"They Are Digging in the Wrong Place"

Bodie Hodge has a post on the AiG website that is nothing short of astounding.  AiG is, once again, moving the goalposts.  And who is Bodie Hodge?  He is, according to the site: "A speaker, writer, and researcher for Answers in Genesis, Bodie Hodge has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale."  Hodge writes:

Each year there are many headlines, books, technical articles, and videos about another supposed missing link—a supposed link between a land mammal and whale, a dinosaur and bird, an ape and human, and so forth. Usually, these are quite easy to refute by anatomical features.

For example, alleged missing links turn out to be anything but—for example, either ape, human, or a fake (e.g., Piltdown man) or dinosaur, bird, or a fake (e.g., Archaeoraptor).

Nevertheless, these alleged missing links rarely make creationists cringe. I think it frustrates some of the evolutionists because they think they have found some sort of knock-out evidence that they interpret as support for evolution. But creationists rarely bat an eye.

Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret as to why creationists rarely take notice of these alleged missing links. It is because the evolutionists are digging in the wrong place—just like the bad guys in Indiana Jones. When you don’t have the correct information, you can miss the mark significantly.

So evolutionists are just like "the bad guys" in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Did you catch that?  A casual trip through the fossil record indicates that there are, in fact, many, many transitional forms present.  We now have very detailed sequences from Devonian crossopterygians to early tetrapods, from land mammals to whales, from maniraptoran dinosaurs to birds and, of course, from late Miocene/early Pliocene apes to humans.

But this isn't even the central focus of his post. First, he lists the conventional geological stratigraphy.  He bungles this early on.  He writes: "In a general sense, evolutionists look for alleged dinosaur-to-bird missing links in the Cretaceous and Paleocene (bolded)."  Wrong.  The dinosaur-to-bird sequence dates to the late Jurassic.  Furthermore, the presence of feathers on non-avian dinosaurs suggests that feathers evolved even before the late Jurassic.  By the early Cretaceous, birds were numerous.  The transition had long since ended by the Palaeocene.  Had he done any study of the transition from dinosaurs to birds, he would have known this.

He then writes:

But here is the problem. The rock layers from Cambrian to Miocene—at least mapped in the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4)—were from the Flood.2 Miocene and Eocene rock is intricately part of the makeup of the mountains of Ararat, as is Cretaceous and Triassic (many times inverted, lying above the Miocene and Eocene). Since that time, the upper strata are post-Flood strata—such as Ice Age layers and recent volcanic flows. I understand creationists debate about tertiary sediment (Paleocene through Miocene) and encourage you study this further.

He gives absolutely no justification for this viewpoint. No evidence is presented indicating why pre-Pliocene sediments are flood and Pliocene sediments on up are not.  There is no event to mark this transition, no sedimentary layer that is distinctive.

Nothing. He simply says that it is so, therefore it is. It gets worse:

So when evolutionists say they found a transitional form between an ape and a human in Pliocene rock, creationists hardly flinch. Evolutionists are looking at the rock strata and the age of the earth incorrectly because humans were around long before that rock was ever laid down! Furthermore, humans existed when the Cambrian rock was laid down during the Flood. To go one more step, mankind had dominated the earth for over 1,600 years before the Cambrian rock was laid down!

When someone says that they found a transitional form between a dinosaur and a bird in the Paleocene, again, creationists hardly think twice. Both specimens died the same year in the same Flood and are not related. This is why finding feathers in the rock layers “before the dinosaurs” is not a problem for creationists.4 Nor is it a problem when we find theropod dinosaurs (which supposedly evolved into birds in the evolutionary story) that had eaten birds in lower Cretaceous rock.5

Birds were made on Day Five, which is a day before the dinosaurs; land animals, like dinosaurs, were made on Day Six. Having both buried in Flood sediment isn’t a big deal.

So many questions...

