Fossilized bird lung tissue controversial; Big if true

_{Denyse O'Leary

December 26, 2018

Cell biology, Intelligent Design}

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https://www.the-scientist.com/image-of-the-day/image-of-the-day--birds-of-a-lung-64976 — Archaeorhynchus spathula with preserved plumage and lung tissue/J. ZHANG, INSTITUTE OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY AND PALEOANTHROPOLOGY, BEIJING

Here’s an interesting premise for science finds of 2018: Big, If True. Among them,

Bird breath
Are white speckles in the chest cavity of a 120-million-year-old bird fossil traces of a respiratory system similar to that of modern birds (SN: 11/10/18, p. 12)? If so, the fossil, found in China, could be the first to preserve lungs of a bird. Some paleontologists aren’t convinced, partly because it’s so rare for delicate lung tissue to survive fossilization. Cassie Martin, “These 2018 findings could be big news — if they turn out to be true” at ScienceNews

Note: What makes the Big, If True premise interesting is that researchers were not looking to find this; it happened on them and it raises questions.

In this case, as with the plants noted earlier today, there weren’t all those years of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) to perfect the system, even assuming it could be done that way.

From the earlier story:

Unlike mammalian lungs that are elastic and pump air in and out, bird lungs don’t change size when the bird breathes. Instead, several air sacs connected to the lungs act like a bellows to draw the air in through the lungs. The lungs themselves contain highly subdivided tissue with tiny air capillaries that are responsible for the transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide gases.

The new Archaeorhynchus fossil surprisingly contains many of the same structures, the team announced. That suggests that these important respiratory adaptations were present very early in the modern bird lineage. Carolyn Gramling, “In a first, scientists spot what may be lungs in an ancient bird fossil” at ScienceNews

About soft tissue in general, we probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet. See, for example, Researchers: Soft tissue shows Jurassic ichthyosaur was warm-blooded, had blubber

See also: Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs

and

Developing story: Young Earth creationist microscopist, fired in wake of finding soft tissue from dinosaurs, sues (2014)

