Transcription
Does this look like a dinosaur or a bird? Looks like a dinosaur. How about this one? That looks like a bird. There's just one problem. That's the same skeleton. Same bones, just posed differently.
Dinosaurs and birds are very different. We're going to talk about seven ways, seven major differences between dinosaurs and birds today.
Around two years ago, I was sitting on my couch. My wife was out of town, and I had just put the kids to bed. There was a thud on the the window of our back door. Uh, and I didn't really notice it, but my dogs did. We got two little dogs, and they ran over. And and I looked outside, and there was a bird, a dove, who had flown into the window and and killed itself. And so, poor little dove was right there. So I did what, uh, any normal human being would do. I grabbed a plastic bag and scooped it up. And then I put together a makeshift dissection kit and put it on the table and started dissecting this dove. That's not normal. Okay. So then I called my wife and I said, "You're not going to believe what I'm doing." And I said, um, "I'm dissecting a bird on our kitchen table." And she's like, there was a pause. And, uh, I expected her, her response was not what I expected. I expected her to say something like, "You're doing what?" Uh, instead, she was like, "On my table?" Apparently, she wasn't that surprised that I was dissecting a bird. I don't know.
So, yes, this is the the poor little bird that [Music] died. Um, some people would say that I just dissected a dinosaur, uh, because they would say that birds are dinosaurs. You hear that these days, and this idea of feathered dinosaurs is all over the place right now. You see it everywhere. Uh, this is a screenshot from the latest Jurassic World movie with a giant feathered Thescelosaurus, uh, or this dinosaur, Pyroraptor. Uh, you can do a Google image search for feathered dinosaurs, and they'll come back with thousands of images. Now, you can even ask AI to generate a feathered dinosaur for you, and it'll happily comply. This was a toy that someone I know found in a Church's Sunday School classroom. Now, I don't blame anybody. I'm sure somebody just picked up a bunch of dinosaur toys and they put it in the classroom, right? But this idea is showing up everywhere. And it's, as a Christian, it's important for us to know, uh, how do we handle this issue?
So it's been a a pleasure working with some great scientists and researchers on this here at Answers in Genesis. And the research we've done over the last several years, uh, turns over a hundred years of evolutionary dogma. And it's just really exciting. Over a hundred species of animals, we've reviewed hundreds and hundreds of books and scientific papers on this topic. So let's see where you guys are on this topic. Because some of you might be thinking, "Well, dinosaurs and birds, they look so different. I bet you I can tell the difference." So what do you think? Does this look like a dinosaur or a bird? Shout out your answer. Looks like a dinosaur. How about this one? That looks like a bird. There's just one problem. That's the same skeleton. Both of those drawings are based on the same skeleton. Same bones, just posed differently. One pose makes it look like a dinosaur. The other pose makes it look like a bird. And the fossil evidence doesn't do much for us. Doesn't help us very much with knowing how the animal was posed in life. It's hard to tell.
So what criteria can we use? If all we have is the bones, in many cases, what criteria, what criteria can we use? How do we know the difference between a dinosaur and a bird? Well, you might have some ideas running through your head. So let's talk about what some of those might be. Here is a skeleton of Archaeopteryx. And you might see some things on this animal and you might say, "Well, that doesn't look like a bird." Like, there's, there's claws. Look at those. Look at those big claws. Is that, do birds have claws on their wings? Actually, go to the grocery store, pick up a chicken wing. On that first digit there, most likely, most of the time, it'll have a little claw. Well, you say, "That's not really a claw. It's just kind of a little nub, right?" Well, how about this picture? This is an ostrich. Look at the size of those claws. We just don't see them very much because they're usually covered with feathers. Turns out, almost half of the families of birds have members with wing claws. Claws on the wings are just part of God's design for birds. Surprising, you might say.
Well, what about fingers? Right? Like that Archaeopteryx, it looks like it has three fingers. Dinosaurs have fingers, but birds don't really have fingers, do they? So again, look at this ostrich photo. You can see, you can't see fingers. There's no skin wrapped around around separate fingers, really. Um, but if you look at the skeleton, you can see, oh, there's, there's three digits there. Now, they're, they're fused a little bit, and that's something we find in modern adult birds. If you look at that chicken wing on the right there, you can see that blue bone. Um, it's actually four bones all fused together in an adult bird. So most adult birds fuse together like this. Those, those four bones into something called the carpo-metacarpus. That's it's really fancy science speak for the carpal and the metacarpal fused together. Um, but in juvenile birds, they're separate. Those bones are separate. And you can see that on the left there. And when we look at the fossils, you can see there are various, we find them in various stages of fusion. Some of them are fused, some of them are less fused. It seems like, um, in some of these pre-flood animals, they were less likely to be fused for some reason. Um, but that doesn't mean they're not birds. So you can't use the fingers to tell whether they're a bird or not.