• If humans were around before the rocks were laid down, how is it that we find no humans at the base of the geological/flood column?  In fact, why aren't human remains found throughout the column, if they predate the Cambrian?
• How is it that all of the fossil species that are supposed to be in flood deposits are perfectly sorted, even to the point of brachipods being sorted by crinulation number and trilobites being sorted  by number of compound eye segments?  What about the detailed fossil sequences mentioned above? 
• if humans had ship-building capacity during the time of Noah and existed in towns and settlements, why is there no evidence of this at the bottom of the geological column?
• If humans did, in fact, predate the Cambrian, why do we find a detailed, clear sequence from prehuman hominoids through human precursors to archaic and them modern humans beginning in the Pliocene?  
• If the sediments from the Miocene back to the Precambrian reflect flood deposits, why do we find the largest land mammals, dinosaurs three quarters of the way up the column, when they should have sunk to the bottom?  
• If the sediments from the Miocene back to the Precambrian reflect flood deposits, why do we find features throughout the geological record that could only have happened on the surface, such as rain drops, footprints, hatched dinosaur eggs, cave systems, sand dunes, burned forests, swamps, etc. 

So why aren't any of these things problems for the creationists?

Biblical creationists presuppose the Bible’s truth and subsequently the true history of the earth—including Noah’s Flood. Evolutionists have presuppositions too, albeit, false ones, but presuppositions nonetheless. This is why when evolutionists look at Flood rock they unwittingly believe that the rock was actually laid down slowly and gradually over long ages. I suggest they have been indoctrinated to believe such stories as gradual rock accumulation over millions of years which has never been observed or repeated. Thus, the concept of millions of years is not in the realm of science but interpretation.

The reason that "evolutionists" do this is because every bit of the palaeontological and geological evidence points to a long depositional history with evolutionary diversity.  It is not a matter of indoctrination.  It is a matter of going where the evidence leads.  One might reasonably argue that if you put on young earth creationist blinders, you do not see the vast stretches of time and the changes that the earth has gone through in its long history, but, instead, a flat earth. 

It is common to find nonsense on the AiG site, but this rises to a new level of inanity. This post is terribly written, incorrect, pompous and insulting.  The writer provides no evidence for the position he takes, insults the hard work of scientists who have spent decades piecing together the geological and fossil records, and betrays complete ignorance of basic geology and palaentology.  It is hard to be charitable to Mr. Hodge, who plainly knows nothing of which he writes and, as a result, produces pure drivel. 
 

How Well Could Archaeopteryx Fly?

Science Daily has a story on Archaeopteryx and its ability to fly. Quoth they:

Some secrets have been revealed by an international team of researchers led by Brown University. Through a novel analytic approach, the researchers have determined that a well-preserved feather on the raven-sized dinosaur's wing was black. The color and parts of cells that would have supplied pigment are evidence the wing feathers were rigid and durable, traits that would have helped Archaeopteryx to fly.

It is nice to have yet more information about this genus. This new information adds yet another dimension to the transitional nature of Archaeopteryx, which is regarded as having mostly theropod dinosaurian characteristics. It does not help the YEC-based arguments that Archaeopteryx was just a bird.


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Where Did the Cretaceous Birds Go?

As evidence continues to pile up supporting the theropod dinosaur-to-bird transition, the question has arisen: where did all of the Cretaceous birds that did not give rise to modern birds go?  Science Daily has this report:

Now a team of paleontologists led by Yale researcher Nicholas Longrich has provided clear evidence that many primitive bird species survived right up until the time of the meteorite impact. They identified and dated a large collection of bird fossils representing a range of different species, many of which were alive within 300,000 years of the impact.
"This proves that these species went extinct very abruptly, in terms of geological time scales," said Longrich. The study appears the week of Sept. 19 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aside: the next time I see a scientist use the word “prove” I am going to strangle them. Scientists don't prove anything. They provide support for a hypothesis or they reject a hypothesis.  Onward.  The common consensus about the dinosaur extinction is that it was, in large part, caused by a huge meteorite that fell to earth toward the end of the Cretaceous in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The crater reflecting this impact is 110 miles across and, while it probably wasn't the entire cause of the dinosaur extinction, it wiped out a good chunk of 'em.The article continues:

Yet modern birds are very different from those that existed during the late Cretaceous, Longrich said. For instance, today's birds have developed a much wider range of specialized features and behaviors, from penguins to hummingbirds to flamingoes, while the primitive birds would have occupied a narrower range of ecological niches. "The basic bird design was in place, but all of the specialized features developed after the mass extinction, when birds sort of re-evolved with all the diversity they display today," Longrich said. "It's similar to what happened with mammals after the age of the dinosaurs."

Another piece of the puzzle!

Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison on Early Human Origins

Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison, two of the preeminent scholars in the study of human origins think that we are assimilating too many fossils into our family tree. In an article in PhysOrg, the author writes:

The paper, "The evolutionary context of the first hominins," reconsiders the evolutionary relationships of fossils named Orrorin, Sahelanthropus and Ardipithecus, dating from four to seven million years ago, which have been claimed to be the earliest human ancestors. Ardipithecus, commonly known as "Ardi," was discovered in Ethiopia and was found to be radically different from what many researchers had expected for an early human ancestor. Nonetheless, the scientists who made the discovery were adamant it is a human ancestor.

Wood and Harrison have a point here. One of the things that we castigate those that are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory about is “unilineal” thinking—that you can have transitional forms in the fossil record that do not reflect direct ancestry but “collateral” ancestry. This is especially true in the transition from the late theropod dinosaurs to birds. Yet, because we are talking about our own lineage, we tend to slip into a unileal way of thinking. Witness the brouhaha about Ida last year. Everyone wanted to roll her into the human fossil line even though there was no concrete evidence of such.

This does not mean that Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus are not transitional. It just means that there is no direct evidence that they are ancestral to the human line. In the article, Wood and Harrison write:

There is no reason why higher primate evolution in Africa in the past ten million years should not mirror the complexity observed in the evolutionary histories of other mammals during the same time period. Nor is there any reason, especially with the lessons from Ramapithecus and Oreopithecus fresh in the minds of researchers, to assume that hominins should not be prone to the same limitations and uncertainties of phylogenetic analysis as other fossil primates.¹

This does not make them any less worthy of study or of producing excitement in the palaeoanthropological community.

¹Wood B., Harrison T. (2011) The evolutionary context of the first hominins. Nature 470:347-352.
10.1038/nature09709

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X-Ray Images of Archaeopteryx Show Original Chemistry

In the "Way Cool" department, bright x-ray images of Archaeopteryx have revealed that part of the original bone chemistry still exists. In an article in ThaiIndian, this is reported:

The discovery could revolutionise the field of palaeontology says the team led by scientists at the University of Manchester and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab in the US.

By recording how ‘bright X-rays’ interacted with the fossil, the team have created maps showing chemical elements which were part of the living animal itself.

The maps show that portions of the feathers are not merely impressions of long-decomposed organic material — as was previously believed.

Instead, they include fossilised fragments of actual feathers containing phosphorous and sulphur, elements that compose modern bird feathers.

Trace amounts of copper and zinc were also found in the dinobird’s bones: like birds today, the Archaeopteryx may have required those elements to stay healthy, said a Manchester release.

Despite the fact that "SLAC National Accelerator Lab" is redundant (SLAC stands for "Stanford Linear Accelerator"), this is yet more evidence that despite having mostly dinosaurian characteristics, Archaeopteryx had some crucial derived traits that support its transitional status. As Prothero¹ notes, there have been five different kinds of feathers identified in the fossil record on various dinosaurs and early birds. The next step is to see when true flight feathers evolved.

¹Prothero, D. 2007. Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters. Columbia Univ Pr.


