In Greenland. From Tia Ghose at LiveScience:
The species, dubbed Tamisiocaris borealis, used large, bristly appendages on its body to rake in tiny shrimplike creatures from the sea, and likely evolved from the top predators of the day to take advantage of a bloom in new foods in its ecosystem, said study co-author Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in England. More.
This is tremendous, but let’s all revise our expectations about “gigantic”:
These ancient sea monsters grew to about 70 centimeters (2.7 feet) long and “looked like something completely out of this planet,” with massive frontal appendages for grasping prey, huge eyes on stalks, and a mouth shaped like a piece of canned pineapple, Vinther told Live Science.
In term of size, this is not giant squid territory. Does anyone know why Cambrian creatures were comparatively small?
See also: What the fossils told us in their own words
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Because they came from unicellular organisms and evolution causes things to get bigger over time?
If you flip those upside down and straighten out the tentacles as ears they look kind of like an underwater Cambrian rabbit.
OT, sort of: Scientific American January 2017 has this article that I read partially while at the newstand (pay access only online):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-birds-evolved-from-dinosaurs/
There’s a new story about the move from fuzz to feathers. It wasn’t because of flight but because of the need for better decoration. None of the thousands of articles that say otherwise need to be thought of as falsified, of course, because there is no real evidence either way.
Looks like some type of baleen on the appendages. Maybe it fed on plankton.
From the source article:
How did this article slip past the “fake news” screening algorithms?
Silver Asiatic,
Do you have an example of such an article?
“likely evolved from the top predators of the day to take advantage of a bloom in new foods in its ecosystem,”
Actually, despite their apparent blind faith in the ‘just so stories’ that they themselves make up without a blink of the eye, a just so story that the creature ‘likely evolved’ to eat shrimp 🙂 , the math and empirical evidence, i.e. the science itself, tells us that its, or any other creature’s, evolution from, or into, any other creature, is not ‘likely’ at all.
Here are a few notes on the the art of making up ‘just so stories’ to fit the Darwinian narrative which Darwinists apparently believe is them ‘doing hard science’:
GUN
Reference BA77’s posts on Just So Stories. If you’re looking for embarrassing claims from evolutionists, he can keep you busy for weeks.
As for claims about the supposed evolution of feathers, this article offers a number of nice stories, none of which really require any evidence other than imagination.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2013/jun/05/dinosaurs-fossils
“There are no weaknesses in evolutionary theory” as it has been said. The article explains: what prompted [feathers] to be maintained, grow larger and change over time? The exact answer is sadly unknown.
This doesn’t stop evolutionists from pretending that they know the answer. This is has been the tactic of the evolutionary story-teller since Darwin. Throw any imaginable conjecture at it and see what sticks.
If you’re an atheist/materialist, I’ll accept that you surrender the right to engage in rational discourse since it’s merely unintelligent evolutionary processes that cause you to think and express things – right?
Silver Asiatic,
Your post in #2 implied that there were thousands of articles claiming that the first feathers evolved for flight, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen. So I was curious to see what you were referring to.
Most arguments I’ve seen is that feathers were either for insulation or display, as the link you gave explains.
However I got the ability to think and express things, I’ll continue to do so.
Removed by author
” likely evolved from the top predators of the day to take advantage of a bloom in new foods in its ecosystem,”
Isn’t this backwards by the usual evolutionist logic based mainly on energy expenditure? If the ocean is yielding a lot more small shrimp and other plankton, shouldn’t a predator be able to sit down and let the filter do its work? Seems like a good era for anemones and sponges.
A predator needs more mobility and fancier appendages when the food is harder to find.
GUN
The Scientific American article I referenced spoke of the belief that the first feathers evolved for flight. We’re talking about the history of evolutionary story-telling here. The story has changed since Darwin’s time.
That was written in 1998.
If you’ve never seen that claim before then I’m guessing you never read through the papers written on the topic in the 70s and 80s (or before then) where it was claimed very often that feathers evolved because they were needed for flight.
Here’s another study with 5 more papers going back to the 19th century:
I think I’ve done enough to show you. Now aren’t you embarrassed to have asked me that question when you could have easily researched it yourself if you were really interested?