What about the teeth? Archaeopteryx had teeth. Well, modern birds, we don't find teeth. We do find, uh, on some birds, a serrated beak, but that's a different structure. But if we, again, if we look at fossil birds, there were numerous fossil birds found that did have teeth. And there's six examples there, uh, of different species of fossil birds. Clearly birds. Evolutionists even agree that these animals are birds, but they had teeth. Um, teeth and beaks. Um, so at this point, you might be ready to throw your wings up in the air and say, "Maybe dinosaurs, maybe birds are dinosaurs." Well, don't give up quite yet, okay? Dinosaurs and birds are very different, and we're going to talk about seven ways, seven major differences, uh, between dinosaurs and birds today.
Now, some of you might have noticed something else about Archaeopteryx. A bony tail. Raise your hand if you noticed the bony tail. Anybody see that? Extra credit points to you guys. Good job. Bony tail. The tail, it turns out, is very important. And we're going to talk about that later. But first, I want to quickly touch on this question. Couldn't God have created dinosaurs with feathers? Could he have done that? Yes, absolutely. We're not going to limit God and say he couldn't have done something. But the joy of science is finding out what God did do. So it's not a question of whether he could or not. He could have, but let's look at the evidence. Um, and we want to start with what God's word, right? We want to start with the Bible. We always want to start with the Bible when we're talking about, um, anything we're trying to figure out in life. And the Bible gives us some clues. So, what day of creation week were dinosaurs created on? Anybody know? Shout it out. Day six. Very good. Genesis 1:25: "God made the beasts of the Earth according to their kind, and the livestock according to their kind, everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good." How about birds? What day of the week did God create birds? Five. Very good. Genesis 1:21: "So God created every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good." So this is just one of many ways you can tell from scripture that God didn't use evolution, right? There's, there's numerous ways. Uh, evolution takes millions of years. God created in six days. Makes it pretty obvious. God created things after its kind, right? Animals don't turn into other kinds of animals. But I think God has a sense of humor. And just to mess with the evolutionists, he created birds the day before he created dinosaurs, just to make sure we were absolutely clear on that issue. So Genesis 1 says a "winged bird." Um, it can literally be translated "flyers" or "flappers" with wings. Um, and it turns out the concept of the wing is pretty important.
So let's do a little science. You guys remember the scientific method? Let's have, let's start with a hypothesis, and then we are going to make some predictions based on that hypothesis. We're going to test those predictions, and then we'll come to a conclusion. That's kind of the scientific method. So our hypothesis is going to be that God only created feathers on birds, right? We'll see if that's, we'll see if that's true. We're going to test that. That's our hypothesis. Uh, seems like a reasonable hypothesis when we look at the world today, living animals. We see feathers on birds. We don't see feathers on reptiles. Um, when we look at Genesis, we see that God created birds on a different day than he created land animals. So it seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Well, let's talk about feathers. Feathers do come in different types and variations, but the key thing to remember about feathers is they're all branching structures, all right? You can see all the different, the six different types there. They all have a main quill or rachis, and then they have, they all have some type of barbs coming off of them. So that's an important thing to remember. They're always, a feather is always a branching structure.
Now, we do find things called filaments on some dinosaur fossils. So this is a Sinosauropteryx, it's a Compsognathus dinosaur, and you can see those those fuzzy things along its neck, right? Um, those are called filaments, but they aren't branching structures. Uh, most likely collagen fibers or something like that. Uh, we, we don't know for sure yet, but that's the, what a lot of scientists think. And so it doesn't look like feathers. So we've got this difference, right? Filaments, and we've got feathers. But science, evolutionists keep trying to use the word "feather" to include both, right? Well, we're not going to do that in this talk. When I say feather, I mean a branching structure. I'm not talking about filaments. And when we find feathers in the fossil record, like on this animal on the left, which is a dromaeosaur called Microraptor, and Archaeopteryx on the right, one of the most famous fossils in the world. When we find feathers on them, they're fully formed, complete branching structures, just like birds today.
So why do evolutionists conflate these two ideas of the filament and the feather into one word? Because they're trying to tell a story, right? They're trying to tell a story of how feathers evolved. Feathers are the most complex integumentary structure in creation. They're amazing, very complex. And so they need to explain how feathers came from something else. So you can see stage one and two, uh, in this supposed feather evolution. Those are the filaments, right? And we do find those on some of these dinosaur families. On the, the lower left there. Um, and then stages four and five, those are branching structures. They're feathers. They're just two different types of feathers that we find on birds today. Stage three, they haven't found those yet. They're completely hypothetical. This was a, a diagram similar based on a diagram from National Geographic magazine. And you can see stage three there, just a little question mark there. Maybe it happened around here. So it's very different. And you can see there's two different groups of animals. So if we look at a group of what they would call theropod dinosaurs, these non-avian dinosaurs, there's a subgroup inside of there called Maniraptora. And if we look at all the fossils that, that where we find real feathers, they're all found inside of this group. They're all found inside of Maniraptora. Now, we do find filaments outside of that group, but just filaments. We don't find feathers outside of that group.
