Gigantoraptor

It was reported in the journal Nature a couple of days ago that Chinese scientists had uncovered the fossil of a giant birdlike dinosaur dating to the late Cretaceous. The article I read about this (by John Noble Wilford of the New York Times) was a veritable goldmine of apologetic material and unintended humor. I’ll probably interact with it in three or four posts during the coming weeks.

The scientists who made the discovery—in a classic use of understatement—admitted that it presented problems for the established evolutionary theory. Specifically, this find refutes “widely-held theories that carnivorous dinosaurs got smaller as they evolved more birdlike characteristics.” No kidding.

Were evolutionary science the objective endeavor that we are supposed to believe, scientists would be content to view this awesome new discovery simply as evidence for a greater diversity of dinosaurs than was previously known. But the majority of paleontologists are not even close to objective. Rather, they have a very specific bias—naturalism—and agenda—to discover fossils for which they can claim the label “transitional.” And there’s no more important gap to fill with “transitions” (in order to bolster evolutionary theory) than that between dinosaurs and birds. This bias and agenda continue to lead evolutionists to say and write some pretty silly things. For now, let me offer you just one example from this most recent article. According to Peter Dodson, paleontologist at the University of Pennsylvania (and a dinosaur authority)...

This [Gigantoraptor] was on the line leading toward birds, though not itself the closest relative to birds by any means.

An unbiased observer could point out a couple of pretty significant facts that would seem to undermine this conclusion. Gigantoraptor dates to 70 million years ago. Birds (the real thing, feathers and all) predated this large dinosaur by nearly 90 million years! So how could the dinosaur be “on the line leading to birds”? Moreover, as almost everyone (and certainly any dinosaur authority worth his salt) now acknowledges, it was shortly after this—at 65 million years ago—that all the dinosaurs (and other higher organisms of the time) were wiped out (by conditions resulting from the impact on the Yucatan Peninsula of a huge meteor). That being the case, just how did this dinosaur “line leading toward birds” manage to pass their genes across this formidable extinction event? Written wills? Sheer will power? Cryonics?

You see, for neo-Darwinian macroevolution to be true, dinosaurs must have evolved into birds. The only problem is that the dino-to-bird evolution theory faces problems at every turn, including from the fossil evidence. Perhaps this is in part why ornithologist Alan Feduccia predicts that the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs will prove to be “the greatest embarrassment of paleontology of the 20th century."