Ceratopsians and Phylogeny

I have been writing a series, critiquing Carl Kerby’s critique of a phylogenic chart. My main point has been that the chart does not say what Kerby says that it says. Kerby argues that the chart shows that “one thing stayed one thing and never changed into anything else.” I’ve brought up that the lines on the chart represent orders and sub-orders of animals. One of the limbs on the tree even represents birds. Within these orders and sub-orders are immense diversity. In the original post, I brought this up.

Just look at "W" which represents the suborder Ceratopsians. They were both bipedal and quadrupeds.

Kerby works with Answers in Genesis and both he and they generally argue that all ceratopsians are one created kind.

Even though breeding studies are impossible with dinosaurs, by studying fossils one can ascertain that there was likely one Ceratopsian kind with variation in that kind and so on.[1]

As I pointed out, ceratopsians do not just include the four legged dinosaurs that remind everyone of Triceratops. It also includes bipeds like Yinlong[2] and Psittacosaurus[3]. There are actually three different families of bipedal ceratopsians[4]. Clearly, Kerby and Answers in Genesis both accept Yinlong and Triceratops as diversity within created kinds.

 If this amount of diversity is accepted, I fail to see why feliformia cannot be considered a single created kind.  Surely the differences between Yinlong and Triceratops are no bigger than the differences between Hyaenidae (hyenas) and Felidae (biting cats and Sabre-tooth cats).[5]

Octopi are smarter than cats

wulffmorgenthaler

NYT:A Tiny Horse That Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up

Rising seas, killer storms, droughts, extinctions and money wasted on snowblowers are not the only things to worry about on a warming planet. There is also the shrinking issue.

It happened to Sifrhippus, the first horse, 56 million years ago. Sifrhippus shrank from about 12 pounds average weight to about eight and a half pounds as the climate warmed over thousands of years, a team of researchers reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.

Sifrhippus was not much like the mustangs or any other modern horses. It was the size of a cat, ate leaves rather than grass and counts as a horse only in scientific classification. It might have made a nice pet if anyone had been around to domesticate it, but the first hominids were a good 50 million years in the future.

Its preserved fossils, abundant in the Bighorn Basin, provide an excellent record of its size change over a 175,000-year warm period in the Earth’s history known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures are estimated to have risen by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at the start, and dropped again at the end.

Scientists have known that many mammals appear to have shrunk during the warming period, and the phenomenon fits well with what is known as Bergmann’s rule, which says, roughly, that mammals of a given genus or species are smaller in hotter climates.

Although the rule refers to differences in location, it seemed also to apply to changes over time. But fine enough detail was lacking until now.

In Science, Ross Secord, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jonathan Bloch, of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville; and a team of other researchers report on the collection and analysis of Sifrhippus fossils from the Bighorn Basin.

They report that the little horse got 30 percent smaller over the first 130,000 years, and then — as always seems to happen with weight loss — shot back up and got 75 percent bigger over the next 45,000 years.

The fossils indicate that at its smallest Sifrhippus weighed about eight and a half pounds, and at its largest about 15 pounds.

Using fine-grained detail on both climate and body size, the researchers concluded that the change in size was, as suspected, driven primarily by the warming trend.

“It seems to be natural selection,” said Dr. Secord. He said animals evolved to be smaller during warming because smaller animals did better in that environment, perhaps because the smaller an animal is, the easier it is to shed excess heat.

Paul L. Koch, head of the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a specialist in reconstructing ecosystems and climates from many millions of years ago, said, “The paper lets us see the effect of warming on mammals where the climate change is really large.”

Dr. Koch, who was not involved in the study, said he thought that the question of whether natural selection was the cause of the changes was still open, and that the disruption of ecosystems during the warming period might have led smaller animals to migrate to new locations.

The current warming period is occurring on a scale of hundreds of years, not thousands, and scientists can only speculate on whether modern mammals will shrink.

“It’s difficult to say that mammals are going to respond in the same way now,“ Dr. Secord said. “If I had to guess,” he said, he thinks some will get smaller. And, he said, some studies have shown some birds to be getting smaller in response to warming.

If warming continues at the highest rate projected, he said, there’s another question: “Can mammals keep up?” [1]
Also for further reading:

A Visual History of Ancient Miniature Horses [Slide Show] Eight equines that paved the way for the massive modern horse

Baraminology: Creationists Re-Examine the Horse Series

I don't believe in Heaven anymore, Moody's just dead.

