If global warming runs away with its self and a few species survive. Would birds evolve into Tyranosaurus etc?
Order of Kilopi
If global warming runs away with its self and a few species survive. Would birds evolve into Tyranosaurus etc?
Order of Kilopi
Highly unlikely, there's far too many thing to evolve into for any specific one to be a likely result.
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Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
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On the flip side, given the right conditions and enough time, could some species of bird evolve into a non-feathered, non-flying, land dwelling carnivore, that ran around on two legs, etc., etc. - sure, entirely possible.
Established Member
Assuming they survive, they will evolve into whatever enables them to survive ... better.
Whatever it is, while it might be scaly and land-dwelling, it won't be a dinosaur.
Order of Kilopi
Lets just hope it is not the chickens they may have a few bones to pick.Originally Posted by Swift
Order of Kilopi
They're birds, not the hulk.
Established Member
Technically birds evolved from a common ancestor of dinosaurs not dinos themselves.
As for the future, Some birds like the roadrunner and secretary bird already do their hunting and spend most of their time on the ground.
A larger flightless form of one them is *possible* but we can't say it will happen with any kind of certainty.
Order of Kilopi
So if conditions were right, the Dodo could return?
Established Member
Birds back into....
They do in the Guiness ad...........
Order of Kilopi
The dodo was the end result of an evolutionary path. Chances are very, very small that a different evolutionary path would arrive at exactly the same dodo.So if conditions were right, the Dodo could return?
To illustrate it, you shouldn't picture it as two lines, and when the second line arrives at the end point of the first one, you have again a dodo. You'd be more precise if you'd imagine 10000 blue lines going more or less parallel, forming an aspect of the dodo at their end point. Now imagine 10000 red lines, which grow during evolution, each at their own speed. If these all end exactly at the end points of each equivalent blue line AND do so at the same time, the red line bundle of evolution of a bird (with different starting conditions than those forming the original dodo) also arrived at the dodo. You see that chances are small to say the least.
Order of Kilopi
yes, I always return to threads I started.
Established Member
From what i've heard they did evolve from dinosaurs, do you have any evidence to the contrary?
Established Member
The top carnivores during the Paleocene (right after the demise of non-avian dinosaurs) were giant flightless birds like Gastornis. In South America prior the formation of the Isthmus of Panama a few million years ago the top carnivores were also giant birds, aptly called terror birds, up to 3 m tall. Being warm-blooded and not that massive, they needed feathers. So it is perfectly possible that such birds reappear again at some point of the future.
Actually, many dinosaurs closely related to birds had feathers. Many maniraptors like the famous Velociraptor were undoubtedly feathered. One ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex was probably also feathered. Some paleontologists have suggested that T. rex babies were downy. Adult T. rex was probably too large to have a feather cover.
Order of Kilopi
Plus it would look as if he was cross-dressing.Adult T. rex was probably too large to have a feather cover.
Have they found velociraptor fossil outlines showing feathers like they found for ancient birds?
I know they once found a piece of dino skin (don't ask me which one), which was leathery like they presented them. Colours may be off a bit.
Order of Kilopi
Cool, A discussion I can contribute to. Yes and no. Can't do in the presense of efficient carnivorous placental mammals. Nowhere do the terror birds evolve where there are true canids or felids. And when conditions change that bring them together the birds always fail to thrive and go extinct after a couple of thousand years or so.
Marsupial mammals only have approximately 70% the cranial capacity of an equal massed placental mammal so the birds from South America weren't that pressured by them. IIRC the European terror birds evolved when Europe was a group of big islands.
So yes, if you kill off the local mammals and give them a few tens of thousands of years you could come up with something
A South American beast. The skull on the right is an eagle skull, for comparison
Established Member
I was being imprecise, my fault.
Yes the common ancestor was defined as a dinosaur, just not a T-rex.
I should have said that the dinos most people are *familliar* with
(T-rex, Triceratops, apatosaurus, etc)
were not direct ancestors of birds.
Established Member
The answer to this bears further discussion.
It is important that you understand that there is no such thing as reverse evolution.