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Comments

"It seems to me the theory is getting ahead of the data." Darwinism in a nutshell. Now, if making correct predictions is the test of a sound theory, then this one is still the best ever: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."ScuzzaMan_{December 27, 2018
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Don't be so gullible: A few notes:
Feathers on a Bird or Dinosaur Tail? The Media Are Certain; the Scientific Evidence Less So - December 9, 2016 Excerpt: But unfortunately we have so little material, and the bone is so difficult to distinguish from the soft tissue, that any strong claims about this tail should be greeted with skepticism. This paper will not be the last word on the nature of the animal that sported this wonderful tail. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/12/feathers_on_a_b103354.html Alan Feduccia, considered an expert on bird evolution, has written, “The major and most worrying problem of the feathered dinosaur hypothesis is that the integumental structures have been homologized with avian feathers on the basis of anatomically and paleontologically unsound and misleading information.” https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/feathers/giant-dinosaur-fossilized-feathers/ Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy - July 2, 2012 Excerpt: One will look in vain, though, for veined feathers with barbs and barbules as found in birds. The authors label the structures “type 1 feathers,” meaning single filaments protruding from the skin. They are actually little more than fuzz, barely noticeable in the photos. Co-author Helmut Tischlinger said, “Under ultraviolet light, remains of the skin and feathers show up as luminous patches around the skeleton.” Some, like Brian Switek at Nature News, dub them “protofeathers.” He wrote, Palaeontologist Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum agrees that the structures on Sciurumimus are probably protofeathers. Although additional geochemical work is needed to study the features’ details, Barrett says, the fossilized wisps are very similar to the fuzz seen on other dinosaurs. But he notes that the presence of these filaments among all dinosaurs is “speculation”,,, http://crev.info/2012/07/dinosaur-feather-story-gets-hairy/ Feathers Not Flying Over New Dinosaur Fossil - Casey Luskin August 2, 2014 Excerpt: Yet according to an article in National Geographic, "Fluffy Dinosaur Raises Questions About the Origin of Dinofuzz," we can't establish that these are feathers:,,, "At a basic anatomical level paleontologists have yet to discern whether the structures on Psittacosaurus , Tianyulong , and Kulindadromeus can truly be called feathers.,,," Did you note,,,? "At a basic anatomical level paleontologists have yet to discern whether the structures on Psittacosaurus , Tianyulong , and Kulindadromeus can truly be called feathers." Looking at the diagram from the paper, they sure don't look much like feathers:,,, I see wispy hair-like structures. I see dinofuzz. But I don't see feathers. A prominent critic writing in National Geographic says much the same. Yet these structures are being unapologetically called "feathers" in Science. It seems to me the theory is getting ahead of the data. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/08/feathers_not_fl088501.html Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers - October 31, 2012 Excerpt: The photo of 1995.110.1 shows only dark criss-cross markings on the bone that they “inferred to be traces left by shafted feathers.” They don’t bear any resemblance to actual feathers. This means that only one fossil had the carbonized impressions extending from parts of its forelimbs at some distance from the bones, leaving plenty of leeway to speculate about what they were, or whether they had any connection to the animal. Yet their artwork shows the adult with fully-fledged wing feathers, barbs, barbules and all, and even multiple colors!,,, There’s no way this specimen can have anything to do with the origin of avian flight. The authors did not even try to connect it to flight. http://crev.info/2012/10/another-flap-over-dinosaur-feathers/ More Fossil-Molecule Contradictions: Now Even the Errors Have Errors - Cornelius Hunter - June 2014 Excerpt: a new massive (phylogenetic) study shows that not only is the problem (for Darwinist) worse than previously thought, but the errors increase with those species that are supposed to have evolved more recently.,,, "Our results suggest that, for Aves (Birds), discord between molecular divergence estimates and the fossil record is pervasive across clades and of consistently higher magnitude for younger clades." http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2014/06/more-fossil-molecule-contradictions-now.html Massive Genetic Study Confirms Birds Arose in "Big Bang"-Type of "Explosion" - Casey Luskin - December 12, 2014 Excerpt: "The absence of a single gene tree identical to the avian species tree is consistent with studies in yeast, indicating that phylogenetic studies based on one or several genes, especially for rapid radiations, will probably be insufficient.",,, When the researchers tried to build the new avian family tree, "we were shocked to find we couldn't get a solid answer," Jarvis recalls. As the consortium developed more sophisticated bioinformatics tools to analyze the genome data, they discovered that protein-coding genes by themselves were not the most reliable for building good trees. The non-coding regions within or between genes, called introns, gave better answers. And although the group had access to supercomputers, they still had to come up with a way to allocate the analysis to the machines' many microprocessors. "It took 3 years to iron out the kinks," Gilbert says. Luskin comments: "The fundamental problem is this: They are finding data that doesn't fit a treelike pattern. But they aren't going to reject common ancestry. They're just going to appeal to ad hoc explanations whenever necessary to explain why the data doesn't fit a tree." - per ENV News from the Flight Deck - July 22, 2013 Excerpt: The Illustra film briefly touches on evolutionary hypotheses for the origin of flight from dinosaurs. One problem not mentioned is that the digits in dinosaur feet differ from those in birds. “Feathered dinosaur” expert Xing Xu, with Susan Mackem, addressed this problem in Current Biology, “Tracing the Evolution of Avian Wing Digits.” In short, there’s not an easy solution: - per ENV News for the Birds - May 7, 2014 Excerpt: Yanornis is called an ancestor of birds, but PhysOrg reported on April 18 that a fossil found in China shows that “the digestive system of the ancestors to modern birds was essentially modern in all aspects.",,, But if it was already “essentially modern” in the ancestors, and already integrated with the flight systems, where is the time for natural selection to have supposedly produced it? http://crev.info/2014/05/news-for-the-birds-2/ "Tracks of birds were found in the Dinosaur Cove in southern Victoria that date to 105 million years ago. The evidence indicates that