A pastor torturing their family pet, prompts five year old not to believe in heaven anymore. This is a sad story and my second cat killing story of the week.

BASTROP, Texas -- A Central Texas pastor is being accused of throwing a neighbor's cat off of a bridge.

Rick Bartlett, pastor of the Bastrop Christian Church, is facing animal cruelty charges. Bastrop Police Chief Michael Black said Bartlett admitted that he caught the cat, named Moody, in a trap on Sunday, Jan. 15. Bartlett told them that he was having a problem with feral cats in his garden.

Moody also told police that he had the cat in a cage in the back of his pick-up truck for three days and forgot about him until Tuesday, Jan. 17., when Bartlett brought the cat to police. An animal control officer noticed a name tag including the phone number of Moody’s owners, Sarah and Eddy Bell, on the cat's collar. The officer offered to take Moody back to his owners but police said Bartlett told them he’d take the cat back himself since they were his neighbors.

Later on the same day, a park visitor discovered Moody’s near lifeless body on the bank of the Colorado River, some 40-50 feet below a bridge.

Greg Maynard, a veterinarian with the Crossroads Animal Hospital, said Moody had severe internal injuries but no external injuries consitent with being hit with a car. Maynard said Moody was "just laid out like a sack of potatoes. No obvious signs of trauma externally. No blood or nothing broke."

The same Animal Control Officer who came to the injured cat’s aid last Tuesday was the same officer who assisted Bartlett earlier that day. She recognized the cat which is how police made the connection to the pastor.

Moody was Sarah and Eddy Bell's cat for 11 years. They are having a difficult time understanding what happened to the beloved member of their family. Trying to explain his death to their five-year old daughter has proved challenging.

“She also asked me where Moody is now and I said, 'Baby he's in Heaven,'" said Sarah. "She knows the man who did this is a pastor at the Bastrop Christian Church and she said, 'I don't believe in Heaven anymore, Moody's just dead.'”

So far, no witnesses have come forward saying they saw Bartlett throwing Moody from the bridge, but in the eyes of the law, the animal cruelty charges are the same since he admitted to police that the animal was in his care.

Attempts to reach Bartlett for comment on this story Monday were unsuccessful. [1]

Child's cat killed due to politics

(CBS News) An Arkansas political campaign manager was shocked to discover his family pet with one side of its head bashed in -- and the word "liberal" scribbled across the corpse in paint.


Jacob Burris has served as Ken Aden's campaign manager since October 2011. Aden, a Democrat, is currently running for Arkansas' 3rd Congressional District.


"To kill a child's pet is just unconscionable," Aden said in an official statement. "As a former combat soldier, I've seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity."


Burris told the Blue Arkansas Blog that one of his younger children found the pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, on their front porch. He said the children are doing fine, but he is not taking the threat lightly.


"I've got a gun and I know how to use it," Burris told Blue Arkansas. "If I have to protect my kids, I'll do it without hesitation."


The Associate Press confirmed with the Russellville Police Department that the campaign manager had filed a report, but they did not have any suspects at this time.


Although the campaign between Aden and incumbent Steve Womack has been tense, Aden's group stated they do not think anyone in the opposing campaign to be responsible.


"We suspect this is the action of a rogue individual or group of individuals who are the type of folks that stoop to the lowest common denominator instead of engaging in civil political discourse," Aden said in a statement. "It is unfortunate this has occurred, and we will await the results of the police and federal investigations." [1]

Sleep Walking Cats

They unparalyzed cats during their REM sleep! What kind of mad scientists are you that you create sleep walking cats!

NARRATOR: Nature, it appeared, had devised a special state of paralysis to house our dreams, one in which they remained internal experiences. It was a conclusion that seemed impossible to deny, when researchers learned to switch the paralysis off.

This cat looks as if it's awake; in fact, it's deep in REM sleep.

This dog appears to be running; it too is in REM sleep, and, like the cat, dreaming.

To see these dreams played out, scientists disabled the part of the brain that paralyzes muscles during REM sleep.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: And what we see when you do this, with cats in particular, is that they can walk around during REM sleep, and their behavior is not random, it's not chaotic. They're not just doing any old crazy thing. They appear to be doing the kinds of behaviors that cats like to do, like stalk a prey, you know, play with a mouse or something. So presumably that's what they dream about when they go into REM sleep, so that's what we think is happening.[NOVA]