Little bird was a lizard, evolutionist say

 

Image courtesy of Lida Xing, Fair use dialogue.

Joel Kontinen

Last year,  a tiny fossil became big news. Trapped inside ancient amber, scientists thought they'd found the skull of a minuscule, hummingbird-like dinosaur with pointy teeth, bulging eyes, and surprisingly robust bones.

It was like no ancient bird or dinosaur ever discovered before. That's because it was actually neither.

Here’s what I wrote about it then: 

This is the standard view of birds or animals trapped in amber found in Myanmar. This creature belonged to the group of dinosaurs that according to evolutionists gave rise to modern birds.

Without the rest of the body, the scientists can’t tell exactly how Oculudentavis is related to other birdlike dinosaurs—or whether it could fly. But they suspect it belongs to a group of relatively primitive birds, perhaps similar to Archaeopteryx and Jeholornis, species that lived between 150 million and 120 million  years ago the researchers of a new study said.

However, this is all wrong. it was not a dinosaur but a lizard, “A similar skeleton found in the same area now suggests the so-called "eye tooth bird" (Oculudentavis khaungraae) is, in reality, a lizard. Its long snout had simply been squashed over time so that it resembled more of a beak..”

"Imagine taking a lizard and pinching its nose into a triangular shape," explains Edward Stanley, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History. 

Source:

 Cassella,  Carly 2021. Once Mistaken For a Tiny Bird With Teeth, This Fossil Is Now Officially a Lizard Science Alert 15.June..

 

Tiny Bird Found In Amber In Myanmar

Image courtesy of Lida Xing, Fair use dialogue.




Joel Kontinen

This tiny head, 14 millimetres long (including the beak), belongs to one of the smallest dinosaurs ever found. Entombed in amber for 99 million years - this is the standard view of birds or animals trapped in amber found in Myanmar. This creature belonged to the group of dinosaurs that according to evolutionists gave rise to modern birds.

The fossil, discovered in Myanmar, has been christened Oculudentavis khaungraae, or “eye-tooth bird.” It has large eye sockets on the sides of its head like modern lizards, and its eyes have narrow openings that limit incoming light. That’s a strong hint that the animal was active during the day.

Oculudentavis’s upper and lower jaws are full of sharp teeth—the most found on any ancestral bird—which implies that it was a predator that likely ate insects and other small invertebrates, researchers report recently in Nature. They think the species tiny size is an example of “island dwarfism,” as it likely inhabited an arc of islands that existed where Myanmar is today.

Without the rest of the body, the scientists can’t tell exactly how Oculudentavis is related to other birdlike dinosaurs—or whether it could fly. But they suspect it belongs to a group of relatively primitive birds, perhaps similar to Archaeopteryx and Jeholornis , species that lived between 150 million and 120 million ago years the researchers of a new study said.

Source:

Vogel, Gretchen. 2020. Head of tiny dinosaur found trapped in amber Science 11 March

Mutations Reveal How Dinos Remain Dinos

A view of Anchiornis by Nobu Tamura, CC BY 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

A new discovery is creating expectations in the Darwinian community, They have known that dinosaurs took to the air during the Jurassic period, when flight weathers appeared.

However, “But no one knows exactly when—and how—these feathered dinos took flight.”

A new study by Pan Yanhong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, looked at the feathers of five species that lived between 160 million and 75 million years ago.

Of these, the Anchiornis is ten years older than Archaeopteryx, which means that these dinosaurs or birds are suggest that “the transition of feathers to flight required both the mutations that eliminated most α-keratins and the truncated flexible β-keratins.”

Today, bird use β-keratins, which control their flight. It might happen that some dinos could have been feathered, That, however, does not mean that they changed into birds.

Source;

Service, Robert F . 2019. Fossil feathers reveal how dinosaurs took flight. Science (28 January).

Archaeopteryx Is a bird; Refused to Be Turned into a Darwinian Icon

Looks like a bird, doesn't it?




Joel Kontinen

“Archaeopteryx was first recognised as a species in the 1860s. It was immediately seized on as evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, because it appeared to be a bird with dinosaur-like traits.”

Now, Martin Kundrát at the University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Slovakia and his colleagues have studied a hitherto-unexamined Archaeopteryx fossil:

“Some of the bones are hollow, which makes them lighter. Modern birds have similar bones to help them fly, implying the species could fly.”

In 2011 researchers family conducted a family tree and concluded that Archaeopteryx was a dinosaur, not a bird. The present research confronts this.

After all, Archaeopteryx confronts Darwin’s supporters by
being an enigma that will not turn into a feathered dinosaur.

Source:

Marshall, Michael. 2018. Dinosaur fossil may be a whole new species of the first birds. New Scientist (25 October).

Jumping Parrots Inspire Origin of Flight Storytelling

Pacific Parrotlets. Image courtesy of markaharper1, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).





Joel Kontinen

When it comes to watching what birds do, it’s a small step from operational science to a just so story about how dinosaurs learnt to fly.

Here’s the latest version, courtesy of the journal Science:

“If you’ve ever watched a bird hop from branch to branch in search of food, you’ve caught a glimpse at how prehistoric flying dinosaurs foraged among forest trees.”

Here’s their "proof":

“That’s what researchers are saying after they trained four Pacific parrotlets (Forpus coelestis)—small, pastel-colored parrots about 13 centimeters long—to jump and fly for millet seed rewards. The researchers designed a cage decked out with perches that doubled as sensors to measure the birds’ leg forces, and surrounded the cages with high-speed cameras to study the birds’ wing beats as they moved between branches.”

If the next branch was near, the parrot jumped. If it was a bit further, it jumped and flapped its wings.

Then, the researchers used this data to figure out how some extinct birds that they define as “birdlike dinosaurs” took to the air:

“Archaeopteryx and Microraptor —feathered dinosaurs that likely flew or glided between trees—would have had the most success at boosting the range of their long jumps by 20%. The larger and heavier feathered dinosaurs Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx would not have been able to generate enough force from a wing beat to support their body weight or significantly increase their long jumps. The scientists surmise that Archaeopteryx developed an edge over other tree-foraging competitors by using their jumping and wing flapping to minimize energy expenditure while foraging for food in their trees. Thus, long jump Olympians of the Archaeopteryx world may have spurred the evolution of flight.”

The problem with this scenario is that it is pure Darwinian storytelling that sees birds evolving from dinosaurs.

Several studies suggest that birds and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

In addition, Archaeopteryx had the flight feathers of modern birds.

Source:

Cross, Ryan. 2017. Watch these tiny parrots reveal how dinosaurs may have learned to fly. Science (17 May).

Evolutionists Put Their Hopes In Missing Links

The current issue of New Scientist surveys the hunt for missing links.





Joel Kontinen

At least two or three times each year the popular media will make big headlines of the discovery of an ”intermediate fossil” that was previously missing. Much more seldom are we told that old links are still missing because they did not fit in with the Darwinian model of the evolution of life.

Writing in New Scientist, Jeff Hecht surveys the search for missing links. Evolution-believing scientists are trying to find fossils in the rock layers that (according to their model) would fill evolutionary gaps.

In this way, they found Tiktaalik rosea that was touted as the intermediary between sea animals and land animals. However, just four years after its discovery, it lost its place and its prestige.

The same thing happened to Ida (Darwinius masillae) that was supposed to be the grandmother of humans. It turned out that Ida was the grandmother of lemurs.

Evolutionists have tried to transform Archaeopteryx, a magpie-sized extinct bird, into a feathered dinosaur as it was found lower in the rock layer (and is thus presumably older) than the earliest ”feathered dinosaurs”, but the origin of birds is still an unsolvable mystery to evolutionists. The problem will not go away by pretending that dinosaurs are birds.

The search for intermediary fossils has not been able to bolster Darwinism elsewhere than among the true evolutionary believers. The Cambrian Explosion and the ever-increasing numbers of living fossils also weaken the credibility of evolution.

Source:

Hecht, Jeff. 2013. Evolution's detectives: Closing in on missing links. New Scientist 2904, 34-38.

Evolutionists Are Lamenting the Loss of South Korea

In South Korean textbooks, Archaeopteryx will no longer be presented as a reptile to bird link.




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists are not exactly happy with what is happening in South Korea. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) announced that school textbooks would be revised so that they will not include questionable evidence for evolution, such as Archaeopteryx that has been presented as a reptile to bird link. The infamous horse series will likewise be dropped.

Nature news interpreted this tendency by suggesting: “In South Korea… the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science.”

It’s an interesting equation. Removing questionable evidence from textbooks equals a battle. But, then, we’ve all heard of even stranger things, like nothing making everything.

Source:

Park, Soo Bin. 2012. South Korea surrenders to creationist demands. Nature News (5 June).

Turning a Bird Into a Dinosaur

Archaeopteryx looks like a bird but some researchers think it might not be.





Joel Kontinen

When a fossil bird has wings and feathers, looks like a bird, and has a bird’s beak and a wishbone, one might think that it is a bird.
For decades, Archaeopteryx has nevertheless been a source of controversy because it also has some traits that reptiles usually have, such as a long bony tail, teeth and claws on its wings (well, few reptiles actually have wings but claws are so reptilian) and it suits neo-Darwinian thinking as a link between birds and reptiles.

Writing in the March 2003 issue of Scientific American, Richard Prum and Alan Brush acknowledged: “Archaeopteryx offers no new insights on how feathers evolved, because its own feathers are nearly indistinguishable from those of today's birds."

However, the journal Nature recently published a paper on the discovery of Xiaotingia zhengi, which threatens to topple Archaeopteryx from its perch.

The fossil was purchased from a dealer, so one cannot be absolutely certain of where it hails from. Xing Xu, a palaeontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, the main author of the paper, nonetheless believes that Xiaotingia hails from western Liaoning in China and that it was found in Late Jurassic rocks dated at 161–145 million years ago.

Xing Xu and colleagues believe that Xiaotingia zhengi is a dinosaur. While there is no explicit evidence that it had feathers, its measurements resemble that of Archaeopteryx. And since it might be a bit older than the 150 million-year old “Archie”, they believe that while still a dinosaur, it is the great uncle of all birds.

The feathers and other avian features of Archaeopteryx do not weigh much in the quest to provide proof for the dino to bird connection. Neither does other contrary evidence.

Sources:

Kaplan, Matt. 2011. Archaeopteryx no longer first bird. Nature news (27 July).

Prum, Richard O. and Alan H. Brush. 2003. Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird? Scientific American 288 (3): 60 –69.

More soft tissue – this time from a ”150 million” year old Archaeopteryx feather

Archie is one of the best-known icons of evolution.





Joel Kontinen

After 150 million years, feathers should by no means be soft. However, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that this has happened. An international team of researchers used the synchrotron rapid scanning X-ray fluorescence (SRS-XRF) method to take a closer look at Archaeopteryx and noticed that Archie’s feathers were still unfossilized.

The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found soon after Charles Darwin published his On The Origin of Species in 1859 and it became one of the best-known icons of evolution.

The fresh study caused the popular press to see birds as the descendants of dinosaurs although Archie is assumed to be much older than T. rex. New Scientist for instance pointed out that the Archaeopteryx bone has the same minerals – copper and zinc – as modern birds.

Such observations do not have much to do with bird evolution.

It would be more pertinent to discuss how a feather can retain its softness for 150 million years.

Like soft tissue in dinosaur bone, Archie’s feather suggests that it cannot be as old as evolutionists assume it to be.

Sources:

Bergmann, U. & al. 2010. Archaeopteryx feathers and bone chemistry fully revealed via synchrotron imaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/05/05/1001569107

Hecht, Jeff. 2010. Soft tissue remnants discovered in Archaeopteryx fossil. New Scientist 2760. (10 May)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18882-soft-tissue-remnants-discovered-in-archaeopteryx-fossil.html

Archaeopteryx - an Icon of Evolution that Refuses to Turn into a Feathered Dinosaur

Image: Wikipedia


Joel Kontinen

It has wings and feathers. It looks like a bird. It has a bird’s beak and a wishbone. But it also has a long bony tail, teeth and claws on its wings. The Archaeopteryx, a magpie-sized extinct bird, is often paraded as the missing link that is no longer missing. The University of Berkeley website, for instance, says, “It has long been accepted that Archaeopteryx was a transitional form between birds and reptiles.” This sounds like hype since scientists in the 1984 International Archaeopteryx Conference agreed that it was a true bird.

Evolution needs transitional forms that would give support to the hypothesis that all life forms share a common ancestor. However, there are grave problems with the dino-to-bird hypothesis. Writing in the March 2003 issue of Scientific American, Richard Prum and Alan Brush acknowledged: “Archaeopteryx offers no new insights on how feathers evolved, because its own feathers are nearly indistinguishable from those of today's birds."

The presence of teeth does not support the belief that Achaeopteryx has evolved from a reptile ancestor. Some other extinct birds also had teeth while some reptiles do not have them. The same applies to claws; even the ostrich has claws on its wings. Thus, the traits of Archaeopteryx are not so unique as evolutionists would like to believe. Of today’s birds, the ostrich looks less like a true bird than Achaeopteryx does. In fact Achaeopteryx looks like a strong flier. Angela Miller of the Natural History Museum in London says, “a CAT scan reveals that Archaeopteryx had the large brain and optic lobes of modern birds, not the brain of a dinosaur.”

The long bony tail does not mean that Archaeopteryx is partly a dinosaur. According to biologist Michael Pitman, “In the embryo some living birds have more tail vertebrae than ‘Archy’”. He adds that some present-day birds, such as cormorants, darters, gulls and parrots have similar vertebrae.

Most evolutions still cling on to their pet theory. For instance, Richard Dawkins says, “feathers are modified reptilian scales.” However, as Dr. Jonathan Sarfati explains, there is no way a bird’s feathers, which consists of an intricate network that seems to be especially designed for flying, could have evolved from scales: “But scales are folds in skin; feathers are complex structures with a barb, barbules and hooks. They also originate in a totally different way, from follicles inside the skin in a manner akin to hair. Finally, feather proteins (f-keratins) are biochemically different from skin and scale proteins (a-keratins) as well.”

Darwinian evolution desperately needs transitional forms. It needs them between birds and dinosaurs and mammals and whales, for example, but these have been few and far between. Even the few remaining ones are highly disputed, often by evolutionists themselves. Over-zealous evolutionists have time and again used extremely questionable fossil remains as proof of transitional forms. Thus, Pakicetus was judged to be a water-dwelling whale ancestor on the basis of two bones from the head. After more bones were found, it was seen that Pakicetus was a land animal resembling a pig.

For many decades, evolutionists have used the same examples to support the view that time and chance can change living beings into very different species. Archaeopteryx was one of the examples Dr. Jonathan Wells used in his book Icons of Evolution (2000), in which he documented the widespread use of erroneous and misleading proofs of evolution in biology textbooks. These included the Miller-Urey origin of life experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, homology (similar structures in different species), Haeckel’s embryos, the peppered moth, Darwin’s finches, mutant fruit flies, human origins, and evolution being taught as fact.

Archaeopteryx is one of the most well-known icons. Ten fossils of Archaeopteryx have been found. Supporters of evolution have given it a number of pet names, such as Dino bird, Reptile bird, Archy and Archie.

Dr Alan Feduccia, who is a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist, has said, “Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.”

Archaeopteryx has been dated as being 150 million years old. The purported feathered dinosaurs appear in the fossil record several tens of millions of years after “Archie”. This has prompted Dr. Jonathan Wells to ask how an ancestor can be younger than its descendants, saying that this is as logical as claiming that David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] is the uncle of Abraham.

The dino-to-bird link has other major hurdle to overcome as well. Molecular biologist Dr. Michael Denton says that biology textbooks do not even attempt to explain how small random mutations required by Darwinian evolution could gradually produce highly complex systems. “A classic example is the lung of the bird, which is unique in being a circulatory lung rather than a bellows lung. I think it doesn’t require a great deal of profound knowledge of biology to see that for an organ which is so central to the physiology of any higher organism, its drastic modification in that way by a series of small events is almost inconceivable. This is something we can’t throw under the carpet again because, basically, as Darwin said, if any organ can be shown to be incapable of being achieved gradually in little steps, his theory would be totally overthrown.”

In 2002 Dr. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki published a paper in which they showed that there are even more problems with the dino-to-bird hypothesis. After studying the embryonic thumb growth in ostrich eggs, they noticed that whereas in dinosaurs the hands developed from digits 1, 2 and 3, in ostriches, which are regarded as “primitive” birds, they develop from digits 2,3 and 4. Feduccia concluded, "This creates a new problem for those who insist that dinosaurs were ancestors of modern birds. How can a bird hand, for example, with digits two, three and four evolve from a dinosaur hand that has only digits one, two and three? That would be almost impossible.”

Moreover, in January 2005 the prestigious science journal Nature reported that there was evidence of ducks co-existing with dinosaurs. Dr. Julia Clarke and colleagues say this means that “at least duck, chicken and ratite bird relatives were coextant with non-avian dinosaurs.”

Archie’s woes do not end here. While animals that have characteristic of more than one species or even genus might be rare, they are not non-existent. The best-known living “mosaic” is the duck-billed platypus. This Australian furry mammal has a beaver’s tail and a duck’s bill but it also lays eggs. It has more mosaic features than Archie. Had platypus become extinct and known only from the fossil record, it would have produced an interesting hypothesis of its origins. Dr. Duane Gish says that the duck-billed platypus is “a creature evolutionists wish never existed.”

The “living fossil” Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) is another well-known mosaic. Evolutionists suppose that it is closer to land animals than to fish, as it even gives birth to living offspring. Yet, Coelacanth, dubbed the dino fish, is undoubtably a fish and not a half mammal. Evolutionists believed it used its fins to walk on the seabed but observations have shown this to be false.

There are animals that look surprisingly similar but belong to different species. Dr. Carl Wieland, CEO of Creation Ministries International –Australia explains that the now probably extinct Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) is a marsupial but looked like the wolf that is a placential. The Flying Phalanger (Petaurus) living in Australia and New Guinea is a marsupial that looks like the flying squirrel. The Darwinian explanation for this phenomenon is convergent evolution, that is, different species are thought to have evolved the same traits independently. A more logical explanation would be common design – the use of “good engineering” in different species.

Dr. Wieland uses the analogy of similar features in different car makes to explain these similarities. The early Porches had an air-cooled rear engine. So did the Volkswagen Beetle. Both cars had the same designer - Ferdinand Porsche, who used his intelligence and utilised functional parts of one of the cars he designed in another car. Common design is a better explanation than convergent evolution. The bones, wings and feathers of Archaeopteryx support the view that it was intelligently designed to be a flying bird. Biologist Michael Pitman says of avian feathers, “behold the parts of a precision instrument of aerospace, unparalleled in design and workmanship by human technology.” He says that reptiles could not have evolved into birds. “There is no decisive genetic or fossil evidence for evolution from scale to feather, cold to warm-bloodedness, non-flight to flight. Almost every tissue, bone and organ differs dramatically in birds.”

Anatomist Dr. David Menton sums up the dino-to birds view by saying, “The theory of the evolution of flight is not about the birds, so much as it’s a theory ‘for the birds.’” Accepting this view would involve concluding, “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be - a feathered t-rex, of course!”

There is a more logical theory, though. It involves rejecting the common ancestor hypothesis in favor of Intelligent Design. It seems that the “after their kinds” view of the Book of Genesis explains biological reality much better than Darwinian evolution does.

The few “mosaic” features notwithstanding, Archaeopteryx looks like it was designed to be a flying bird, not a feathered dinosaur recycled from odd bits and pieces. There are several living animals, such as the duck-billed platypus, Coelacanth and ostrich, with mosaic traits. None of them is a missing link. Neither is Archie; it has too many traits that only true birds have, so it cannot be an icon of evolution. This elegantly designed bird points to supranatural technology that surpasses everything humans have ever been able to come up with.





Sources

Anon. 1999. Blown Away by Design: Michael Denton and Birds' Lungs. Creation 21(4):14–15. http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v21/i4/design.asp

Gish, Duane T. 1995. Evolution: The fossils Still Say NO! El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research.

Menton, David and Carl Wieland. 1994. Bird Evolution Flies Out The Window: An Anatomist talks about Archaeopteyx. Creation Ex Nihilo 16(4): 16- 19. http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v16/i4/birds.asp

Pitman, Michael. 1984. Adam and Evolution. London: Rider.

Prum, Richard O. and Alan H.Brush. 2003. Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird? Scientific American 288 (3):60 –69.

Sarfati, Jonathan. 1998. Book review: Climbing Mount Improbable. TJ 12(1):29–34. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i1/improbable.asp

________________. 2002a Refuting Evolution. 2nd ed. Acacia Ridge, Australia: Answers in Genesis.

________________. 2002b. Ostrich Eggs Break Dino-to-Bird Theory. Creation 25(1):34–35.

Wells, Jonathan. 2002. Inherit the Spin: Darwinists Answer “Ten Questions” With Evasions and Falsehoods. http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_inheritthespin.htm

Wieland, Carl. 2004. Dynamic Life: Changes in Living Things. (DVD). Answers in Genesis.

____________. 2005. Dinos Breathed like Birds? TJ 19(3): 11 –12.