So let's jump into the seven dramatic differences between dinosaurs and birds. Um, there's a lot of diagrams I'm going to show you in this, in this talk, and they're also in this paper. So if you want to do a deep dive on this topic and the anatomy side of things, check out Answers Research Journal, my paper there. I also want to give a big shout out to Dr. Haynes, um, for all the groundwork that she has laid on the research side of things. She's just done an amazing job. So you guys ready? We got to move fast. All right. So our scientists have done some just incredible work, really studying, going deep into the papers and the fossils and studying all these specimens to try to figure out what's special about birds. And guess what? Birds have wings. A very deep concept, I know. Birds have wings, and that ties back to that, that concept we saw in Genesis, right? Wings are important. So the first four criteria we're going to talk about, the first four dramatic differences, are related to the wings. And the first one, we've already talked about a little bit. Wing feathers, right? These aren't just random feathers attached to the body. Birds have wing feathers, feathers, not filaments. If we look at that Archaeopteryx fossil, you can see the feathers are arranged very beautifully into a wing, just like modern birds today. Same thing with the dromaeosaur, Microraptor, a wing, very clearly, um, wing feathers there. This one's a little bit harder to see. This is Caudipteryx, it's an oviraptorosaur. And there's kind of the, the body outline. They had smaller wings, they were probably flightless, but still, feathers are still arranged in a wing shape.
So here's a diagram of those, uh, some of those animals. This is a dove, and you can see the three different groups of feathers there. The primary feathers, which are the feathers attached to kind of those finger bones. The secondary feathers are attached to the arm, the ulna bone. And the alula feathers are attached to that first digit, the gray feathers right there. If we look at the feathers on Microraptor, the dromaeosaur, again, same type of arrangement, right? Um, very similar to to modern birds, arranged in a fan shape. Got all these different, uh, different things that make it just like a bird. Same thing with Caudipteryx. Uh, the feathers are shaped a little bit different, the wing is a little bit different shaped because different birds have different shaped wings based on how they fly. But still, bird. They're not, they're not feathers that are randomly attached to the body or something like that. Evolving partially functional. These are fully formed wings. And another thing that birds have around their wings is something called a patagium. And this, this soft tissue, the red and the blue, you can see there. The red is the propatagium, and the blue is the postpatagium. And it's a complex system of tendons, ligaments, and nerves that automatically fold the wing feathers when the wing closes. And it connects to the skeleton. It's really a remarkable system. So that the bird, basically, when the bird stretches out its elbow, the wing automatically opens up. And when it closes its elbow, the wing automatically folds. It's just an amazing structure that God created.
So if these feathered maniraptorans are birds, we would expect to find evidence of something like this in the fossil record, right? Well, guess what? We find on several of these feathered maniraptorans, we find evidence of this soft tissue. You can see it there. This is Anchiornis. And not only do we find kind of the, that body outline of that, but we also find little feather follicles in the skin if you use the right kind of light on this fossil. And that's significant because this is something that evolutionists don't talk about when they talk about feather evolution. You can see in that, that diagram, that little picture on the right there. Every feather in the skin of a bird, each has nerves, blood vessels, and muscles that attach to it. So there's a whole network system of the nervous system and the blood vessels and the muscles to control these feathers individually in some cases, and to be able to, to grow these feathers, to be able to release them, to be able to grow another one in its place. Um, and it's a sensory system. So that when a bird is flying, you know, kind of like if somebody touches the hairs on your arm or something like that, you can feel it, right? Birds have that with their feathers. So they can feel where the wind is, so that they can adjust mid-flight. It's really remarkable. So difference number one between dinosaurs and birds: birds have feathers on their wings. All right.