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Palaeontology Ramping Up in China

Randy Boswell of the Ottawa Citizen has an article on work that is going on in China involving the transition from Dinosaurs to birds and the work of a Canadian palaeontologist:

But a Canadian scientist working in China has scored a paleontological hat trick in the past month alone, co-authoring three papers that detail the discovery of two new species of the extinct reptiles -- including one with a striking resemblance to the roadrunner -- and reveal a previously unknown feature of "feathered arms" in a birdlike dinosaur with the posture of a penguin.

Corwin Sullivan, an evolution expert raised in Ontario and B.C. and educated at the University of Toronto and University of Victoria, says the flurry of published studies is "mostly a coincidence of timing," but also reflects how China has emerged as the world's richest fossil hotbed, particularly when it comes to tracing links between dinosaurs and birds.

The amount of material that is coming out of this area is staggering and there is much more to come.

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Earliest North American Bird

PR Newswire is reporting on the discovery of the earliest fossilized bird in North America. The story notes:

The new shoreline-inhabiting species bridges a gap in time and space between older enantiornithine birds found in Europe and Asia, and younger species from North and South America. Scientists had suspected these kinds of birds should have been in North America at the time, but direct evidence of their presence had been lacking until now.

More pieces of the puzzle.

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More on the Microraptor Specimen

Reuters has a story on the discovery of the microraptor with four wings (see the post below this one):

"This finding suggests that birds are likely to be descended from a kind of small-sized four-winged dinosaur about 160 million years ago," Xu said.

"It is a link between more typical theropods (dinosaurs which moved around with two rear limbs) and birds. It lived around a time period ... that we expected for birds' ancestor."

In a statement, the researchers said: "Long feathers cover the arms and tail, but also the feet, suggesting that a four-winged stage may have existed in the transition to birds."

The transition from dinosaurs to birds is still poorly understood because of the lack of well-preserved fossils, and many scientists say bird-like dinosaurs appear too late in the fossil record to be the true ancestors of birds.

It seems to be clear that a whole series of theropods were moving in the direction of flight. Which one got there first is still not known. We likely do not have enough information of the collateral ancestry of birds.

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More Dinosaurs From China

Eric Adler of the Kansas City Star writes a story on the new "Chinasaurs" being unearthed in the Far East. As this stuff comes out of the ground, it gets harder and harder to ignore:

“Whether you are looking for marine reptiles or birds or dinosaurs, or whatever, China is developing so fast right now it is staggering.” said Philip Currie, professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Alberta and vice president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. “I’d say that right now it is number one in the world for most major fossil finds.” The first KU discovery, announced in December, looks at fossilized teeth of a nasty turkey-sized dinosaur to show that some meat-eating dinosaurs not only clawed or chomped their victims, but also oozed venom from glands in their mouths like cobras or Komodo dragons to poison their prey. Read more: Discoveries by KU paleontologists trumpet the age of the Chinasaurs - KansasCity.com

Here is the image from the story of a microraptor that has four wings and a dinosaur body.


About this animal, they write:

Paleontologists David Burnham and Larry Martin and animal flight expert David Alexander — all with KU — worked with Chinese scientists to create a model using bones cast from a 125-million-year-old, four-winged gliding dinosaur named microraptor to show that the pheasant-sized critter probably did not run on the ground, as many scientists contend.

The puzzle pieces keep being found. Read the whole thing.

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Fat Birds

It seems that the ancestors of emus and cassowaries became too heavy for flight quite a bit back. Discovery News reports:

The study used molecular dating of the mitochondrial DNA from the moa, which stood 2.5 meters (6.7 feet) tall and weighed up to 250 kilograms (551 pounds), and found its closest relative to be the tinamous -- a flighted bird the size of quail, found in South America.

Previously it was thought ratites all shared a common flightless ancestor about 80 million years ago and their worldwide dispersal occurred before the supercontinent of Gondwanaland broke up.

But Phillips says the problem with this theory was that much of the continental break-up occurred well before the proposed common ancestor.

Their study, which also included DNA sequencing of 22 bird species including flightless and flighted birds, shows ratites became flightless around 65 million years ago, he says.

This coincides with the extinction of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event.

