By
Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.
First published in Refuting Evolution, Chapter 4
Birds are animals with unique features like feathers and special lungs, and most are well designed for flight. Evolutionists believe they evolved from reptiles, maybe even a type of dinosaur.
Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science even presents an alleged dinosaur-bird intermediate as evidence for evolution. This intermediate and other arguments for bird evolution are critically examined in this chapter. This chapter also provides detailed information on some of the unique features of birds.
Archaeopteryx
Teaching about Evolution has several imaginary ‘dialogues’ between teachers. In one of them (p.8), there is the following exchange:
Karen: A student in one of my classes at university told me that there are big gaps in the fossil record. Do you know anything about that?
Doug: Well, there's
Archaeopteryx. It's a fossil that has feathers like a bird but the skeleton of a small dinosaur. It's one of those missing links that's not missing any more.
On the same page, there is a picture of a fossil of
Archaeopteryx, stating:
A bird that lived 150 million years ago and had many reptilian characteristics, was discovered in 1861 and helped support the hypothesis of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species two years earlier.
However, Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist himself, disagrees with assertions like those of ‘Doug’:
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.1
Archaeopteryx had fully formed flying feathers (including asymmetric vanes and ventral, reinforcing furrows as in modern flying birds), the classical elliptical wings of modern woodland birds, and a large wishbone for attachment of muscles responsible for the downstroke of the wings.3 Its brain was essentially that of a flying bird, with a large cerebellum and visual cortex. The fact that it had teeth is irrelevant to its alleged transitional status—a number of extinct birds had teeth, while many reptiles do not. Furthermore, like other birds, both its maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw) moved. In most vertebrates, including reptiles, only the mandible moves.4