Difference number two: swivel wrist. All right, hold up your arm for me. All right, keep your arm straight and try to bend your wrist to the side. How about you? I can't get past 45 degrees or thereabouts. That's because I have a human wrist, not a bird wrist. A bird wrist can fold all the way up beside its body. It can almost touch the kind of the finger bones to the side of the arm. That's because it has a swivel wrist. It's got a special bone in its wrist called a semi-lunate carpal. It's a half-moon shaped bone, and that allows that wrist to swivel sideways. Uh, a bird can't really do this. Their wrist doesn't bend that way. It bends the other way. It swivels. So if these feathered maniraptorans are birds, our prediction is we would expect to see what? A swivel wrist in these animals, right? Well, what do we find? That's exactly what we find. So you see there's the chicken with the swivel wrist, Sapeornis, which is an extinct bird, and Microraptor. They all have the same bone and this swivel wrist functionality. So they have the ability to kind of close their wing. Now, if you look at the dinosaur wrist there on Allosaurus, it's very different. It doesn't bend that way. And that's consistent across all the theropod dinosaurs that, that we see here that are not birds. And so you can see that bottom row, those are all different dinosaur wrists, and they, they function a little bit more like a human wrist. They have the ability to grasp. But all these feathered maniraptorans have a swivel wrist. This is a big problem for evolution because somewhere along the way, this is a quote from an evolutionist. "Somewhere along the way from early dinosaurs to birds, wrists changed so much that we could be excused for thinking birds don't even have them. Wrists went from straight to bent and hyperflexible, allowing birds to fold their wings neatly against their bodies when not flying. Underlying this change is a drop in the number of wrist bones from nine to just four." He doesn't offer a lot of explanation of how this happened. This is a big problem for evolution. Like, what, what benefit would that give to an animal to completely re-engineer its wrist so it can bend sideways before it can even fly? Doesn't make sense. Uh, in fact, it creates, uh, a very nonsensical creature. You've got an animal that has these, that's supposed to be hunting with these, these large forelimbs that it's, that supposedly evolved, but then it's got these big feathers coming off the fingers that get in the way. And when it tries to, to grasp something, it can't actually grasp. It has to like pull its arms and and swivel the wrist sideways. It doesn't make sense at all. So number two major difference is swivel wrist. But there's two more for the wings.
Number three: stabilized shoulder. All right, we've been at this a while. This is the fourth session for some of you, and and you might be getting a little weary. So so do me a favor and just, just shrug it off, okay? Shrug it and roll your shoulders back. Roll them forward. All right, very good. You guys are awesome. All right, feel a little better? Take a deep breath. All right. Uh, what you just did, all that motion in your shoulder, you can do that because the only skeletal element, the only bone attaching your arm to the rest of your body is your collarbone. It's just this little bone right here, and it can move around quite a bit. Birds can't shrug their shoulders. Did you know that? They can't shrug their shoulders at all. Their shoulders are locked into place with their rib cage and the rest of their body. They can move their neck a lot, but not their shoulders. Why is that? There's a really good reason for that. If you tried, if you grew feathers on your arms and tried to fly like a bird, you would have a big problem. You'd most likely dislocate your shoulder and break your collarbone because your shoulder is not built for flight. Flapping is a big deal to a bird, and so they need a stabilized shoulder joint that can handle all those forces of flapping. It's a very rigorous activity. And so that's what, that's what birds have. This is a goose skeleton, and you can see this is the shoulder. The black bone is the scapula. The gray bone is the humerus, which is the, the first bone in the wing. And then they've got this special bone called the coracoid, which is in blue. And that bone, uh, works with the furcula and the scapula to create a tripod-type structure, which is an engineering, uh, really strong engineering structure. So the shoulder is kind of attached to this tripod, and so it's very stable, right? And that shoulder doesn't move. And you can see that angle, you've got that angle between the scapula and the coracoid, and that adds to that stability. Dinosaurs don't have this. So this is an Allosaurus shoulder. It has a coracoid bone, but it's almost like it's just an extension of the scapula. In fact, in some cases, they're so fused, it's hard to, to see the line between them.
So how about, so what would our prediction be? Our prediction would be that if these feathered maniraptorans are birds, we would expect to see a reinforced shoulder joint, like what birds have. All right, so there's our goose, there's our Allosaurus, there's Caudipteryx, which is an extinct bird. You can see it's got the angled, uh, scapula and coracoid bones there. And there's our dromaeosaur, Microraptor. Same thing. It's, it's a little bit slightly different shape, but it looks nothing like the dinosaur. Looks very avian. Looks very bird-like. It's got a reinforced shoulder joint. Let's extend that out. You can see all the dinosaurs across the bottom, they all have those rounded coracoid bones that are just an extension of the scapula. Don't have that extra stability. And across the top, you can see there's some variation, but they've all got some more of an angle and more of an elongated coracoid bone. If you look at that ostrich on the far top right, you can see that the angle is not very sharp. Why would that be? Well, ostriches can't fly, right? So they don't need as much of that stability. So it has a broader angle. And so we see that in some of these extinct animals too, like Caudipteryx. The angles, the angle's not quite as strong. It was most likely flightless, um, but it still doesn't look like a dinosaur shoulder. And it's really cool, the, the muscle system that birds have around their shoulder joint. They've got a really elaborate pulley system in their shoulder. So the, they have a muscle that attaches to, to the sternum, and it loops up through something called the triosseal canal and attaches to the humerus and helps raise the wing. It's a pulley system. So how did a dinosaur shoulder with a standard, a usual deltoid muscle that just helped raise the arm, loop through a canal to create a completely different muscle structure? It even reversed the direction that it was pulling. So Microraptor, if you look at that, the latest research indicates that Microraptor and these other feathered maniraptorans had a similar pulley structure. Um, so their shoulder was very much bird. So our third major difference is the stabilized shoulder.
