Re: Chinese feathered dinosaurs, where are the skeptics?

Logos cut and pasted without even bothering to format a bit:

Chinese feathered dinosaurs, where are the skeptics?

by Mark Robertson



13 July 2004



After hearing paleontologist Paul Willis debate Carl Wieland in August
2003,1 it was with great interest that I visited the travelling display of
dinosaur fossils from China. In the debate, we were told that Dr Willis had
said, 'God created Liaoning [the area of China, where the so-called
feathered dinosaur fossils were found] because He hated creationists.' Of
course such statements are meant to mock, because Paul Willis does not
believe God created anything. Yet, he was keen to tell the mainly Christian
audience that they could believe in God and in millions of years. We would
expect, however, that, as Australian Skeptic of the Year, belief in the God
of the Bible would receive the same amount of scorn in a different venue.

Figure 1. The colourful model of Caudipteryx zoui dwarfed by the tailbones
of its supposed ancestor Yangchuanosaurus huopingensis.

View more information and resources on Chinese Dinosaurs

This is supposed to be a link, but I find it to be excellent advice for
the person who wrote this. Ignorance can be repaired.

So finding out what Paul has put his faith in was a question in the back of
my mind as we entered the display at the Queensland Museum.

The exhibit

After being overwhelmed by the size of the large sauropod and theropod
dinosaurs, my attention was captured by the incredibly colourful models of
the 'feathered' dinosaurs. These were at the feet of their supposed
ancestor, a large theropod named Yangchuanosaurus huopingensis, said to be
160 Ma (million years) old.2

Minor correction: Yangchuanosaurus is an allosaurid, definitely not
ancestral to any of the feathered theropods. This is a problem the
author has with reading cladograms, as will become evident below.

The creativity of the models' sculptors was evident. The faces and colours
they produced showed a strong Chinese influence, similar to the stylized
dragons often seen in Chinese art. However, I was struck by the likeness of
several of the models to modern ground-dwelling birds, such as the
roadrunner and cassowary, though much more colourful (figure 1). Given the
authoritative presentation and visually understandable 'evidence', it was
clear that the exhibit would convince most people that dinosaurs evolved
into birds hundreds of millions of years ago.



The fossils

The real 'bones' of the exhibition, the fossils, were displayed opposite the
models. They were under further interpretative drawings presumably showing,
via a line of arrows, the lineage of evolution from dinosaurs to birds
(figures 2 and 3). Unfortunately not all the specimens were on display at
the Queensland Museum but one would expect that the fossils presented some
of the best examples of the available fossil data.





Figures 2 and 3. The interpretive sequence of drawings above the fossil
slabs. Note the line of arrows implying an evolutionary relationship.





The fossil slabs showed a progression:

Not really. Only in the writer's head.

Sinosauropteryx prima (date not given in the display but others have placed
it at 125 to 135 Ma),



Caudipteryx zoui (125 Ma),



Protarchaeopteryx robusta (125 Ma),



Velociraptor mongoliensus (80 Ma),



Sinornithosaurus milleni (125 Ma) and



Archaeopteryx lithographica (150 Ma).



The only bird in this sequence is Archaeopteryx from Germany, while the
'feathered' dinosaurs are all from China. Three smaller Chinese bird
fossils Sinornis santensis, Changchengornis hengdaoziensis and
Confuciusornis sanctus (all '125 Ma') were shown after Archaeopteryx, and
were described as 'lacking the long bony tail of their [supposed] ancestors'
and having 'larger keeled breastbones'.



The feathers?

The first obvious inconsistency came to mind while looking at the evidence
for feathers. Sinosauropterxy prima had what appears to be a dark fuzzy
outline surrounding the bones, apparently interpreted as the trace of
hair-like filaments. I must confess that it looked much like the shading
artists will often do around pencil drawings to emphasize the outline of an
important object. The guidebook describes these 'proto-feathers' as
feather-like structures.3 It explains that they appear as impressions in
the fine-grained matrix or as a halo of darker, fibrous-like areas, usually
at right angles to the bones, although not always contacting them.
Certainly this evidence is vague. Did some dinosaur have a furry coating,
or is this 'fuzz' just an artefact of the preservation or recovery process?

