Not really.
Plants didn’t colonize land until the Ordovician Period. Sea life was around long before that, and famously diversified in the Cambrian Period that preceded the Ordovician.
Powered flight has evolved four separate times (insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats) but in no case has a flying creature evolved from a swimming creature. They always pass through a stage of living on land first.
Okay, that in fascinating.
Powered flight has evolved four separate times (insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats) but in no case has a flying creature evolved from a swimming creature. They always pass through a stage of living on land first.
So there is a clear empirical segregation between swimming and flying creatures. Did they ever go the reverse direction? Flight to sea?
Plants didn’t colonize land until the Ordovician Period. Sea life was around long before that, and famously diversified in the Cambrian Period that preceded the Ordovician.
One word: Penguins.
Well, all I can say is, apparently it is possible, because paleontologists don’t just make up these time frames. They state them based on painstakingly examined evidence.
As far as just how many such fossils they have found, what they look like, etc., I apologize that I don’t have time today to look through Google results on Ordovician plant fossils, but you’d be welcome to satisfy your curiosity that way. If you post what you find here, I’ll be fascinated to read about it with you!
Sincerely,
AMW
This recent discovery and article suggests otherwise…
“The new findings suggest that, for ancient penguins to evolve the level of diversity now seen in their body plans, the ancestors of all penguins would have originated millions of years beforehand, likely during the dinosaur age, the researchers said. This contradicts some previous suggestions that penguins diverged from other birds only 62 million years ago.”
Being picky, its difficult to believe the idea these penquins became exstinct competing for food as the article suggests. Although, there was a recent discovery of mass penquin colony death, mostly chicks. It was suggested these died from a flood, then hypothermia, as they were not old enough to have water repellent feathers and were soaked.
I am not following your logic here. My contention is that penguins are members of the class Aves, commonly referred to as birds.
Thanks,
Chris
How does this contradict what Chris wrote?
how about flying fish evolving from sea creatures? I guess they’re not technically flying 
Competition for food is what limits the size of all biological populations. If this weren’t the case then life would expand exponentially until it filled the entire universe.
Since birds emerged out of dinosaur populations, it should not be surprising that Penguin fossils (which are part of the oldest evidence for birds in general) would indicate key ancestral populations before the arrival of the Dinosaur-killing asteroid.
Note these interesting comments from the article you linked for us!
"Penguins that walked the Earth 61 million years ago might have been giants, growing to nearly 5 feet tall, according to the oldest penguin fossils unearthed to date. Perhaps even more impressive, these oversize waddlers might have evolved alongside dinosaurs, the researchers report in a new study…
Ancient penguin bones “are among the oldest fossils of modern birds known from anywhere in the world,” said study lead author Gerald Mayr, an ornithologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany. As such, investigating penguin fossils can help address “ongoing debates on when exactly modern birds appeared,” Mayr told Live Science.
The researchers analyzed fossils of leg bones excavated along the Waipara River in New Zealand’s Canterbury region. Previous research unearthed many avian fossils there, which got embedded in marine sand about 4 million years after the end of the dinosaur age about 65 million years ago…
The scientists discovered that these penguin leg bones were about 61 million years old. They belonged to a bird the same age as the oldest known penguin to date, Waimanu manneringi , Mayr said. Moreover, the newfound penguin reached a size of about 4.9 feet (1.5 m) — nearly as large as the biggest known extinct penguin, Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi , which lived in Antarctica about 45 million to 33 million years ago.
These findings reveal that “penguins reached a giant size very early in their evolution,” Mayr said. He added that giant penguins were likely driven extinct by the emergence of marine mammals such as seals and toothed whales."
They may be a class of Aves. My original question is whether flying creatures have ever evolved into fish species ( particularly water breathing). You suggested Penquins. This latest discovery suggests Penquins are very old, and evolved alongside dinos. But, did they ever fly?
Perhaps thats an illogical question. Evolution may only move from water to land to flight, but not the reverse?
Fish don’t breathe water! They get oxygen from water through their gills.
Did penguins ever fly? Yes, penguin ancestors used to be able to fly.
Thanks, yes gills to be precise, as opposed to obtaining oxygen from the air and holding their breath while diving.
It seems a little murky regarding penquin flight, according to this article.
“Somehow, the first ancestors of penguins are related to flying birds, but the truth is that modern penguins did evolve from non-flying birds; That’s the difference. Some believe that the “basal Penguin” lived somewhere in what was Gondwana, a large mass of land that was in the process of fragmentation and which would later become Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and parts of South America.”
So, inconclusive at this time?
Fascinating stuff. We were at Sea World a couple of weeks ago, and watching the penguins “fly” around underwater is fascinating. You can easily see how one early bird line could evolve to fly in the air, and another would evolve to fly in water
It seems birds evolution is a hot topic.
