Ah Beauty! Up Early, It Being (Thursday) Bridge Day at the Central Union Church

Checking the BBC News Online, I read of a fossil--newly discovered at the Daohugou fossil beds in Nincheng County, Inner Mongolia, in sediments which have been dated to around 168--152 million years ago--of Epidexipteryx, "a primitive flightless member of the avialae clade, which lived a little before Archaeopteryx....Phylogenetic analysis suggests that the species is a member of a 'bizarre lineage' known as scansoriopterygidae ('climbing wings')....Epidexipteryx [exhibits] an unexpected combination of characters seen in several different groups of theropods [the bipedal dinosaurs which are the ancestors of birds]....

"It had a fluffy, down-like covering and sprouted two pairs of enormously long, ribbon-like shafted tail feathers.  These were almost certainly used for display -- making it the oldest known species to possess these...The bizarre appearance...indicates that morphological disparity...close to the origin of birds is higher than previously assumed.  

"The absence of...limb feathers suggests that display feathers appeared before aerofoil feathers and flight ability...."

So:  ornamental display feathers before flight feathers.  The implications are staggering.  A question that occurs to me is Darwin's "abominable mystery," the origin of flowering plants. Flowers, as we know, appear quite suddenly in the fossil record 130 million years ago--although a group of geochemists from Stanford now claims to have fossil chemical evidence that flowers may have evolved during the Permian, 245 to 290 million years ago.  

'Tanyrate, what this does show is that scientists (of all people) are always and always making these assumptions about things, and then getting all flabbergasted when things turn out to be different from what they expected.  Might I suggest that a milder, less contentious attitude, with less vehement certitude about things they don't know anything about, and a greater tolerance for uncertainty--like, say, that of Jean de La Fontaine, would save our conscientious scientists from some of the rudeness of their disappointments and the ker-smashedness of their illusions--and, at the same time, be both more poetic and more scientific?

I'm reading, with trembling delight, Jean Orieux's 1975 biography of La Fontaine.  I'm just up to his being patronised by Nicolas Fouquet and the exquisite "Nymphes de Vaux."  I must say I'm a little disappointed in our subject's parenting--he, after all, had one of the world's greatest fathers (on a par with Cicero's, Montaigne's, or Milton's).  But the true story of how he got boreder and boreder with his pointy-nosed wife, and eventually just kind of lost track of her, has me in stitches.  

Meantime, for diversion, I'm also reading La Tsarine aux Pieds Nus, a silly over-written biography of Catherine I of Russia, and a very gritty, venereal-warts-and-all biography of Guy de Maupassant.  All delicious stuff.