All right, one more wing difference, and that is the shoulder joint. Okay. Um, all right, make like you're going to do a chicken dance. All right, and then, and then raise your, raise your shoulders, okay? Raise your arms up. Get your elbows up. See how high you can go. All right, so you can get up there a little ways. If you straighten your arms out, interestingly, you can raise your up arms up higher, right? So that's what a bird needs, right? They need wide range of motion in their arm, right? In their, in their wing. And so that's what we see in birds. This is a kind of a cross-section through a, a bird, a European starling. And you can see the, the coracoid and the furcula bone, those two white bones, uh, and then you can see the, the blue part, which is the range of motion of the humerus, okay? And then there's that red with the little arrow. It's called a glenoid, lateral-facing glenoid. And so that's just, just the, the fancy word for the socket that, that shoulder attaches into, right? And it needs that range of motion. So that glenoid, that socket, that is in the shoulder, it's located high on the body and it's angled sideways so that they have a wide range of motion. Let's look at a dinosaur shoulder. This is our Allosaurus. You think it could flap? No. Definitely not. Not only does it have a much smaller arm forelimb, um, but it's angled down. It's located lower on the body. So how about some of these feathered maniraptorans? What do they look like? Well, here's Microraptor's shoulders. It's located high on the body. You can see the, the coracoid and the, and the sternum there. And the, the glenoid is pointing out. It's got that wide range of motion. Sometimes it's a little bit easier to see even on the, the side view. You can see the Allosaurus there. All it can do, its arm is just pointed down into the rear of the animal. Just got a little range of motion there, not a lot. But the Microraptor and the, the starling have a broad range of motion for their wing, right? And you need that to be able to fly. And that's consistent across, um, these feathered maniraptorans. So there's our first four: feathers, swivel wrist, stabilized shoulder, and that special specialized shoulder joint.
So we took these and we said, "Okay, let's analyze these across, uh, 150 different, 157 different species of non-avian dinosaurs." Okay? And then the first, the first row there is birds. So blue is all bird characteristics. Green is all dinosaur characteristics. And you can see there's a pattern there, right? These are different family groupings. And, um, now you might be looking at some of these and you might see that the, um, the dromaeosaurs and the troodontids and oviraptorosaurs, some of them are are kind of [Music] big bad Rex. Get back. Mo, back. All right, stay still right there. Okay, Tyrannosaurus Rex, ladies and gentlemen. He's a big guy. Tyrannosaurus Rex, 43 feet long, very large, one of the largest predators to ever walk the Earth, right? Um, Allosaurus, also pretty big, 32 feet long. So sometimes we think that dinosaurs are big and birds are small, right? You got a blue jay or a raven. That's a big chicken. Some chickens actually get that big. Ever been chased by a goose? That's not much fun. Ostrich, heaviest bird alive, 9 feet tall. It's a, it's a really big bird. Uh, this is a marabou stork. They're really impressive when they fly. We have one, a couple of these at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. You should check them out. 8 and a half foot wingspan. Not the biggest flying bird, though. The Indian Condor, almost 11 foot wingspan. That's a very large bird. So we think of dinosaurs as big and birds as small. But what if we, what if we look at the fossil record? This is Dinornis. He's an extinct bird, 12 feet tall. That's a very large bird. That's Argentavis, 21 foot wingspan. I wouldn't even want to go outside. That's a big bird. Dinosaurs aren't always big either. It's a decent-sized dinosaur. I wouldn't want to have that in my backyard. Probably 10 feet long. But some of them are pretty small. This is that Sinosauropteryx we were just talking about earlier. Only three and a half feet long. He's so cute. I almost want to pet him. What about some of these feathered maniraptorans? Well, Microraptor, we were just talking about. He's the dromaeosaur. Caudipteryx, the oviraptorosaur. And this is a Troodon named Jianchanglong. I think they're not very big, right? But you can't use size, as you can see, to tell the difference between birds and dinosaurs. We have to use other criteria because there's big dinosaurs and small dinosaurs. There's big birds and there's smaller birds.
Now, some of you might be wondering, "Well, what about some of the bigger dromaeosaurs, like, and some of the bigger oviraptorosaurs, like, like these guys?" We're going to talk about them in a little bit. Um, all right, so now we're going to move on to the last three criteria. Some of you probably heard the phrase, "If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's a duck." Right? And part of the reason for that phrase is because birds walk very differently from dinosaurs and other bipeds. So this is a photo of a roadrunner. And if you ever looked at a bird and wondered why its knee bends backwards, uh, well, that's not actually its knee. That's actually the ankle. The knee is up in the body, usually covered by feathers, kind of hidden. And that's because birds are knee-walkers. Their femur, the first bone in their leg, uh, stays relatively stable, and the rest of their leg moves underneath it. That's why they look so funny when they, when they walk. But dinosaurs, they walked more like people. They're hip-walkers, right? The whole leg swings when they walk.
