'Oldest bird' Archaeopteryx knocked off its perch in controversial new study

[The Straight Story]

The archaeopteryx, supposedly the oldest and most primitive bird on Earth, might not have been a bird after all, scientists say.

The controversial claim, if confirmed, is something of a bombshell for researchers, who have viewed the evolution of birds and feathered flight through the lens of the species since it was discovered 150 years ago.

The finding leaves palaeontologists in the awkward position of having to identify another creature as the oldest and original avian on which to base the story of birdlife.

Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The spectacular fossils of an animal with the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and tail of a dinosaur, caused an immediate sensation in Victorian England where society was wrestling with the consequences of evolution through natural selection.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/27/oldest-bird-archaeopteryx-study

[sudopod]

1. ...the awkward position...

nope.avi

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Creationists will jump up and down over that headline, but...

Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "The overall picture of birds being descended from meat-eating dinosaurs is now very firmly established. This is an argument over a relatively small rearrangement of some of the twigs on the evolutionary tree close to the origin of birds. It doesn't affect much of our big picture view of how birds came from dinosaurs, but some of the minutiae: the small changes that are important to the biology of the animals.

"This part of the evolutionary tree is very sensitive to small changes in how we interpret the anatomy and the combination of anatomical features we see in these animals as they are discovered. As a result, the structure of that evolutionary tree is very unstable and can flip around. Maybe archaeopteryx wasn't on the direct ancestral line to birds, but was part of an early experimentation in how to build a bird-like body."