Last year we covered research from Oregon State that revealed a key difference in dinosaur and bird anatomy that stymies claims that the former evolved into the latter. Now, research from the same department says not only that dinosaurs did not evolve into birds, but that some birds may have evolved into what are now considered dinosaurs. Those ideas go strongly against the current of most evolutionary research over the past decades.
Research from the same department says not only that dinosaurs did not evolve into birds, but that some birds may have evolved into what are now considered dinosaurs.
Oregon State zoologist John Ruben, who commented on the research in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said, “We’re finally breaking out of the conventional wisdom of the last 20 years, which insisted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that the debate is all over and done with. This issue isn’t resolved at all. There are just too many inconsistencies with the idea that birds had dinosaur ancestors, and this newest study adds to that.” Ruben also explained the alternative scenario Oregon State researchers are proposing: “Raptors look quite a bit like dinosaurs but they have much more in common with birds than they do with other theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus. We think the evidence is finally showing that these animals which are usually considered dinosaurs were actually descended from birds, not the other way around.” And in his published commentary, he noted, “Given the vagaries of the fossil record, current notions of near resolution of many of the most basic questions about long-extinct forms should probably be regarded with caution.”
The dinosaur-bird evolution debate is entwined with evolutionary disagreement over how flight developed: from ground-dwelling dinosaurs that (supposedly) ran to achieve flight, or from animals that glided from the treetops, like flying squirrels. According to Ruben, one recently examined fossil is not consistent with the ground-up version, suggesting that raptors were descendants of birds that lost their flight capabilities (rather than dinosaurs in the process of “learning to fly”).
From the Bible, we know that God created animals to reproduce “after their kind.” We also know, from observational science, that as kinds reproduce, they occasionally lose complex features—but never spontaneously gain them if they were not present in the creature’s original genome. A third fact we know is that understanding fossils requires a great deal of interpretive work—and those interpretations are quite subject to bias. Thus, without observing raptors and certain fossilized birds in real life, we can only conclude that they were members of original created kinds and that any flying capabilities in either group were the result of design, not accident. It is even possible that some so-called “feathered dinosaurs” (whether they genuinely had feathers or not; we’re not convinced) should be seen as distinct from other dinosaur kinds. For all their theories, evolutionists still cannot explain such crucial flight technology, such as how feathers could have evolved—from scales or anything else. Neither the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds nor the notion that birds evolved into dinosaurs can answer that question.
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