The origin of birds entails a extreme downside for Darwinists, which paleo-ornithologist Alan Feduccia has referred to as a temporal paradox (1994, 1996). The paradox lies in the truth that primitive fossil birds are contemporaneous with and even seem earlier within the fossil document than their assumed theropod dinosaur ancestors. This is the alternative of the pure expectations from a Darwinian viewpoint, and subsequently must be defined away with advert hoc hypotheses comparable to ghost lineages, that are lengthy spans of existence of teams that go away no fossil document. Of course, Darwinists all the time hope that this downside might be solved with new fossil discoveries and plenty of such claims have been made fairly unsuccessfully as I’ve elaborated in earlier articles (see Bechly 2022).
A New Discovery
Now, a brand new discovery revealed within the journal PLOS ONE might have made the infamous temporal paradox of birds even worse — a lot worse — as a result of it extends the existence of bird-like kinds many million years additional into the previous, previous any of the much less bird-like theropods.
Earlier this month, a group of scientists from the University of Cape Town (Abrahams & Bordy 2023) reported the identification of bird-like footprints from the Upper Triassic of Lesotho in southern Africa, that are at the very least 210 million years old. Actually, the fossil tracks had been already found and described by paleontologist Paul Ellenberger within the mid twentieth century and categorised as ichnogenus Trisauropodiscus. The validity of this ichnogenus was later questioned by different scientists, and an avian affinity has been hotly debated. Abrahams and Bordy re-examined authentic discipline materials, casts, historic images, and interpretative sketches in earlier publications. Based on this revision they might determine “two distinct Trisauropodiscus morphotypes, one of which resembles footprints made by birds.” The authors focus on numerous standards to tell apart the tracks of non-avian dinosaurs from bird-like dinosaurs ancestral to birds, and located a number of clear standards of the second morphotype uniquely matching bird-like tracks. As commenter Nield (2023) readily admitted: “These footprints are something of a mystery: fossils for even the earliest bird ancestors don’t show up for another 60 million years.”
This new discovering parallels the invention of tetrapod tracks within the Zachelmie quarry in Poland, which turned out to be 10 million years older than even the oldest fishapod putative ancestors of quadrupedal land vertebrates such because the well-known Tiktaalik and even the completely fish-like Eusthenopteron (Niedźwiedzki et al. 2010, Ahlberg 2019). Empirical knowledge once more battle with Darwinian story-telling. In spite of the distinctive similarity with trendy chicken tracks, the researchers subsequently speculated that the producer of the Trisauropodiscus tracks may need been some type of three-toed archosaur with convergent bird-like pedal morphology. Consequently, the press launch of the invention says that “unknown animals were leaving bird-like footprints in Late Triassic Southern Africa” (PLOS 2023), and Smithsonian Magazine commented that “mysterious creatures with bird-like feet made these tracks long before birds evolved” (Kuta 2023). In the identical spirit, one other commenter (Yazgin 2023) requested “who made the footprints if the earliest known birds didn’t emerge until at least 50 million years later?” and answered: “Until the fossil of an animal that lived at the right time, in the right place, and with the right proportions is found, the mystery of who created the Trisauropodiscus tracks remains.”
Protecting the Evolutionary Narrative
To be clear: nothing in these fossil footprints themselves means that they’re something however chicken tracks, however they must reinterpreted as one thing else to guard the evolutionary narrative from inconvenient conflicting proof and unsolved mysteries. Theory trumps knowledge in evolutionary biology.
With this ultimate Fossil Friday article for 2024, I want all people a contented New Year. I hope you’ll take pleasure in my articles within the coming yr as effectively.
References
- Abrahams M & Bordy EM 2023. The oldest fossil bird-like footprints from the higher Triassic of southern Africa. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293021, 1–17. DOI:
- Ahlberg PE 2019. Follow the footprints and thoughts the gaps: a brand new have a look at the origin of tetrapods. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 109(1-2), 115–137. DOI:
- Bechly G 2022. Fossil Friday: The Temporal Paradox of Early Birds. Evolution News August 19, 2022.
- Feduccia A 1994. The Great Dinosaur Debate. Living Bird Quarterly 13(4), 28–33.
- Feduccia A 1996. The Origin and Evolution of Birds. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT), 432 pp.
- Kuta S 2023. Mysterious Creatures With Bird-Like Feet Made These Tracks Long Before Birds Evolved. Smithsonian Magazine December 4, 2023.
- Niedźwiedzki G, Szrek P, Narkiewicz Ok, Narkiewicz M, Ahlberg PE 2010. Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian interval of Poland. Nature 463, 43–48. DOI:
- Nield D 2023. Mysterious Bird-Like Footprints in Africa Predate The Existence of Birds. ScienceAlert December 4, 2023.
- PLOS 2023. Unknown animals had been leaving bird-like footprints in Late Triassic Southern Africa. ScienceDay by day November 29, 2023. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231129150127.htm (additionally see Phys.org)
- Yazgin E 2023. Mysterious bird-like tracks in Africa: The oldest birds? Cosmos Magazine November 30, 2023.
