Early Bird
Commenter Josh tips us off to new paleontology suggesting the earliest birds are even older than previously believed. The news came in a new teaser article published in Nature magazine.
Although dinosaurs were largely extinct by 66 million years ago, therapods, the three-clawed, hollow-boned group that included Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex, had started to evolve into today’s birds. Many palaeontologists consider the first bird to be a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Archaeopteryx, fossils of which were found in Germany. But this study adds to mounting evidence that by the time of Archaeopteryx, dinosaurs had already diversified into different kinds of birds, [University of Utah paleontologist Mark] Loewen says.
It has been accepted that the ancestors of modern birds were dinosaurs—to the extent that many refer to today’s birds as dinosaurs’ most successful modern relatives. But there are so many details that are missing from the fossil record, even while new evidence turns up time and again that looks tantalizingly as if it contained bird-like features, such as feathers and light, hollow bones.
Josh poses a question about the artist’s imagined creature that heads the Nature article (see link): What basis is there to believe the reconstructed appearance of ancient bird-like dinosaurs? To which I suspect the most honest answer is “not much.” Details that we know we don’t know much about from the fossil record include feathers, colors, behaviors, possible vocalizations. But the speculative illustrations bring the story to life nonetheless, inspiring future paleontologists until better evidence is unearthed—or we go all Jurassic Park.
Josh's question below ("So, is paleontology in the eye of the beholder?") is relevant to the issue of free speech as discussed in D. French's opinion piece.
The importance of dead bird remains is in the eye of the beholder, but the information and experience informing those eyes determines whether the opinion is an expression of paleontology, random and unexamined human experience, or something working from the second to the first.
The protections given free speech are, theoretically, in the societal interest of advancing knowledge and truth. It seems to me that the speech that is currently wreaking havoc is due to its intentional disconnect from provable fact.
We do an abysmal job of teaching epistemology. The popular understanding of "the lone genius" generally lacks any understanding of the depth of study and research and analytical thinking that goes into a new perspective or scientific idea. Newton had little real time interaction with other people during the time he formulated much of the substance of his physical laws and ideas about light. But he studied the works of others and corresponded with others and experimented with real masses and clocks and energy - he informed himself and tested his ideas as objectively as he could.
In contrast, there is a popular and nebulous belief in the value of personal experience and intuition that skips the informing and testing part of knowledge. The desire to teach students to be confident leads to teaching them to trust their feelings over their intellect, rather then teaching them to use one to inform the other in order to calibrate their gut feelings and check their cockiness.
The less we know about how people actually know stuff the harder it is to know what is real and what is not, and who to trust.
Outside of fast food place, I just saw a parking sign that read "reserved for drive-thru." Why does drive-thru need parking?