This article challenges the ‘convenient’ belief that birds evolved from dinos.
“A great deal more research is needed to solve the puzzle of bird evolution. Archaeornithura is not enough on its own to provide all the answers. But fossils such as this will certainly help inform the debate and assist in our search for related species. Understanding the evolution of modern birds and how they made it across one of the largest extinction events of all time is surely a major holy grail of evolutionary biology”
Im still clinging to the broad brush notion that birds, fish, insects, land animals have seperate distinct origins, reflecting the creation narrative. This runs counter to the single origin evolution narrative.
Perhaps you should reread your question, which made no mention of fish nor water breathing. Your question was:
Chris answered it directly and forthrightly.
Perhaps you also should review the meaning of the term “species,” particularly its relationship to much larger groupings like class.
I don’t think it does, and moreover it’s neither convenient nor a belief. You’ve even got it wrong in that birds ARE theropod dinosaurs, they didn’t “evolve from” them.
"…we might understand the reasons for the dramatic success of modern birds and why they made it while other dinosaurs died out."
How can the article challenge the hypothesis that birds are dinosaurs, when it literally states that they are dinosaurs?
Penguins evolved from flying birds. However, providing articles would be fruitless and a waste of time.
There is nothing wrong with the sentence you quote. Birds descend from a common population of flying reptiles. Penguins are included. And then, along the way, some sub-populations branched off and found a better way of living without flying. Penguin ancestors are included. So BOTH statements are true, depending on which time period you are focusing on.
Breaking News: Humans are African on both their mothers’ and fathers’ side of the family !
Ostriches are birds. They came from ancestors who flew. Then a little later, a sub-group broke off and developed a better life running like crazy without flying.
What is so difficult to grasp about this?
Here… this is what you need to study - - how ONE kind of marsupial, turned into THREE MAJOR KINDS …
Below is one of my posts from another thread!:
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Some Creationists love to dismiss “so-called speciation” by saying what’s so special about the examples if you still have a brightly colored fish that is still a brightly colored fish?
Where is the Fish to Amphibian example, evolved right before human eyes?
Where is the Lizard to Bird laboratory study?
Where is the mammal to whale evolution witnessed in modern science?
Even the fast-motion video done by Harvard Medical School with a giant table-sized plate of agar is ho-hummed … because despite proof of “micro-evolution”, at the end of the study, you only have bacteria, not a colony of cells in the shape of Elvis.
The closest I could come to satisfying this peculiar form of Creationist melodrama are the three “Creature Plans” found in Australia … all different ecological niches, appearances and methods of living, and yet all peculiarly closely related!
I have reproduced parts of another post in another thread … pointing out that when one particular population of Marsupial made it to Australia, they discovered a continent with no rivals… no Placental Mammals… and apparently not even an earlier marsupial arrival.
And so the “diaspora” began… with each new Viking Marsupial discovering unexploited ecological niches!
In short, it is the perfect recipe for analysis: ONE KIND differentiates into at least THREE KINDS:
vegetarian mole, carnivorous canine like predator, and an omnivorous animal of the “bandicoot” phenotype!
@aarceng, the text below is for you!
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How about THIS article below! … which even if you are skeptical about the key placental link from South America to Australia, the article compares three very diverse “kinds” of Australia’s fauna and concludes that they are unusually closely related, genetically, despite the distinct “kinds” of animals they represent:
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This post is just to provide the separate link of the study mentioned above:
“Tracking Marsupial Evolution Using Archaic Genomic Retroposon Insertions” by Maria A. Nilsson, Gennady Churakov, Mirjam Sommer, Ngoc Van Tran, Anja Zemann, Jürgen Brosius, and Jürgen Schmitz
PLoS Biol. 2010 Jul; 8(7): e1000436. Published online 2010 Jul 27. PMCID: PMC2910653 PMID: 20668664
Notice in the image below, the various branches associated only with South America, and branches associated with Australia, where “radiating” speciation continued, in isolation from the rest of the world.
[Be sure to click on the images to enlarge text to a more convenient font size!]
While at the top we have “shrew-like” forms, and at the bottom we have “kanga” forms aggregated, in the middle grouping, we have the suggestion that three very distinct groupings share a close heritage:
Dasyuromorphia: the group having most of Australia’s carnivorous marsupials, including
quolls,
dunnarts,
the numbat,
the Tasmanian devil,
and the thylacine.
[In Australia, the exceptions include the marsupial moles and the omnivorous bandicoots.]
Notoryctemorphia: moles, vegetarian
Peremelamorphia: bandicoots & bilbies “the characteristic bandicoot shape: a plump, arch-backed body with a long, delicately tapering snout, very large upright ears, relatively long, thin legs, and a thin tail. Their size varies from about 140 grams up to 4 kilograms, but most species are about one kilogram, or the weight of a half-grown kitten [4 kilograms = 4 half-grown kittens].”
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