DID THE DINOSAURS EVOLVE INTO BIRDS?The "feathered dinosaurs" have again been making science headlines. While there is nothing in the creation model that would prevent some dinosaurs from having feathers, the hype that has been generated around this leaves even some evolutionists like Storrs L. Olson, Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian Institution disgusted by the unwarranted speculation. Recently National Geographic was forced to admit that their much-touted Archaeoraptor fossil was a fraud. Independent studies by embryonic researchers and respiratory experts reported in the journal Science that dinosaurs evolving to birds is just not a reasonable scenario. (Creation Ex Nihilo 20:41, 1998) Archaeopteryx is considered by many evolutionists to be an ancestral form linking reptiles and birds. While Archy certainly is a unique creature, its fully-formed feathers, wish bone, and perching feet clearly establish that it was a bird. Evolutionists point to it having a tail and claws on its wing. But some birds that are alive today exhibit these features. It is best described as a mosaic creature (like a platypus) that has some special features, like teeth. Some Darwinists have even suggested that the small carnivorous dinosaur Compsognathus could be the transitional dinosaur between Archy and the reptiles. Although the Compy appeared to have hollow bones, it makes a poor specimen for the evolutionists speculation because it co-existed with Archaeopteryx. Moreover, dinosaurs are divided into two formal groups: lizard-hips and bird-hips. Modern evolutionists have altered the story and now claim that it is these lizard hipped dinosaurs that evolved into birds, which appears to be rather contradictory. And since Compy is a saurischian, he becomes an even less plausible ancestor! Most problematic of all for the dinosaur-to-bird story are the birds that have been found in the fossil record contemporaneously and even before most dinosaurs. "Fossil remains claimed to be of two crow-sized birds 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx have been found....a paleontologist at Texas Tech University, who found the fossils, says they have advanced avian features. ...tends to confirm what many paleontologists have long suspected, that Archaeopteryx is not on the direct line to modern birds." (Nature, vol.322, 1986, p.677) More recently, Dr. Alan Feduccia of the U. N.C. and the author of the encyclopedic The Origin and Evolution of Birds (1999) studied ostrich embryos and concluded: "Whatever the ancestor of birds was, it must have had five fingers, not the three-fingered hand of theropod dinosaurs." (Naturwissenschaften 89:391-393, 2002) Lastly, well-preserved bird-like fossil footprints appear in clearly established Late Triassic sediments of northwestern Argentina. This discovery is said to be 55 million years earlier than Archaeopteryx, a time when (according to the evolutionary paradigm) there were not even many dinosaurs around yet! (Melchor, R.N., de Valais, S. and Genise, J.F., "Bird-like Fossil Footprints from the Late Triassic," Nature, 2002, vol. 417, pp. 936-938.)