Maybe Birds Aren’t Dinos After All!

This is big. I mean, this is huge! As far as I’m concerned this is the story of the year – maybe even of the decade. Physorg.com reports, “Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird links.” From the article: “Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight - and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.”

The transition of dino-to-bird has been a basic tenet of evolutionary dogma for decades. As an example of an evolutionary series, I’d say the dino-to-bird series is way ahead of the horse or whale series and is second only to ape-to-man evolution. In most evolutionists’ minds, bird from dinosaur evolution is settled. National Geographic once reported that we can say that birds are dinosaurs with as much confidence as we say humans are mammals. Of course, they later had to retract that statement with much red-facedness but we won’t go there now.

The confidence of evolutionists in the dino-to-bird theory can be seen in the way they present their theories to the public. Does anyone remember the velociraptors from the movie, Jurassic Park? In that movie, velociraptors were very dino-like. Lately, however, artistic renderings of velociraptors make them appear much more bird-like. It seems like dino-to-bird evolution truly has occurred in the minds of artists. This is what they believe and they’ve been selling it to the public as a done deal.

This new research could change all that. Again from the article, “The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say.”

What insightful new facts did the OSU researchers uncover that led them to this about face? Here’s a quote from the article:

"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

Duh!! You think? I’m not a scientist or anything but even I could have told that you can’t have descendants older than their ancestors. And evolutionists are just now figuring it out? That should have been their first clue! But as they say, “love is blind” and if you have a theory you love, you can’t let facts get in the way!

Even though the reverse daughter/parent relationship should have sunk the whole dino-to-bird idea, what really did it for the OSU researchers involved the avian respiratory system and the characteristics of the femur (thigh) bone. According to the article, warm-blooded birds use about 20 times more oxygen than cold-blooded reptiles (I guess they’re assuming dinos are cold-blooded reptiles). By the way, this has been brought up many times before by creationists: how likely it is that animals having perhaps the lowest metabolic rate (reptiles) would directly evolve into animals having perhaps the highest metabolic rate (birds)? Because of their complex respiratory system, birds have a fixed femur that keeps their air-sac lung from collapsing as it breathes. Dinosaurs, as well as every other walking land animal, lack this critical feature and, instead, have a moving femur. A moving femur in dinos means they could not have had a respiratory system like birds.

What really made me laugh as I read the article are these two candid quotes:

"It's really kind of amazing that after centuries of studying birds and flight we still didn't understand a basic aspect of bird biology," said John Ruben, an OSU professor of zoology….

"This is fundamental to bird physiology," said Devon Quick, an OSU instructor of zoology who completed this work as part of her doctoral studies. "It's really strange that no one realized this before.

No, it’s not really strange or amazing. When you’re committed to a theory, you project your theory onto the evidence. The theory becomes a paradigm through which all new data is viewed. If you go looking for evolution, you will see evolution where there is none. It’s like the saying, “when you’re a hammer, everything else looks like a nail.”

Now don’t get me wrong. The scientists at OSU aren’t becoming creationists. They’re not rejecting evolution over this flap – not even close. I’m sure they’re still 100% committed to evolution. I consider this to be another example of the Constanza Tactic which I’ve blogged about in the past. Evolutionists will push some highly touted evidence as “proof” of their theory, they will convince the public evolution is true, later they will quietly discard the evidence when they discover they were all wrong about it, and the public will continue believing in evolution.

Sometimes I wonder how many sub theories of evolution must be proven wrong before people begin to suspect the overall theory might not be true. Indeed, it doesn’t matter at all to many people that their “cherished theories” were wrong because they just come up with a new theory to explain the new evidence. If the new theory is later shown to be wrong as well, then it will be on to the next theory. But THE theory - the theory of evolution - can never be wrong.