Here is an article that appeared in this morning's (19 October 1996)
newspaper, that claims a dinosaur has been found with feathers.
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Downy fossil boosts bird-dinosaur theory
NEW YORK
---CHINESE palaeontologists claim to have found the fossil of a feathered dinosaur that lived 121 million years ago providing evidence that birds are descended from the prehistoric titans.
Photographs of the fossilised creature show an unmistakable downy stripe down its back.
Palaeontologists who have seen the fossil say that its confirmation as a feathered dinosaur would provide almost irrefutable evidence that today's birds evolved from dinosaurs.
"As soon as they showed me the specimen, it just blew me away," said Phil Currie. "You can't come to any conclusion other than that they're feathers."
Feathers have not been found on anything other than a bird.
The theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds is based mainly on the similarity in the shape of bird hip bones to those of one dinosaur group.
"This is not a bird, but it does have feathers," said Luis Chiappe, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "So the people who resist the dinosaur origin of birds will have a hard time explaining this."
On Thursday, Chen Peiji, of the Nanjing Palaeontology Institute, showed photographs of the fossil at the American Museum of Natural History, where the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology is holding its annual meeting.
A fossil collector found the specimen near Yianxin in Liaoning province.
The photographs show the flattened fossil of a bird-like beast splayed on a slab of rock, its neck twisted back.
Down its back, from the nape of its neck to the tip of its tail, is what appears to be a row of feathers that have left their impression in the rock.
"It's fantastic," Dr Currie, a palaeontologist at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Canada, said. "It's almost mane-like at the back of the head."
Dr Currie said that in life, the feathered dinosaur was about a metre long. It ran on its hind legs, holding its front limbs in front of it.
Its appearance suggested the feathered dinosaur was closely related to compsognathus, a relatively small dinosaur that ate insects and other small animals.
("Downy fossil boosts bird-dinosaur theory", The West Australian, Saturday October 19, 1996, p15) =======================================================
As a Progressive Creationist, I personally would have no problem with birds having been made from a small dinosaur common ancestor, although no doubt this would be a problem for YECs.
However, the time-frame here might be a problem. According to the artiocle, this fossil is dated "121 million years ago" which places it in the Lower Cretaceous (136 - 100 mya), which is well after Archaeopteryx in the Upper Jurassic (176 - 144 mya). Indeed, fossils of modern-looking birds have been found 14 million years earlier in the Late Jurassic:
"Another piece [of the jigsaw puzzle of how birds evolved] has come from the discovery of a fossil bird in China, the size of a sparrow. The bird, which is only slightly younger than Archaeopteryx, lived in trees and was capable of true flight....Now, with the discovery of a fossil bird in northeastern China, palaeontologists have a further piece that may enable them to complete the puzzle of avian evolution. The bird, found by a 10- year-old boy and as yet without a name, is the first evidence that fairly modern tree-perching birds had evolved by 135 million years ago, 15 million years after Archaeopteryx." (Hecht J., "Fossil birds an evolutionary re-think", New Scientist, 3 November 1990, p14)
To be a candidate ancestor of birds (and not just a surviving remnant from the ancestral stock), a true bird common ancestor would have to predate these Jurassic birds.
Of course, it may turn out that this "dinosaur" is really an Archaeopteryx-type bird, with not all of its feathers preserved. Indeed, it may even be a "devolved" Archaeopteryx.
But if the true reptilian ancestor of birds is eventually found, it would not necessarily be evidence for Neo-Darwinian "blind watchmaker" evolution. This is because evolution is supposed to be a blind, undirected, natural process. Yet what we would have is evidence of Intelligent Design, and Progressive Creation. That is, we have a process where a small, light-boned dinosaur "evolves" and when the right time had come (namely when winged insects and seeds had appeared), the only animal that could benefit from feathers, grew them!
As I wrote to the Reflector on 12 Jul 96:
------------------------------------------------------ "...they would have to be reptiles who would benefit from feathers (eg. a small, light-boned dinosaur like Compsognathus) - it would not be much use for a Brontosaurus to develop feathers! :-) Then further genetic miracles (eg. an avaian lung, an avian heart, an avian circulatory system) would have to happen *to their descendants*, *in the right order*. An Intelligent Designer could arrange all this, but not a Blind (ie. unsconscious) Watchmaker." ------------------------------------------------------
and again on 28 Aug 96:
------------------------------------------------------ "Indeed, Archaeopteryx is a huge problem to Neo-Darwinian blind watchmaker evolution. Here we have a reptilian form acquiring characteristics over millions of years in a supposedly blind and undirected way (eg. light hollow bones, air-sacs, avian lung, warm bloodedness, etc) and then the only animal that could use feathers, actually grew them when it was ready to use them! This is actually one of the best evidences for Intelligent Design and a biotic message to those who have eyes to read it." ------------------------------------------------------
God bless.
Steve
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