So what are some things that would help us discern if these feathered maniraptorans walked like birds? Well, one thing is the tail. We, uh, mentioned the tail earlier. So it seems like 30 caudal, 30 tail vertebrae or fewer, um, is about, uh, the threshold for a short tail. And as we look at these animals, you can see Microraptor has 26. Archaeopteryx only has 22. But if you look at some of these dinosaurs, they're up above 40 in most cases, and they've got these big long tails because they need a center of balance that's at the hip because their leg needs to move from the hip, and so they need a long tail to balance out their body. But birds, they have a center of balance further forward because they're walking from their knee, and their knee is further forward. So, question I'm sure you've all been wondering, can Archaeopteryx walk like a dinosaur? You can see that little tail that it's got. If Archaeopteryx tried to walk like a dinosaur, it wouldn't work. It's way off balance, right? And you'll sometimes see reconstructions of some of these feathered maniraptorans that try to pose them like a dinosaur, and they, they make the tail look thicker than it actually was and things like that to try to make it look right, but it doesn't work.
Now, some researchers are kind of thrown off by this because most modern birds have something called a pygostyle, and that's a, it's a shorter tail with a set of fused bones on the end. And these extinct animals, these feathered maniraptorans, they have something that's a little bit different from the pygostyle, but functionally it's very similar. And you can see the base of the tail is very flexible, but the, the end of the tail is stiff, and that adds to their, their flight ability. It's kind of a flight control that they can use. And the same thing with Microraptor here. It's got an unfused pygostyle, um, but there's still stiffening elements in it. The end of the tail is still stiff, as opposed to the dinosaurs like the Saurolophus. It's got that big thick tail that's flexible all the way down. And this is really important because it's a, it's a problem for evolution. If a dinosaur, even if it evolved wings somehow magically, um, and tried to, tried to fly or tried to soar, it wouldn't work. It would fall out of the sky because its center of balance is too far backward. The center of balance needs to be really far forward for flying to even work. It would, it would, it would spiral out. It wouldn't even be able to glide. So short tail, that's another major difference between dinosaurs and birds.
So another thing is, again, that knee walking. And we'll illustrate that by looking at our Allosaurus skeleton here at the Creation Museum, Ebenezer. If you look at that tail, number one, it's really long, like we talked about. But another unique thing about it that we see in dinosaur tails is it's got a lot of large muscle attachments. Look at all those, those bony processes that go all the way down the length of the tail. That's because it's got a, scientists think it had a large muscle called the caudo-femoralis longus, and it needed to attach to that tail, and it used that muscle for walking because that femur has to move somehow, right? And so there's a muscle attachment on the femur called the fourth trochanter. That big old muscle attaches to the femur, and it pulls the leg back and propels the animal forward. So there should be evidence of that muscle. If it's a dinosaur, if it's a bird, we expect to not see evidence of that muscle. Well, what do evolutionists say about this? Here's a quote from an evolutionist: "In advanced forms such as Oviraptorosaurs, Troodontids, or Dromaeosaurs, many of the modifications toward an avian style of walking had already taken place." So they're saying, they're admitting that these animals, they already walked like birds, but they're not birds, they're dinosaurs. Look at the language that they use there. "Advanced forms," "modifications that had already taken place." That's evolutionary language. And this is all through the research papers. There's some things that are good observational science, and there's a lot of stuff that's just storytelling.
So here's a diagram of that again, that muscle that provides that locomotion in a dinosaur. Birds, very different. They have a, a muscle that has a similar name, but it does the exact opposite. It anchors to the stable femur that's not moving, and it has the ability to help move the tail. So what do we find in these feathered maniraptorans? Well, there's Microraptor. We don't find the big muscle attachment on the femur. We don't find big muscle attachments all down the tail. It just had, most likely, a small muscle there that had, that provided some tail movement. So they walked like birds. And this allowed, this is really important for for flight as well, because it allows that tail to move separately from the legs. A dinosaur can't do that. A dinosaur's tail has to stay stable while it's walking or running, um, to give it the, the power, something to anchor to.
All right, so we are at six major differences between dinosaurs and birds: short tail, knee walking. Last one: hip structure. So birds have, you can see the blue bone there, they have a pubic bone that points backwards toward the rear of the animal. Dinosaurs have, in that green bone there, a pubic bone that points forward. And if we look at these feathered maniraptorans, they point backwards. Now, this one's a little bit hard to tell in some reconstructions. There's, there's room for interpretation as far as what the exact angle was. And so some of these have, there's debates about, "Oh, what was the exact angle?" And, and how far was it pointing backwards, or was it vertical? But overall, it's pretty consistent. The pubic bones in the dinosaurs point forward. The pubic bones in the feathered maniraptorans, the birds, uh, are vertical or pointing backwards. And this is a big problem for evolution too. An evolutionist says, "Additional support for a locomotor transition within Eoraptor comes from the evolution of highly retroverted pubes." That's rear-facing pubic bones, which, as previously studied, have proposed is likely to have fundamentally altered the moment arms and, by inference, functions of several major locomotor muscles. What are they saying? Basically, the whole pelvis was re-engineered between dinosaurs and birds. Completely different structures. Which makes sense if God created these as, as different kinds of animals, right?