Evolution:
- always moves forward
- has no goal
- knows there are a nigh-infinite number of ways of solving a complex problem
Consider this a lousy analogy but I can't think of any other.
A player bashing balls around on a pool table.
The player ends up with a very interesting combination (five balls in a straight line all touching) all pointing at the far right pocket. He calls this the 'Dodo' configuration.
He goes for lunch. When he comes back, some else has been playing pool and his precious Dodo is lost forever. The only way he could ever hope to get that configuration back is to reverse all the hits of the errant player, but he knows it is impossible to reverse shots.
Alas, he goes back to playing. If he plays long enough, he may create another configuration with five balls touching in a row, but it will never be the Dodo, no matter how much it may coincidentally resemble it.
Order of Kilopi
Except on ST-TNG thanks to Mr. Barkley.
Give yourself a bit more credit. I think it's a great analogy.
Honored Member
All the above analogies are good. To me, the core idea is that history moves forward only. I know it sounds trite, but it means that when we look back in time we only see the 'branch points' taken, not those possible. The problem is that we are driven to see those as inevitable, not just possible. It's like one of those displays at the science museum where a marble falls down a board with many rows of nails to bounce off. The path of any individual ball is unpredictable in advance, but easy to trace out after it reaches bottom if you recorded which way it bounced each time.
A slightly different question is whether there is a theoretical possibility (sort of a Jurassic Park) that genetic information exists in extant birds to reconstruct dinosaurs (and to those, myself among them, who currently believe that birds ARE dinosaurs, we all know what we're talking about). Both birds and dinosaurs evolved beaks, for example, and all (as far as I know) modern adult birds are toothless, but the genetic capacity for teeth is still present in some birds. On the other claw, mutation of those genes has proceded apace for 65 megayears, so we could only guess what they looked like back in the Mesozoic.
Order of Kilopi
Yeah, that is what I meant.
But I like the 10,000 blue lines and 10,000 red lines explanation better.
Order of Kilopi
Again highly unlikely, there's too much information that's been dropped,
__________________________________________________
Reductionist and proud of it.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails. Clarence Darrow
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. Mark Twain
Order of Kilopi
Where'd the mammals go?
Order of Kilopi
What do you mean Korjik?
Member
The smaller skull is actually a califonia condor. I saw that article too.
Administrator
Well, I'm at work at the moment.
Order of Kilopi
In the meantime, we still have ostriches. And emus. And penguins.
Order of Kilopi
aurora, they don't directly compete with carnivorous mammals. It makes a difference.
Order of Kilopi
Nerthus, Oh well, I'm sure they are the same in a blind taste test.
Established Member
There does seem to be pattern on isolated land of the development of flightless birds - quite substantial and relatively recent ones on Madagascar and New Zealand - smaller perhaps on Mauritius - quite ordinary flightless rails on many other islands.
But Dinosaurs?
In any case, if we assume (the evidence would support the case) that birds are monophyletic, then their common ancestor was a single species of archosaur (perhaps a species that might be classified as a dinosaur although, I'd guess, part of a group of protodinosaurs - experts will correct me, I''ve no doubt).
Honored Member
HenrikOlsen wrote:
I may not have been clear in my opinion here. Certain traits remain in the genetic file of birds (embryonic tooth buds, juvenile finger claws as seen on on hoatzin chicks) that are potentially recoverable to produce, say, a creature that resembles a bipedal, toothed ornithiomimid. But it would NOT be an ornithomimid. Those dinos are gone, never to return.Again highly unlikely, there's too much information that's been droppedOriginally Posted by mike alexander
A slightly different question is whether there is a theoretical possibility (sort of a Jurassic Park) that genetic information exists in extant birds to reconstruct dinosaurs (and to those, myself among them, who currently believe that birds ARE dinosaurs, we all know what we're talking about). Both birds and dinosaurs evolved beaks, for example, and all (as far as I know) modern adult birds are toothless, but the genetic capacity for teeth is still present in some birds. On the other claw, mutation of those genes has proceded apace for 65 megayears, so we could only guess what they looked like back in the Mesozoic.
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