Comment on How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds"
Kelly@lemmy.world 5 days ago
The idea is quite old:
Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He compared the skeletal structure of Compsognathus, a small theropod dinosaur, and the “first bird” Archaeopteryx lithographica (both of which were found in the Upper Jurassic Bavarian limestone of Solnhofen). He showed that, apart from its hands and feathers, Archaeopteryx was quite similar to Compsognathus.
But known fossil evidence is quite young:
One of the earliest discoveries of possible feather impressions by non-avian dinosaurs is a trace fossil (Fulicopus lyellii) of the 195–199 million year old Portland Formation in the northeastern United States. Gierlinski (1996, 1997, 1998) and Kundrát (2004) have interpreted traces between two footprints in this fossil as feather impressions from the belly of a squatting dilophosaurid.
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It’s too bad T.H. Huxley was such a racist POS. He was a great paleontologist and I like his style of agnosticism.
WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I just read his Wikipedia page. Under the conditions of his time, how was he a racist? The article says he opposed slavery, opposed “scientific racists” of the time who argued polygenism and that some races were “transitional” between animal and man, and he asserted that science could never excuse the atrocities of slave owners. He supported
He did have incomplete theories about a racial hierarchy of intelligence, which was a common idea at the time. The article doesn’t suggest that he was a primary champion of that theory, or that it heavily featured in most of his work.
In my opinion, he seems like a man who was doing what he could to expand his understanding of his observations, even if he was limited and misled by the prevailing methods and attitudes of his lifetime. Perhaps he should be judged against his peers rather than modern sensitivities, particularly without any evidence of malice in his work.
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You’re right, and he softened his stance with age (as well as his stance on sexism). To add to it on a personal level, I also enjoy the works of H.P. Lovecraft and he was wildly racist even compared to his peers.
It’s less about judging him by today’s standards than it is about lamenting that I’ll never be able to think of his work without remembering his racist views. I also can’t watch Call Girl of Cthulhu without remembering Lovecraft’s cat’s name. I can separate the art and science from the artist and scientist, especially if they’re dead so that they can’t benefit from it, but because of my own past (I was raised with a lot of passive racism by well meaning people) I can’t forget what they said.