All right, so we've got our seven major differences between dinosaurs and birds. There's more. Uh, we've got a whole list of other things that we're going to be looking into and researching because there are tons of differences between dinosaurs and birds. But these are the ones we've had time to research so far. So jumping back to this, you can see there's a consistent trend of blue bird traits in a dromaeosaur, troodontid, oviraptorosaur. And even alvarezsaurids, which are funny little birds, they remind me of kiwis. Um, and then the dinosaur family groups: C, Ceratosaurus, the Tyrannosaurs, the Compsognathus, Ornithomimids, and actually Therizinosaurs, which some people call them like the panda bears of the, of the dinosaurs. They're just weird. You got to, you should look them up. I don't, don't have time to go into them right now. Um, they're actually in Maniraptora, but they look like dinosaurs. So they're one of the exceptions. And you notice there might, there are a few exceptions here in the, in the data. There's some greens where you'd expect to be blues, and there's some blues where you'd expect to be greens. And our researchers have done a ton of work looking into every single one of those exceptions in that data set. And it seems like either there's a good reason for it, like, "Oh, it's a flightless bird, so it doesn't have quite as much of that reinforced shoulder," or there's just biased interpretation or bad data. All right.
So our hypothesis: God only created feathers on birds. What do you guys think? Seems like it was correct from all the evidence we have so far. So could God have created birds on dinosaurs? Yeah, he could have. Did he? We don't have any evidence of it yet. So probably not.
All right, now the big question I'm sure everybody is curious about: What about the Raptors? Okay, let's talk about Raptors. I, I really enjoy these movies. The Jurassic movies, they're really fun. Like Brian said, I've, I've been a dinosaur lover since I was a kid, so I've seen them all in theaters. And, you know, I was, I, I really enjoy them. The Raptors from the Jurassic movies were actually based on two animals called Deinonychus and Utahraptor. So I'm going to talk about them briefly. And the movies, uh, promote a common misconception, and that is that we find dinosaurs like this all together, articulated, beautifully fossilized. That doesn't happen very often. So let's talk about Utahraptor. The yellow bones are what they found for Utahraptor in the beginning. That's it. Now they've supposedly found some additional ones since then, but they haven't published anything about them, really. We don't have good descriptions for them. And they were found in just this big heap of bones of a bunch of different species. And it's hard to tell, well, what was Utahraptor and what wasn't. So that's probably why they haven't published much on it. Here's the drawings of the bones from the actual original paper. Um, but that doesn't stop them from creating a reconstruction in a museum like this. How do they do that? Well, they look at the animals that were more primitive than it, supposedly, and the animals that are more advanced than it, supposedly, that they do have better fossil evidence for, and they create a reconstruction based on their story. Deinonychus, that's Utahraptor. We don't even have enough bones to know what Utahraptor was at this point, whether it was a bird or a dinosaur, right? So if you love the idea that the Raptors in Jurassic Park were real, and you want to say, "Oh, Utahraptor looked like that," go for it. That's all I have to say about that.
Deinonychus. Dr. Hayes has done a ton of research on Deinonychus, and she's, she's talked about how these specimens were found 50 million years apart, 30 miles apart, 30 years between expeditions. There's all these different, and that's true of the, the even just the skull bones that they found. They didn't find an articulated skull. They found a bone here, a bone there, a bone here, a bone there. None of them all together. And they put this skull together and said, "I think it looks like this." Same thing with the rest of the body. So this brings up a really important point, and that's these bones are versus associated. So anybody here like to do puzzles? I like puzzles. My family likes puzzles. And so, you know, you get a brand new puzzle from the store, you open the box, and you rip the bag open, and you're digging through the pieces. You know those pieces that come from the factory already together? Those are articulated. All right, they're already together. You know that they, that they belong together because they're connected, right? Those are articulated. Those are the best fossils to find because we know these bones, two, two bones went together. The rest of the pieces, they're just associated. They're in the same box, right? Now, imagine you're doing 10 different puzzles all at the same time in the same living room. Some of you puzzle makers just had a panic attack. No, I can't do it. Some piece is gonna get lost, right? So that's what paleontology is like, right? You've got all these different animals fossilized all around the world, and you're trying to associate these bones together to figure out which ones went with which animal. And if you leave the puzzles out long enough, people, your kids are traipsing through the living room, you know, pieces are going to get mixed up. The, you know, this puzzle piece is going to be near the other puzzle piece. But in general, they should be kind of close to the same area where you started it. That's kind of like the evolutionary assumption of how fossils are. The animal died there, its bones are kind of scattered around the same area. That's their assumption because that's their worldview. Now, imagine a giant flood comes through your living room. You got waves crashing everywhere, water swirling around, and then it all, the water all goes away. Would you have any idea which piece went with which puzzle? No, you'd have no idea. That's the creationist worldview with paleontology. When we find a bone and it's mixed with some other bones, do we know it's the same animal? No, not unless it was articulated and they were connected and you could tell it was the same animal. And so it's really hard. And that's why when we find something like this, it puzzles evolutionists. Creationists are like, "Oh, that's exactly what we'd expect from a, a worldwide flood." It's a whole jumble of bones, right? This is Dinosaur National Monument. And that's another reason paleontologists are so excited when they find something like this. It's a fully articulated animal, all fossilized together. And so as we've done our research, we've based these criteria and this research on articulated animals first. We wanted to figure out, okay, if it's right with, if the data we're looking at is correct on the articulated animals, which it most likely is, then when we look at the disarticulated animals, we'll have a better chance of being right.
