Bird Fossils Weren’t Evolving

When you see a modern-looking bird as a fossil, how can you say it’s evolving?

Wondering about Wonderchicken

Oldest fossil of modern birds is a ‘turducken’ (Science Magazine). A bird found in Cretaceous strata in the Netherlands is being called the oldest modern bird. But it’s a bird, not something else. It’s a pretty advanced bird, too, like one you would find walking along the beach in the sand.

“This is an incredibly informative specimen,” says Amy Balanoff, a paleontologist at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who wasn’t involved in the work. Whereas the earliest birds, like the 150-million-yearold Archaeopteryx, look very different from today’s, the new fossil has clear characteristics of modern land and waterfowl, perhaps offering a glimpse of their common ancestor.

No ancestor was found. If this were really the first evolving modern bird, wouldn’t it look much simpler than today’s waterfowl? Instead, it has characteristics of ducks and turkeys. Another problem for evolution is that this bird’s descendants survived the supposed cataclysm that killed off all the dinosaurs. The find also argues against the assumption that modern birds first evolved in Antarctica.

‘Wonderchicken’ fossil from the age of dinosaurs reveals origin of modern birds (University of Cambridge). Other news sites emphasized evolution in their coverage, as if this bird skull came to life and told them how it evolved; “hopefully it ushers in a new era of fossil finds that help clarify how, when and where modern birds first evolved” even though admittedly “The origins of living bird diversity are shrouded in mystery,” the article says. Where’s the evolution?

The fact that Asteriornis was found in Europe is another thing which makes it so extraordinary. “The late Cretaceous fossil record of birds from Europe is extremely sparse,” said co-author Dr John Jagt from the Natuurhistorische Museum Maastricht in the Netherlands. “The discovery of Asteriornis provides some of the first evidence that Europe was a key area in the early evolutionary history of modern birds.”

It does no such thing. It’s a modern bird. It has no date on it. The “evolutionary history” of this bird exists only in the imaginations of the evolutionary paleontologists, who force-fit all data into the moyboy scheme on which Darwinism depends.

Fossil ‘wonderchicken’ could be earliest known fowl (BBC News). Reporter Helen Briggs quotes Darwin storyteller Daniel Field feeling giddy about this fossil skull:

“It’s the only nearly complete skull of a modern bird that we have, so far, from the age of dinosaurs and it’s able to tell us quite a lot about the early evolutionary history of birds” ….

“The wonderchicken is going to rank as a truly important fossil for helping clarify the factors that actually gave rise to modern birds.“

That phrase “gave rise to” is an evolutionary trick. It embeds their magical belief into the language. The only tool evolutionists have is chance, and chance does not “give rise to” anything. Stuff just happens. The fossils show the existence of “modern” birds (neornithines, “new birds”) and other extinct birds, such as the enantiornithines (“opposite birds”) which had teeth and bony tails and claws. The enantiornithines and some of the neornithines went extinct.

Instead of trying to draw mythical lines between the fossils, they should focus on more challenging questions, like how powered flight could have evolved (see film Flight: The Genius of Birds, where Paul Nelson quips, “If something works, it didn’t happen by chance”). The number of design specs necessary for powered flight outstrip any capabilities of the Stuff Happens Law. Powered flight (which also characterized pterosaurs and exists in insects and bats today) is the big question for Darwinists to explain.

Am Bird

Tiny birdlike dinosaur species identified from skull trapped in amber (New Scientist). Calling something a dinosaur doesn’t make it one. There are people who call each other dinosaurs. A partial bird skull was found in amber. Was it evolving?

This birdlike dinosaur was discovered in northern Myanmar and has been analysed by O’Connor and her colleagues. It is 99 million [Darwin] years old and the smallest dinosaur ever found from the Mesozoic era.

Amazingly, the paper in Nature about this fossil only uses the word “dinosaur” once, as a possibility: “The find appears to represent the smallest known dinosaur of the Mesozoic era,” it says. And it never mentions evolution except in the references.

Trapped in amber, this could be the smallest dinosaur ever found (Live Science). Tia Ghose uses the word “dinosaur” a whopping 36 times to describe this tiny bird in amber, but on what basis? Because it had “lizard-like eyes”? The thing is as small as a hummingbird. No dinosaur known was ever that small as an adult. Be prepared to be indoctrinated by the Authorities:

Luckily, other parts of the skull are more intact. Researchers marveled at its unique anatomy after using specialized scans to analyze the specimen. Rather than distinct sockets for its teeth, “the teeth are fused into the skull, which is highly unusual for a dinosaur, including birds,” O’Connor said. (A quick note: Birds evolved from dinosaurs, which explains why, in part, early birds had teeth.)

