The four feather types: filaments, filament bunches, tufted filament, down feather/Zixiao Yang
From ScienceDaily:
An international team of palaeontologists, which includes the University of Bristol, has discovered that the flying reptiles, pterosaurs, actually had four kinds of feathers, and these are shared with dinosaurs — pushing back the origin of feathers by some 70 million years.
…
Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “We ran some evolutionary analyses and they showed clearly that the pterosaur pycnofibres are feathers, just like those seen in modern birds and across various dinosaur groups.
“Despite careful searching, we couldn’t find any anatomical evidence that the four pycnofibre types are in any way different from the feathers of birds and dinosaurs. Therefore, because they are the same, they must share an evolutionary origin, and that was about 250 million years ago, long before the origin of birds.”
Birds have two types of advanced feathers used in flight and for body smoothing, the contour feathers with a hollow quill and barbs down both sides.
These are found only in birds and the theropod dinosaurs close to bird origins. But the other feather types of modern birds include monofilaments and down feathers, and these are seen much more widely across dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
The armoured dinosaurs and the giant sauropods probably did not have feathers, but they were likely suppressed, meaning they were prevented from growing, at least in the adults, just as hair is suppressed in whales, elephants, and hippos. Pigs are a classic example, where the piglets are covered with hair like little puppies, and then, as they grow, the hair growth is suppressed.
Professor Benton added: “This discovery has amazing implications for our understanding of the origin of feathers, but also for a major time of revolution of life on land.
“When feathers arose, about 250 million years ago, life was recovering from the devasting end-Permian mass extinction. Paper. (paywall) – Zixiao Yang, Baoyu Jiang, Maria E. McNamara, Stuart L. Kearns, Michael Pittman, Thomas G. Kaye, Patrick J. Orr, Xing Xu, Michael J. Benton. Pterosaur integumentary structures with complex feather-like branching. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018; 3 (1): 24 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0728-7 More.
It certainly is “amazing,” as Professor Benton says, that a complex array of features appeared 250 million years ago, rather abruptly, just as life was recovering from the Permian extinction. Would anyone have predicted that? Talk about “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian.”
Follow UD News at Twitter!
See also: The Founding Feathers?
and
Dinosaur found with preserved tail feathers, skin
earlier than predicted under NDT assumptions, followed by stasis, favors ID and YeC, as explained in/by RCCF framework for understanding science.
Here are a few feather-related papers that confirm evolution and disproof ID:
Molecular signaling in feather morphogenesis
A chemotaxis model of feather primordia pattern formation during avian development
Dynamic transcriptome profiling towards understanding the morphogenesis and development of diverse feather in domestic duck
Genetic and Molecular Basis of Feather Diversity in Birds
Development, Regeneration, and Evolution of Feathers (PDF, PMC)
A non-coding region near Follistatin controls head colour polymorphism in the Gouldian finch
De Novo Transcriptome Sequencing Analysis of Goose (Anser anser) Embryonic Skin and the Identification of Genes Related to Feather Follicle Morphogenesis at Three Stages of Development
Introgression of regulatory alleles and a missense coding mutation drive plumage pattern diversity in the rock pigeon
This one is not feather-related, but also confirm that evolution is true and ID isn’t:
The fitness consequences of genetic variation in wild populations of mice
PDF
PavelU, aside from the usual peer-reviewed ‘just so story telling’ of Darwinists, do you have any actual real time experimental evidence of feathers originating from scales?
No?? I thought not!
Shoot, I would take experimental proof of one species of bacteria transforming into another species of bacteria as proof that it is at least plausible to do as you imagine, but you don’t even have that minimal level of proof:
Until you present such real time experimental proof that it is even possible to transform one creature into another creature, you are certainly not doing science when you make such dogmatic claims as you have done in post 2..
But since you, I assume in good faith, at least pretended that you were being scientific, here, if you are interested, are some of the primary scientific reasons that you are not even in the right metaphysical ballpark as to offering a coherent solution for explaining biological novelty:
Moreover, PavelU since you seem motivated to falsify ID and prove evolution true, to falsify ID and prove evolution true then all you have to do, since the primary claim of ID is that only an intelligent mind can create non-trivial information, is simply prove that unguided material processes can generate non-trivial coded information.
Shoot, besides falsifying ID and proving evolution true, you could, potentially, win yourself up to 10 million dollars to boot:
For what its worth, all the falsification criteria laid out by Charles Darwin himself have now been met, but Darwinists still refuse to honestly admit that their supposed scientific theory is now falsified as far as empirical science is concerned: