Transcription
We are now told by evolutionists that birds are dinosaurs. Thanks to science, we know our planet is home to 10,000 or so species of living dinosaurs. We just call them birds. One evolutionist even said, "A penguin is just as much a terrible lizard as a stegosaur." So, so what's going on?
Hi everyone, I'm Gabriela Haynes. I'm a PhD paleontology here at Answers in Genesis. I'm Joel Lineweber. I'm a Paleo artist, and we're here at the Allosaurus exhibit in the Creation Museum.
We see feathered dinosaurs everywhere nowadays, in books and toys and movies like this feathered Pyroraptor in Jurassic World. Both Dr. Haynes and I are Christians who believe the account of history in God's Word, the Bible. And we're going to discuss whether the idea of feathered dinosaurs is reasonable to believe in a Biblical worldview.
The Bible says that the winged fowl were created on Day Five, and the land animals like reptiles, dinosaurs, on Day Six. This is the opposite order from what evolutionists claim. It's clear from scripture that animals were produced after their kind. So, we know that God did not use evolution to make birds evolve from dinosaurs.
But, well, can we accept the idea of feathered dinosaurs without accepting evolutionary ideas? Feathered dinosaurs like this Pyroraptor from Jurassic World have become a poster child for this topic, and many people believe there's good science to back up these claims. The idea that dinosaurs like Velociraptor were fully feathered is no longer at all controversial. Even some creationists claim that your worldview has little influence over these interpretations. But let's examine the claims.
How much movie-making magic is going on related to this topic? Well, Pyroraptor is not a good example at all because it did not look like that. It was like the size of a turkey with only a few bones found, as you can see. And the bones were not even like connected, articulated to each other. Pyroraptor wasn't found with any feather impressions. Evolutionists think that it may have had feathers.
Some scientists claim that Archaeopteryx, that famous animal always known as a bird, well, now they're saying that it was a feathered dinosaur. Oh, you mean this guy? Yep, this is a replica of what might be the world's most famous fossil. But is this a dinosaur or a bird? And how do we tell the difference between birds and dinosaurs? We're going to show you three ways to tell the difference between a bird and a dinosaur that even a kid can understand.
But first, evolutionists are saying some surprising things that are different from what scientists used to believe. So let's talk about how we got here. The point is, evolutionists have been changing the definitions of words. They have been changing their meaning. And that's a big problem because they're not changing those definitions, they're not changing those meanings because the data has changed. They're changing those definitions to better match, to better fit their evolutionary worldview.
We don't see evolution happening today. We don't see one kind of creature changing into another kind. We also don't find that in the fossil record. That's an assumption on the part of the evolutionary worldview. Evolutionists have been changing the meanings of words like dinosaur, bird, and feather to match their assumptions that dinosaurs evolved into birds. They're using this "new speak" to build a bird-evolution house of cards. This house of cards is required for the idea of feathered dinosaurs to stand up to scrutiny.
Now, we're going to talk about three words in this episode. The first word that we're going to be talking about is the word dinosaur, or dinosaur. The meaning of this word, the meaning of what a dinosaur is, has changed. For example, Richard Owen in 1842 was the first one to coin this word and its meaning, which is basically related to what a reptile is.
The first change for the term dinosaur was proposed in 1992, and it was based on phenetic cladistics ideas. That is the main background for this change is evolution, the idea that organisms are connected, are related. It was because of evolutionary ideas that phylogenetics and cladistics were developed, and they have been applied in the scientific field. Another change happened in 1993, and some others in 1998, 2000, 2002, until the latest, uh, in 2005. Here you can see the changes that happened throughout those years. All of them have in common the same reason for that change, which is phenetic cladistics, evolutionary ideas.
However, this idea that led to include birds and dinosaurs comes way before all those changes. It comes with Darwin's idea of evolution, and it had the support of Thomas Huxley, John Austen Baker, and Gorton, for example, and it was all based on evolutionary ideas.
Evolutionists are now saying that birds are dinosaurs. So they've changed the definition of dinosaurs from a reptile that walks upright, like this Tyrannosaurus, to also include everything they believe evolved from a dinosaur. So the first word they changed is dinosaur.
The next word they've changed is bird. As you can see in their worldview, apes and birds are not the same thing. They are not synonymous anymore, which leads to the conclusion that birds are living dinosaurs. As you can also see here in this paper, birds are the sister group of mammals. Birds are the sister group of crocodiles. Birds are dinosaurs, according to this new definition of bird. Not all animals with feathers have to be birds because it's not based on anatomy, it's based on evolution. They changed the definition of dinosaur, and now they've changed the definition of bird.
Not only that, but evolutionists have created a new term called "non-avian dinosaur." A dinosaur that is not an avian, that's not a bird. Well, that's what we expect, right? Because a dinosaur is a dinosaur, which means a reptile, and a bird is a bird. This term alone is confusing. Sounds like a married single man. It makes no sense. The term itself shows bias and evolutionary ideas that birds and dinosaurs are connected.
Here are some examples of supposed non-avian dinosaurs. This group of animals includes Pyroraptor, the one we talked about earlier. This group is called Maniraptora, and it also includes some other animals with much better preservation than Pyroraptor. Two animals called Microraptor and Caudipteryx have been found with complete wing feather impressions. Microraptor was found three years after Pyroraptor, and this fossil was published with clear wing feathers and tail feathers. It's part of the Dromaeosauridae family. Caudipteryx was first found in 1998, and this fossil was also found with clear wing feathers and clear tail feathers. It's related to the Oviraptoridae family.
The next word that they have redefined is the word feather. Here I'm holding, uh, a feather from an African Crowned Crane from the zoo at the Ark Encounter. As you see in this paper, they are understanding and believing that the feather evolved. And in this paper, for example, they also talk about this new theory for the evolutionary origin of feathers. It's clear by that paper and others that the idea that feathers evolved is responsible for the idea that filaments should now be accepted as feathers.
As we can see in this quote, here's a diagram that shows the supposed evolution of feathers. Stage three feathers, the ones in the middle, they haven't been found, and evolutionists can't explain what would cause them to form. We do find some dinosaurs with preserved filaments, like this Sinosauropteryx. But just because evolutionists want this to be a feather does not make it a feather. Some evolutionists even believe that these filaments were actually collagen fibers under the skin.
Evolutionists are redefining all these terms based on assumptions in their worldview. They justify this thinking because they have a whole new way of classifying life. In science class, uh, I learned about Linnaean classification with kingdom, phylum, order, family, and so on. But evolutionists have a new way of classifying life based only on supposed ancestry. This new classification scheme is called cladistics. And instead of placing animals in different groups based on their anatomy, they try to show evolutionary connection, evolutionary relationships between the animals. They even have a new term for each of these points along the tree called the "clade." Here you can see how the clades are represented.
But as the secular author mentioned in his paper, phenetic systematics is not neutral because it's deep structure in bodies, evolutionary assumptions. Phenetics refer to the totality of the evolutionary history. This new classification scheme means that a bird is also a reptile. Even some creationists have been trapped into this type of thinking. If you take this thinking to its logical conclusion, then a human is also a fish.
You see, when you change the meanings of words just to fit an evolutionary worldview, you have a big problem because none of the data has changed. Slate of hand trickery can't disprove the truth. And the truth is that the idea of feathered dinosaurs is just a house of cards built on assumptions and wordplay. If any one of those assumptions or definitions are built in in the wrong way of thinking, evolutionary ideas, as we've shown, then the whole house of cards falls.
Okay, now we can get down to the business of showing what these animals actually were. We said there were three ways to know if an animal is a bird. But is that really necessary? You guys are smart. You can probably tell the difference between a dinosaur and a bird. So what do you think this is? It looks like a dinosaur, doesn't it? How about this one? Bird or dinosaur? This one looks like a bird.
There's just one problem: those two drawings are based on the same skeleton, just posed differently. Same bones, just posed differently. One pose makes it look more like a dinosaur, the other pose makes it more like a bird. See, we have to be careful with drawings because they can be used to make an animal look like a dinosaur, or look like a bird, or even look like a missing link.
Now, let's talk about those three ways to tell a bird from a dinosaur. Now, remember, we're using the classic definitions of bird and dinosaur without evolutionary ideas behind them. We're going to try to make it easier to remember. So here we go:
Feathered wings, swivel wrist, tiny tail: Bird.
Scaly skin, straight wrist, big tail: Dino.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. That was really fast. Let's break these down. Okay, all right.
The first thing to look for is feathered wings. We saw these feathers earlier in Archaeopteryx. They're found in other fossils like Microraptor and Caudipteryx, the fossils we looked at earlier. These aren't just feathers randomly attached to the body. They're fully formed wing feathers, indistinguishable from modern birds. If you look at all the animals found with feathers, we can see that they're all inside one group. The name of this group is called Maniraptora, and feathers do not occur outside that group. Only filaments do. That does not mean that all the animals in that group are definitely birds, and not all are found with feathers, but it's a good starting point.
Several Maniraptora fossils even show soft tissue around the feathers called patagia. This is only found on bird wings. This is consistent with what we see today. So the first of our three criteria to tell a bird from a dinosaur is: birds have feathers, dinosaurs don't have feathers. Dino fuzz doesn't care.
The second thing to look for is a swivel wrist. The idea of birds evolving from dinosaurs was even being pushed heavily back in the '90s with the original Jurassic Park movie. All of these animals found with feathers have a special half-moon-shaped bone in their wrist that enables it to swivel. Archaeopteryx, Microraptor, and Caudipteryx all have this special bone. This bone is also consistently found in many animals in the Maniraptora group, but not outside that group.
This special wrist bone is what we find in living bird wrists, especially in juvenile birds. A bird's wrist is very unique because it allows the wing to fold against the body. If you hold your wrist up straight and try to bend it sideways, it doesn't go very far. But these special wrist bones allow a bird's wrist to swivel so they can open and close their wings. You see, Allosaurus wrist bones are very different and bend in the opposite direction.
Evolutionists have a big problem here because they have no mechanism to explain how a dinosaur wrist could turn into a bird wrist. The special wrist supposedly evolved before birds could even fly. But a swivel wrist and feathered fingers actually make it harder for these animals to capture food with their arms. The second bird criteria lines up with the first and is present on the same group of animals, the one that we mentioned before, the Maniraptora group. If a fossil is found with feathers and the swivel wrist, it was a bird.
The third criteria is a tiny tail. Living birds have a really tiny tail. That's because the last several vertebrae fused together into something called a pygostyle. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, have a huge, muscular tail that helped them stay balanced. Animals like Archaeopteryx, Microraptor, and Caudipteryx looked a little different than living birds, but their tails were still way shorter and thinner than dinosaur tails. The tails of these extinct birds were around 30 vertebrae or shorter. Peter Werner, in his book on Archaeopteryx, says that coelurosaurs, which means "like dinosaurs," have around 30 to 40 tail vertebrae. Some of them had fused or partially fused pygostyles, but some of them, like Archaeopteryx and Microraptor, had an unfused pygostyle that was stiff, so it still could have acted like a bird's tail.
This short tail is a very important part of a bird's anatomy because birds walk very, very differently from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs move their legs from the hip. Their heavy tails keep them balanced. They had large muscle attachments on their tail and on the thigh bone to move their big bodies. Bird legs are more crouched, and they move their legs from the knee and balance at the knee, not the hip. Birds don't have big muscle attachments on the tail or the thigh bone because they don't need them. They have a tiny muscle that helps move the tail.
These third criteria lines up with the first two. This bird tail is present in Archaeopteryx, Microraptor, Caudipteryx, and other Maniraptorans. These features create another big problem for evolutionists. Somehow, dinosaurs evolved a completely different way to walk with a very different tail, leg, hip, and muscle structure. And these dozens of changes would have been detrimental to the animal until they could all work together.
That's it! We now have three criteria that work to tell the difference between dinosaurs and birds: feathered wings, swivel wrist, tiny tail: bird. Scaly skin, straight wrist, big tail: Dino. These three criteria work. Even some evolutionists agree that these supposed feathered dinosaurs were just birds.
Here you can see all the supposed dinosaurs found with feathers. We can see that most of them were the size of a turkey or smaller. These drawings show them posed like dinosaurs, but if we take away the body outline and re-pose them more accurately like birds, we can see they're all just birds. They have just been mislabeled by evolutionists because of a fairy tale about the past. Once you see them with flesh and feathers, you can see that God created these animals as birds on Day Five of creation week, before dinosaurs even existed. Building our thinking on the Bible is building on the rock, instead of on a house of cards.
Feathered wings, swivel wrist, tiny tail: Bird.
Scaly skin, straight wrist, big tail: Dino.
We've been working on this for three years, and we've got so much more we could say about dinosaurs and birds. So if you want to see more, comment, like, and share.