Most of these had no natural predators or could run faster than the ones they did have until humans came on the scene.

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The Poisonous Bird

Out of China comes the discovery of a venomous raptor that may have been ancestral to modern birds. The story, in UPI notes:

The turkey-sized Sinornithosaurus thrived nearly 128 million years ago in northeastern China, Larry Martin, a university paleontologist, said this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This thing is a venomous bird for all intents and purposes," Martin said. "It was a real shock to us and we made a special trip to China to work on this."

Sinornithosaurus, closely related to the four-winged glider Microraptor, had depressions on the side of its face that housed poisonous glands to deliver venom through its teeth, university researcher David Burnham said.

While there are currently poisonous birds that have toxins in their skin and some on their feathers, there are no birds that deliver their attack with a neurotoxin like this, which is how modern snakes do it. Given that the earliest snakes appear in the fossil record around 130 gigayears ago, their common reptilian ancestry becomes more apparent and provides stronger support for the reclassification of birds as reptiles.

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Archaeopteryx Growth Trajectory: The Dinosaur to Bird Avalance of Evidence Continues

Archaeopteryx, it seems, matured more like a dinosaur than a bird, according to a new report from ScienceDaily. How do we know this , you ask?:

That's because new, microscopic images of the ancient cells and blood vessels inside the bones of the winged, feathered, claw-handed creature show unexpectedly slow growth and maturation that took years, similar to that found in dinosaurs, from which birds evolved. In contrast, living birds grow rapidly and mature in a matter of weeks.

Also groundbreaking is the finding that the rapid bone growth common to all living birds but surprisingly absent from the Archaeopteryx was not necessary for avian dinosaur flight.

This is not good news for those arguing that Archaeopteryx was a true bird (see the ICR article here and the AIG article here), not that that position was tenable to begin with. The other notable conclusion is this:

"From these findings, we see that the physiological and metabolic transition into true birds occurred millions of years after Archaeopteryx," he said. "But, perhaps equally important, we've shown that avians were able to fly even with dinosaur physiology."

The Avalanche continues.

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Tyrannosaurus Rex and Trichomonosis: The Dinosaur to Bird Avalanche of Evidence Continues

The Chicago Sun-Times has an article on what may have killed the famous Tyrannosaur named Sue, which currently resides in the Field Museum. According to the story, by David Newbart:

Theories abound on what led to the demise of the Field Museum’s most famous specimen: shortly after the Tyrannosaurus rex was found, some wondered if a series of holes in the back of her massive skull were bite marks suffered during a ferocious battle with another meat-eating dinosaur.

But researchers have honed in on a culprit far smaller: a throat infection caused by a single-celled organism.

Writing in Tuesday’s edition of the online journal of Public Library of Science One, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere theorize that the parasitic infection could have led to an autoimmune response that eventually could have led Sue to starve to death 67 million years ago.

Now the punch line: the infection shows evidence of being caused by the Trichomonosis bacteria which is found in only one other sub-class: birds. Given all of the other palaeontological evidence that the the theropod dinosaurs and Aves share a common ancestry, what are the odds they would share the same kind of infection by chance?

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Nut-Eating Dinosaur Found

According to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times by Maudlyne Ihejirika, a fossil dinosaur has been discovered that ate nuts. The story notes:

The discovery of the Psittacosaurus, announced last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was made in 2001, in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia.

But famed University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and two colleagues from the People's Republic of China who made the find, then spent years preparing and studying the specimen.

The finding is significant in that Psittacosaurus presents the first solid evidence of nut-eating in any dinosaur, according to Sereno. And Psittacosaurus, like other of his fossil findings in recent years, provides further evidence of the ancestry of dinosaurs to modern birds.

"The parallels in the skull to that in parrots, the descendants of dinosaurs most famous for their nut-cracking habits, is remarkable," said the internationally renowned Sereno, currently a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.

Another piece of the puzzle linking dinosaurs to birds and another nail in the coffin of those denying that there is such a link.