Yes, they did, and no, it isn't. If you try a microscope you will get a
better view. Weren't there any magnified photos of the proto-feathers?

Caudipteryx ('Caudi', as Dr Willis affectionately nicknamed it) showed some
long fibrous-looking traces in the area of the tail, similar to fossils of
thin reed-like plants. To claim that they are feathers is clearly a
statement of faith in a worldview, not a scientific observation.

Obviously he didn't get a very good look. Caudipteryx feathers have a
shaft, barbs, and barbules. They're excellent feathers.

The information displayed below Protarchaeopteryx robusta indicated that
detached feathers could be seen in the top left of the slab, but no matter
how closely I looked, I could see no markings in that area consistent with
the claim (compare figures 4 and 5).

I'm seeing a pattern here. The author's eyes aren't very good, so he
decides that all the scientists are wrong.

Figures 4 and 5. The fossil slab (right-click to enlarge) and interpretative
key (below) for Protarchaeopteryx robusta. Note indication for feathers in
top left of slab.





The only evidence presented for the 'feathered' dinosaur, Velociraptor
mongoliensus was a skull. The evolutionary just-so story beneath was
amazing. 'Velociraptor has not yet been found in the Liaoning deposits and
its feathers are not preserved in the Mongolian and Chinese deposits where
it occurs. However, because all its close relatives had feathers, it is
most likely that Velociraptor did too.'

This is not a just-so story. It's inference from phylogeny. And in fact
there are feathers on many other Chinese dromaeosaurs, some of them very
close to Velociraptor.

Finally, the reproduction of Sinornithosaurus milleni again left me
wondering how anyone could conclude that the linear scratched traces
surrounding the bones were feathers.

This should help: Xu, X., Zhou, Z. and Prum, R. O. 2001. Branched
integumental structures in Sinornithosaurus and the origin of feathers.
Nature 410:200-204.

Family trees

The exhibition displayed a family tree alongside each of the models and
alongside the larger dinosaur fossils. These trees showed that the closest
relative to the supposed ancestor of both birds and theropods was the
5-metre-tall Yangchuanosaurus huopingensis.

Dumb way to put it. The trees showed that Yangchuanosaurus was the
sister group of all the other theropods shown, given the taxon sample
they happened to use. All the theropods were equally closely related to
their common ancestor.

All the so-called feathered
dinosaurs were further along the same branch of the tree (later) away from
this supposed family split. So, in this scenario, feathers must evolve
twice, once for the birds and once for the feathered dinosaurs, not once as
implied by the sequence from Sinosauropterxy to Archaeopteryx.

I have no idea how he could have gotten that idea from the tree. It
showed feathers evolving once, in the common ancestor of Sinosauropteryx
and the other feathered theropods. It constantly amazes me how difficult
it is for people to read evolutionary trees. It's not just creationists
who have this problem, either.

This
sequence also completely ignores the dating of the fossils. Not only is
Archaeopteryx 25 million years older than the oldest of its supposed
ancestors, but evidence for birds from footprints dates back to 225 Ma,
according to their own evolutionary dating.

The fallacy density in this paragraph sets a new record.
1. None of these is claimed to be ancestral to any other. Cladograms
just don't contain such information. All the tree shows is recency of
common ancestry. There is no time paradox. Dating is irrelevant. This is
like asking "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" (Or,
more precisely, "If Homo habilis came from monkeys, why are there still
monkeys?") In other words, it's a version of one of the claims even AiG
says you shouldn't use.

