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Tiny 99 mya bird (?) skull trapped in amber raises many questions

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Found in modern-day Myanmar, it seems to waffle between bird, dinosaur, and lizard:

Dinosaurs were big, whereas birds — which evolved from dinosaurs — are small. This variation is of great importance, because body size affects lifespan, food requirements, sensory capabilities and many other fundamental aspects of biology. The smallest dinosaurs1 weighed hundreds of grams, but the smallest living bird, the bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae)2, weighs only 2 grams. How did this difference come about, and why? In a paper in Nature, Xing et al.3 describe the tiny, fossilized, bird-like skull of a previously unknown species, which they name Oculudentavis khaungraae. The discovery suggests that miniature body sizes in birds evolved earlier than previously recognized, and might provide insights into the evolutionary process of miniaturization…

Oculudentavis is just one fossil species. However, even single fossils can contribute greatly to our understanding of the history of life on Earth. In this case, weighing perhaps 2 grams, Oculudentavis is about one-sixth of the size of the smallest known early fossil bird1. This indicates that, only shortly after their origins late in the Jurassic period (which lasted from about 201 million to 145 million years ago), birds had already attained their minimum body sizes.

Roger B. J. Benson, “Tiny bird fossil might be the world’s smallest dinosaur” at Nature

Yeh, stasis again. So many life forms arrive suddenly, stay around a while, and don’t change much. Not your schoolteacher’s Darwinism.

But get this: Benson goes on to explain that one of the “bizarre” features of Oculudentavis is qualities present in lizards but neither in birds nor in dinosaurs. It is smaller than most hummingbirds but had over a hundred teeth…

The more research we do, one suspects, the more of this type of thing we’ll find and the harder it would all be to explain to our old Darwinian schoolteacher.

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne offers, “The fact is that it’s such a weird creature means that they can’t really place it anywhere with any accuracy.” Given that it’s pretty much one of the smallest life forms found so far what do we want to bet that hundreds more will turn up that confuse things even more?

See also: Stasis: When life goes on but evolution does not happen

Comments
Isn't evolution wonderful ? Always surprising us !Axel
March 16, 2020
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Rather than accept the possibility that an untested hypothesis might be problematic with the greater understanding of the past, Darwinists will continue to cling to the belief that macroevolution is fact. It does not matter that macroevolution has never been witnessed and the results never replicated, which is required for a hypothesis to become a scientific theory. All that matter is some really smart people believe it to be so.BobRyan
March 14, 2020
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and here we go again: "evolved earlier than previously recognized" "earlier than thought" "smaller than thought" "bigger than thought" "older than thought" "smarter than thought" "more evolved than thought" ....martin_r
March 14, 2020
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