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Flash	170368.  Sat Apr 28, 2007 9:46 am It sounded a bit too easy. So they just had a common ancestor, and we know the T-Rex went extinct rather than evolving into something else because it disappears from the fossil record?
Jenny	170377.  Sat Apr 28, 2007 10:49 am Isn't almost everything where the taste is unknown said to 'taste of chicken'? I think this is possibly a tribute to the blandness of factory-farmed chicken. Incidentally, I can tell you (for I have read it on Conservapedia...) that the young earth creationists are claiming this discovery as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.
Gray	170399.  Sat Apr 28, 2007 12:36 pm Yes, there are no transitional dinosaur fossils whatsoever after 65mya. They were a 'dead end' because they and their food chain were too large to adapt when whatever-it-was-probably-a-meteor made a bit of a mess of the environment. The little scuttlers did fine, though. Interesting that the proteins (not the DNA - my mistake) sampled were from collagen on the T-Rex thigh. Must be able to get a good gag out of that. Here's the breakdown of the analysis: Quote: "Out of seven sequences, we had three that matched chicken uniquely and we had another that matched frogs uniquely and another that also matched newt uniquely and a couple of others that matched multiple organisms that include chickens and newts," said John Asara of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, one of the authors of the study. Dr Asara said the results supported the view that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but added: "If we had more species in the database to compare it to, such as alligator or crocodile, which have not been sequenced yet, we may also find matches to those species. Based on this study, it looks like chickens might be the closest amongst all species that are present in today's genome databases." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2056218,00.html
eggshaped	170403.  Sat Apr 28, 2007 1:02 pm IIRC anything which has a similar evolutionary path to chicken tastes of chicken. I read a fascinating paper about this a couple of months ago. Tarantula tastes of prawns.
Flash	170407.  Sat Apr 28, 2007 2:07 pm But the suggestion does seem to be that "birds evolved from dinosaurs", ie that the dinos didn't so much die out as morph.
Gray	170456.  Sun Apr 29, 2007 3:51 am 'Morphing' is just another word for evolution, and that takes millions of years - tens of millions. It's almost certain that birds evolved from 'dinosaurs', but they didn't evolve from the big famous ones like T-Rex. The archaeopteryx fossil - which appears to be halfway between a small dinosaur and a bird - is about 150 million years old, so that's probably one of the strains that made it by surviving the K-T extinction, and then spent a while evolving into birds. But the other branch was a complete dead end. You can see from this phylogeny what evolved from what. Everything on that tree is now extinct except for the very last twig - Aves. Paleontology is all very sketchy, because there's not that much to go on. Have a look here for a pretty frank discussion of what we think we know...
MatC	170733.  Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:54 am Jenny wrote: Isn't almost everything where the taste is unknown said to 'taste of chicken'? I think this is possibly a tribute to the blandness of factory-farmed chicken. That's an interesting idea. I am just about old enough to remember when chicken was a treat meat, eaten a few times a year, before factory farming made (a version of) it into a daily bread. Was that the 1970s? If so, does the belief that everything unknown tastes of chicken date from around then? I think that whole "tastes of chicken" business would be worth pursuing. Incidentally, there is a vegetable equivalent: all unknown, forgotten, "wild", and the like, edible plants are invariably "used in place of spinach," according to everything you read. Obscure herbs, edible weeds, that sort of thing - stuff that nobody eats unless they're starving and it's the 17th century - they are always "spinach substitutes." Thing is, I've never met anyone who eats enough spinach to really need back-up supplies.
eggshaped	195434.  Fri Jul 27, 2007 8:23 am Quote: These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape. John Phillip Sousa

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