Whoa! Wait a minute. Before asserting that “Birds evolved from dinosaurs,” why did they lose teeth? That’s devolution, if anything. The assertion explains none of this. Ghose linked to another indoctrination piece on Live Science by Darwin priestess Mindy that merely says that some birds had teeth. No explanation. Mindy ad libs glibly about the “origin of flight” and “the evolution of flight” without explaining how mutations and selection could build hollow bones, the pulley muscle system, a completely new lung and dozens of other integrated systems that flight requires. Just believe.

Smallest ever dinosaur skull found in 3cm piece of amber  (The Conversation). Look at the artist’s conception of this bird and ask if any fair-minded observer, who didn’t already swallow the narrative that birds evolved from dinosaurs, would call this a dinosaur. It was flying, winged bird with teeth and perching feet, if this artwork is at all reliable. But David uses the word dinosaur 25 times, and bird just 10 times, sometimes “bird-dinosaur.” Do you get the feeling that this is an intentional manipulation of language to indoctrinate?

Discovery of smallest known mesozoic dinosaur reveals new species in bird evolution (Phys.org). Like the other articles, this one pumps the word dinosaur into the brain through repetition, leaving the brainwashed reader helpless against assimilation into the cult. But how did this “dinosaur” get so small? Like the other articles, this press release applies the Darwin Flubber to say that evolution pulled “miniaturization” out of its Stuff Happens toolkit.

The discovery represents a specimen previously missing from the fossil record and provides new implications for understanding the evolution of birds, demonstrating the extreme miniaturization of avian body sizes early in the evolutionary process.

But if this were a law of nature, everything would miniaturize with time. Whoever argues that obviously doesn’t understand evolutionary theory. To be indoctrinated into the cult, you must understand that evolution makes things smaller, except when it doesn’t (giraffes, blue whales, and giant redwoods). That’s why today we have ostriches and hummingbirds. Got it? Repeat after me: birds are dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs….

Soft Tissue and DNA in Frozen Lark

Frozen bird turns out to be 46 000-year-old horned lark (Stockholm University). Evolution sneaks into a story that has nothing to do with evolution as Darwin envisioned it: progress from bacteria to man. This is just a case of small-scale microevolution. And it happened not so many Darwin Years ago:

“Not only can we identify the bird as a horned lark. The genetic analysis also suggests that the bird belonged to a population that was a joint ancestor of two sub species of horned lark living today, one in Siberia, and one in the steppe in Mongolia. This helps us understand how the diversity of sub species evolves,” says Nicolas Dussex, researcher at the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University.

46,000-year-old bird, frozen in Siberian permafrost, looks like it ‘died a few days ago’ (Live Science). Like the frozen puppy found in permafrost last year (3 Dec 2019), this bird doesn’t look very old, either. It can’t be very old.

“[The bird] is in pristine condition,” Dalén told Live Science in an email. The find is extraordinary because “small animals like this would normally disintegrate very quickly after death, due to scavengers and microbial activity.”

They recovered mitochondrial DNA from this bird. Nothing about it looks tens of thousands of years old. Radiocarbon dates beyond human history become more unreliable. Creationists say that the atmosphere changed after the Flood, leading to unreliable dates before civilization became re-established.

Selection, the Modern Buzzword

Birds of a feather really do flock together (Phys.org). Briefly, this article is about tiny birds called “grey white-eyes” that live on Reunion Island. There are slight microevolutionary differences in feather shading and color distribution between five subspecies of these birds.

Dr. Bourgeois and colleagues sequenced the DNA of birds in each of the five color groups. They hoped to find if their regional differences were due to fitting better into their separate environments (natural selection), or because they preferred to mate with birds which looked the same as themselves (sexual selection).

The answer was both.

And so the narrative goes on. If it’s not natural selection, it’s sexual selection. Or vice versa. Or both. But who is the selector? The environment? No; environments are blind and don’t care. By the individuals of the species? No; they have no way of making their preferences change their genes. Selection is a synonym for Stuff Happens.

Selection is a personified word that conveys no information but has become a habitual catch-all pseudo-explanation term used by lazy scientists. Either way, Darwin’s famous word propagates by stasis. Maybe some day this vacuous word will go extinct.