Did you really think that evolutionists always knew that feathers existed before flight? That was a huge failure in “the theory” when it was finally validated in the 1990s.
But as I said, nobody noticed or cared. You didn’t even know about it.
of related note:
Silver Asiatic,
Well, they do discuss the flight vs display debate. But that isn’t regarding the origin of feathers. They are discussing the origin of features that appeared later (tens of millions of years later, or more) usually associated with flight feathers.
Some quotes from the article:
In other words, they aren’t claiming that feathers evolved for display, or flight, but rather for warmth, as pretty much everyone else does – then later for display, and then flight.
So instead of the usual story of:
feathers for warmth –> feathers for flight
or the minority view of:
feathers for display –> feathers for flight
they propose:
feathers for warmth –> feathers for display –> feathers for flight
I found two of the papers, and again, not about the origin of feathers, but of flight – which was much, much, later.
Here’s the quote you gave with added context.
Notice it this time? In other words, we’re no longer talking about the origin of feathers in this section, but of flight. Two different events perhaps 100 million years apart. And, BTW, this quote is from a 1982 textbook. (The “March” is a typo, should be Marsh.)
There have been two major debates regarding feathers, going back to the 19th century. 1) The origin of feathers (For warmth? Display?) and 2) Origin of flight and flight feathers. Much later, once we have small creatures covered with feathers, how did they begin to fly? Did they glide from trees? (Arboreal hypothesis), or were they running on the ground and leaping? (“Running” hypothesis).
You’re conflating the two.
The Sci Am article is saying that there’s another step in between those two.
Well, I don’t know how far back you want to go, but one of the surprises with the discovery of archaeopteryx in the 1860s was how unbird-like it was despite having feathers little or no different than those of a modern bird. It was pretty well agreed that if the feathers weren’t preserved that no one would have guessed that the creature had any. It was contentious whether archaeopteryx could fly, but I think most believed it couldn’t. But with how advanced the feathers were, it was believed by many that it surely had ancestors with less advanced feathers, on creatures even less bird-like. And so whether or not archaeopteryx could fly, it had ancestors with feathers that surely couldn’t. I haven’t read enough 19th century literature on the evolution of birds and feathers to know if that was the consensus view – but it was certainly a common one.
Which theory are you referring to? Darwinism? Why would natural selection mean that the first feathers had to evolve for flight?
Or maybe you mean the theory that feathers originally developed for flight? In that case, yes, I agree that if feathers didn’t develop originally for flight than that’s a problem for the theory that feathers originally developed for flight.
I’m sure if you google enough you’ll find an article claiming feathers evolved for flight – I wasn’t saying that they don’t exist – but you probably realize now that they aren’t as common as you thought. (Actually, it turns out that they are probably even rarer than *I* thought). Because they aren’t common, I was just curious if you had a particular article, or articles, in mind, and I was curious what they were. I thought it might be interesting. That’s all.
GUN
Thanks for your reply. My point was merely an observation on the shifting nature of evolutionary claims. I think another good point we may have explored is that very few scientists or historians actually trace (or even compile) the catalogue of ideas that come under the guise of evolution. In this case, I think it would be difficult to trace the ideas about feather-evolution from Darwin to today. Theorists can propose ideas of any sort, with the barest of evidence.
I made a mistake of trying to characterize the mind of the Darwinian theorist and that’s a no-win argument. Yes, any imaginable purpose could be the proposed-evolutionary cause of any thing. Selection can preserve traits for whatever various reasons, as it is claimed. With feathers, however, some evolutionists wanted to show a direct advantage and also try to explain how the beautifully engineered functions of feathers, specifically for flight, came about. I think the simplest answer regarding the supposed thermal-function of feathers is that fur does as good or better a job of warmth. Why the need for the diversity and complexity of feathers merely to fulfill the same function that all other animals have with fur or hair?
But this is a distraction. The evolutionary claim on the evolution of feathers, much more, on flight itself is very weak.
Fair enough. I think it’s interesting that there are very few studies on the history of evolutionary thought over time. Scientists and historians don’t seem to care about how various theoretical-claims come and go. As in this case, it’s difficult to trace back who said what and when.