All right, pop quiz. I know Brian said there wouldn't be any more pop quizzes today, but I've got one for you. All right, I want you to take the seven criteria we talked about, all right? Feathers, swivel wrist, the shoulder, the short tail, the knee walking, the hip structure. And we're going to evaluate an animal, and I want you guys to tell me whether you think it was a dinosaur or a bird, okay? All right, here we go. Let's look at the wrist. Does this look like a dinosaur wrist that bends and grasps, or does it look like a swivel wrist that swivels sideways? What do you think? Swivel wrist. Good. Shoulder. Is that an angled shoulder, or is that just the, that continuous scapular-coracoid? It's the angled shoulder, right? Let's look at the hips. So Microraptor and Archaeopteryx, those are their hips. Our animal that we're looking at looks like a bird hip. Let's look at the tail. Here's an actual photo. Around 26 tail vertebrae. Big muscle attachments? No. Looks very much like a bird. Uh, this animal that we're talking about, we haven't found feathers on it, but there's an animal in the same family that we, around the same size, that we did find feathers on. It's very similar. You can see giant wing feathers, big tail feathers. That animal is called Xuelinglong. It's a pretty big animal, about the size of a big turkey. And our animal is there at the bottom. All right, what do you think? Raise your hand if you think our animal was a dinosaur. Raise your hand if you think our animal was a bird. That animal is Velociraptor. I didn't call Velociraptor a bird. You just did. Don't tell anybody that I called Velociraptor a bird. Here is a beautifully articulated fossil specimen of Velociraptor fighting a dinosaur, a Protoceratops. Uh, so we know it's not the, the associated problem. It's not just a bag of bones that were found together. So I don't know what to say. I'm sorry if I crushed some of your, uh, your, if I killed your favorite dinosaur. Velociraptor may have been a bird. That's all I can say. We haven't found feathers on it yet. Maybe we will someday. We'll see.
All right, so if we look at all of the feathered maniraptorans, the ones we actually find with real feathers, branching structures, uh, there's only about 15 or so of them. Um, there's over 100 species in Maniraptora and in those families, but only 15 or so have actually been found with feathers. And one of the things that confuses us, um, is how these animals are presented. Because if you look at them like that, they kind of look like dinosaurs, right? But if you strip away all the assumptions and just look at the bones and repose those bones based on the things that we talked about with wings that can fold and legs that had that knee that was closer to the center of balance, and then you put the feathers back on, they look a lot like birds, don't they? The evolutionary worldview affects the interpretations and the, the images that represent these animals too. So when you see an image of an extinct animal, don't just take it at face value. You need to dig a little deeper sometimes and ask some questions about it. There are some drawings of Microraptor and Caudipteryx, what they may have looked like as birds. Again, this is a dromaeosaur and an oviraptorosaur. Evolutionists would call these non-avian dinosaurs, but they look a lot like birds, don't they? And we spent a lot of time trying to get these reconstructions right. You can see the skeleton there with the drawing over top of it for Caudipteryx, and same thing for Microraptor. They might have looked something like this.
So wings are important. "God created every winged bird according to its kind." When you start with God's word instead of man's word, you know you're starting with the truth, right? And it's like having a guide for how to correctly interpret the evidence. It guides you along as you try to discern truth from error and what's just worldview interpretation and what's actual observable science. Let's wrap it up with one final verse. "Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth." This is part of Jesus' prayer for us as he, uh, at the end, near the end of his life, right before his crucifixion, he prayed this for us. And as he talked to the Father, he said, "Father, your word is truth." God's word doesn't contain truth. It's not a, a pithy devotional thing, not just morals for life. When you start with God's word, it affects your thinking in every area.