true flying birds existed at the same time as dinosaurs during the Early Cretaceous. The evidence is a bird’s landing tracks. The tracks have a backward pointing toe that is the same as modern birds. ...The birds were estimated to be the size of a small heron by the scientists." (True flying bird tracks from dinosaur times discovered in Australia, October 28, 2013) http://www.examiner.com/article/true-flying-bird-tracks-from-dinosaur-times-discovered-australia Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-Bird Links - June 2009 Excerpt: "one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs,“ Ruben said. “However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link,,, “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.” ----"For one thing, birds are found (many millions of years) earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem,"... - per science daily "In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates. No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate." Donald R. Prothero - Darwin’s Legacy - February 2012 "The first and most complete fossil of archaeopteryx, found in 1855, was misidentified as a flying pterodacylus for 115 years. The newest finding, though, demonstrates that our understanding of even well-studied fossils like archaeopteryx -- scrutinized, measured, modeled for 150 years -- can still be upended." - Bye Bye Birdie: Famed Fossil Loses Avian Perch - Oct. 2009
bornagain77_{December 26, 2018
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There is a lot of evidence for dinosaurs having been feathered or with primitive pre-feathers. One 2016 paper in Cell Current Biology: At https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31193-9 : Summary "In the two decades since the discovery of feathered dinosaurs [1, 2, 3], the range of plumage known from non-avialan theropods has expanded significantly, confirming several features predicted by developmentally informed models of feather evolution [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. However, three-dimensional feather morphology and evolutionary patterns remain difficult to interpret, due to compression in sedimentary rocks [9, 11]. Recent discoveries in Cretaceous amber from Canada, France, Japan, Lebanon, Myanmar, and the United States [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18] reveal much finer levels of structural detail, but taxonomic placement is uncertain because plumage is rarely associated with identifiable skeletal material [14]. Here we describe the feathered tail of a non-avialan theropod preserved in mid-Cretaceous (?99 Ma) amber from Kachin State, Myanmar [17], with plumage structure that directly informs the evolutionary developmental pathway of feathers. This specimen provides an opportunity to document pristine feathers in direct association with a putative juvenile coelurosaur, preserving fine morphological details, including the spatial arrangement of follicles and feathers on the body, and micrometer-scale features of the plumage."doubter_{December 26, 2018
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Deletehazel_{December 26, 2018
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As to:
The new Archaeorhynchus fossil surprisingly contains many of the same structures, the team announced. That suggests that these important respiratory adaptations were present very early in the modern bird lineage.
The impossibility of converting a reptile lung into an avian lung is touched upon in the following video and articles:
From a Frog to a Prince: Biological Evidence of Creation - video - 2:16 minute mark https://youtu.be/TMoWfPn2pCI?t=136 Blown away by design: Michael Denton and birds’ lungs Excerpt: A classic example, he says, is the lung of the bird, which is ‘unique in being a circulatory lung rather than a bellows lung [see box]. I think it doesn’t require a great deal of profound knowledge of biology to see that for an organ which is so central to the physiology of any higher organism, its drastic modification in that way by a series of small events is almost inconceivable. This is something we can’t throw under the carpet again because, basically, as Darwin said, if any organ can be shown to be incapable of being achieved gradually in little steps, his theory would be totally overthrown.,,, The amazing bird lung As a bird breathes, air moves into its rear air sacs (1). These then expel the air into the lung (2) and the air flows through the lung into the front air sacs (3). The air is expelled by the front air sacs as the bird breathes out. The lung does not expand and contract as does a reptile’s or mammal’s. The blood which picks up oxygen from the lung flows in the opposite direction to the air so that blood with the lowest oxygen (blue in the diagram always means lower oxygen, red means high oxygen) is exposed to air with the lowest oxygen. The blood with the highest oxygen is exposed to air with an even higher oxygen concentration. This ensures that, in every region of the circulation, the concentration of oxygen in the air is more than that of the blood with which it is in contact. This maximizes the efficiency of oxygen transfer from the air to the blood. This is known as counter-current exchange. Such very efficient lungs help birds to handle the energy demands of flight, especially at high altitudes.1 https://creation.com/blown-away-by-design-michael-denton-and-birds-lungs Evidence Of Design In Bird Feathers And Avian Respiration - Andy McIntosh http://journals.witpress.com/paperinfo.asp?pid=399
Supplemental notes:
FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds - Feathers - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2yeNoDCcBg FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds - Flight muscles - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdvkopOmw0 FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds - Skeletal system - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fZS_B6UW4 FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds - Starling murmurations - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GR9zFgOzyw FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds - Embryonic Development - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ah-gT0hTto Scientists caught faking Dinosaur - bird fossil Archeopteryx (Stors Olson) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iz7GResDtQ "The hype about feathered dinosaurs in the exhibit currently on display at the National Geographic Society is even worse, and makes the spurious claim that there is strong evidence that a wide variety of carnivorous dinosaurs had feathers. A model of the undisputed dinosaur Deinonychus and illustrations of baby tyrannosaurs are shown clad in feathers, all of which is simply imaginary and has no place outside of science fiction." - Storrs Olson - curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History "The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age---the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion." - Storrs Olson - curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History
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