2. There are no bird footprints dating back to 225 Ma.

3. Dating is not evolutionary. It's just dating. Nuclear decay has
nothing to do with evolution.

In the debate,1 Dr Willis quickly passed off the obvious discrepancy of
dating as an issue of relation, but not direct lineage. Dr Willis argued
that man and modern apes both evolved from ape-like creatures, and there are
still apes today. However, there are no living examples of these supposed
ape-like ancestors, and evolutionists can't decide if it looked more like an
orangutan or a chimpanzee. But even further, the explanation of relation
and lack of fossils does not wash with all evolutionists:

That's the sound of a point whizzing past the writer.

'Cladograms which depict birds diverging from theropod stock just in the
nick of time to show Archaeopteryx on a separate lineage (I am thinking of a
recent Scientific American article) are mischevious [sic]. Archaeopteryx is
a highly specialised, and therefore highly derived, creature possessing,
apparently, a fully developed flight plumage. Any explicit or implied
suggestion that it arose overnight is simply ridiculous. Archaeopteryx had
avian history and I, for one, cannot imagine it being any shorter than 20
million years or more. . the real problem here is not that dromaeosaurid
fossils appear so late; it is the temporal coincidence of a stem group
[bottom of the family tree] organism, Compsognathus, [found in the same
geological formation as Archaeopteryx and very similar to Sinosauropterxy
prima] with a highly derived crown member [top of the family tree] of the
same lineage, Archaeopteryx. This problem requires more than a glib appeal
to sampling inadequacies.'4

Was that Alan Feduccia? No, it appears to be some New Zealand web site
containing the musings of a fellow named Chris Clowes. He should have
read this: Brochu, C. A. and Norell, M. A. 2000. Temporal congruence and
the origin of birds. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 20:197-200.

It also appears to have been written before the discovery of Microraptor
gui.

Regarding the claims of birds evolving from dinosaurs, this anti-creationist
goes on to say:

'Presumably this kind of over-zealous interpretation is being advanced by
lay people [it's not lay people, but professional palaeontologists]; one
sincerely hopes that the professional researchers graduating from our
universities today would not make such elementary errors of logic. . the
evidence is complex and appears, in light of the present state of our
knowledge, contradictory. The point to draw is not that the "popular"
hypothesis is wrong, but that the jury is still out. Claims that birds
arose from the Maniraptora [dinosaur classification including theropods,
defined by the closeness of the fossil to modern birds5] are just Bad
Science: we simply do not know.'4

Sadly, he doesn't present any evidence or argument for his contention.
In fact that's the entirety of the discussion.

So who are the real skeptics? Obviously not the Australian Skeptics who
sponsored the guidebook published by the Australian Museum.3 One suspects
that their anti-creationist agenda is clouding their objectivity.

Yes, it's obvious that they're wrong. The evidence: something some guy
wrote on the web. It's on the web, it must be true, and outweighs all
the dozens of scientific papers written on the subject.

What's next

The guidebook for the exhibition mentions the exposed fraud, 'Archaeoraptor,
which so badly fooled National Geographic in 1999'.3 A review of the
literature for the recent discovery of a supposed four-winged dinosaur,
Microraptor,6 reveals that all the fossils of Microraptor showing feathers
were purchased, as was Archaeoraptor, rather than being found in-situ by
paleontologists.

This is not true. The first specimen of Microraptor was a part of
Archaeraptor. The other specimens were indeed found in situ.

I can't help wondering how valid Microraptor is and whose
face may end up with egg on it this time. Certainly it is not the kind of
evidence I would want to stake my faith on.

I'm betting that evidence is not particularly relevant to his faith.

[snip]

Microraptor was announced in January 2003 after the travelling Chinese
exhibit was put together. No fossil evidence was available to view, but is
discussed in the guidebook.

See: Xu, X., Zhou, Z., Wang, X., Kuang, X., Zhang, F. and Du, X. 2003.
Four-winged dinosaurs from China. Nature 421:335-340.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Available online at:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/chinesedinosaurs/featheredDinos.asp

COPYRIGHT © 2006 Answers in Genesis



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