Fossil Friday: Fossil Bird Tracks Expand the Temporal Paradox
The origin of birds involves a severe problem for Darwinists, which paleo-ornithologist Alan Feduccia has called a temporal paradox (1994, 1996). The paradox lies in the fact that primitive fossil birds are contemporaneous with or even appear earlier in the fossil record than their assumed theropod dinosaur ancestors. This is the opposite of the natural expectations from a Darwinian point of view, and therefore has to be explained away with ad hoc hypotheses such as ghost lineages, which are long spans of existence of groups that leave no fossil record. Of course, Darwinists always hope that this problem will be solved with new fossil discoveries and many such claims have been made quite unsuccessfully as I have elaborated in previous articles (see Bechly 2022).
A New Discovery
Now, a new discovery published in the journal PLOS ONE may have made the notorious temporal paradox of birds even worse — much worse — because it extends the existence of bird-like forms many million years further into the past, preceding any of the less bird-like theropods.
Earlier this month, a team 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, which are at least 210 million years old. Actually, the fossil tracks were already discovered and described by paleontologist Paul Ellenberger in the mid 20th century and classified as ichnogenus Trisauropodiscus. The validity of this ichnogenus was later questioned by other scientists, and an avian affinity has been hotly debated. Abrahams and Bordy re-examined original field material, casts, historical photographs, and interpretative sketches in previous publications. Based on this revision they could identify “two distinct Trisauropodiscus morphotypes, one of which resembles footprints made by birds.” The authors discuss various criteria to distinguish the tracks of non-avian dinosaurs from bird-like dinosaurs ancestral to birds, and found several clear criteria 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 finding parallels the discovery of tetrapod tracks in 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 as the famous Tiktaalik or even the totally fish-like Eusthenopteron (Niedźwiedzki et al. 2010, Ahlberg 2019). Empirical data again conflict with Darwinian story-telling. In spite of the unique similarity with modern bird tracks, the researchers therefore speculated that the producer of the Trisauropodiscus tracks might have been some kind of three-toed archosaur with convergent bird-like pedal morphology. Consequently, the press release of the discovery 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 same spirit, another commenter (Yazgin 2023) asked “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 suggests that they are anything but bird tracks, but they have to reinterpreted as something else to protect the evolutionary narrative from inconvenient conflicting evidence and unsolved mysteries. Theory trumps data in evolutionary biology.
With this final Fossil Friday article for 2024, I wish everybody a happy New Year. I hope you will enjoy my articles in the coming year as well.
References
Abrahams M & Bordy EM 2023. The oldest fossil bird-like footprints from the upper Triassic of southern Africa. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293021, 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293021
Ahlberg PE 2019. Follow the footprints and mind the gaps: a new look at the origin of tetrapods. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 109(1-2), 115–137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755691018000695
Bechly G 2022. Fossil Friday: The Temporal Paradox of Early Birds. Evolution News August 19, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/08/fossil-friday-the-temporal-paradox-of-early-birds/
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. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mysterious-creatures-with-bird-like-feet-made-these-tracks-long-before-birds-evolved-180983362/
Niedźwiedzki G, Szrek P, Narkiewicz K, Narkiewicz M, Ahlberg PE 2010. Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland. Nature 463, 43–48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08623
Nield D 2023. Mysterious Bird-Like Footprints in Africa Predate The Existence of Birds. ScienceAlert December 4, 2023. https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-bird-like-footprints-in-africa-predate-the-existence-of-birds
PLOS 2023. Unknown animals were leaving bird-like footprints in Late Triassic Southern Africa. ScienceDaily November 29, 2023. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231129150127.htm (also see Phys.org)
Yazgin E 2023. Mysterious bird-like tracks in Africa: The oldest birds? Cosmos Magazine November 30, 2023. https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/oldest-bird-tracks-fossil-africa/
