One of the most recent of dinosaur discoveries ever made is the discovery of a basal dromaeosaurid named Mahakala (named in honor of a Tibetan protector god), a dinosaur that lived 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period in what is now Mongolia. How does creationists deal with this other than denial? The answer is in this article from CMI where in the article entitled Plucking the Dinobird where Creationist Shaun Doyle (who has no experience at all in dinosaurology) tries to foolishly debunk the factual notion of dinosaurs having feathers by just telling the reader to deny everything evolutionists tell about Mahakala.
After a brief introduction, in the segment entitled [sic] Feathered Fossil Folly, Doyle claims,
"The first thing that needs to be stated before anything else is that no feathers were found with this fossil. This of course doesn't stop them postulating that they had them and rendering them as such because they require Mahakala to have them for dino-to-bird evolution to even get off the ground."
This is not what scientists are learning about through the study of Mahakala. In fact what scientists are learning from this has to do with their maintaining of small size before they are able to get off the ground. More on this in a bit. The claim about evolutionists postulating about Mahakala having feathered is very similar to creationists postulating about dinosaurs and man co-existing despite finding no evidence of this because this is the only way they can fit them into their young earth dogma.
"This is the same problem that researchers ran into with Gigantoraptor. They assume it was feathered, then claim it as evidence that dinosaurs were feathered, without providing any independent evidence! This doesn't mean it didn't have feathers, it simply means they currently have no fossil evidence to show that it did."
In reality, unlike creationists who has not a single independent evidence of their own for their dino-human coexistence, scientists have plenty of evidence for such a notion of dinosaurs having feathers. The reason why they didn't find feathers on both dinosaurs is because all the feathers have rotted away. Feathers don't fossilize and the feathered markings found on the feathered dinosaur fossils are all imprints left behind after the actual feathers rot away.
Next, Doyle claims that the placing of Mahakala poses great problems for evolutionists concerning morphological and chronological sequences and adds,
"Mahakala is claimed to be a basal dromaeosaur largely because of its small size,…
Wrong! The real reason has to do with its connection with Troodontids and Dromaeosaurids. Not because of its small size.
"…but this requires evolutionists to postulate 60 million years of [sic] "evolutionary stasis" (itself a contradiction in terms).
How is it a contradiction in terms, Doyle or is that you way of making as if evolutionists are making everything up the same way you creationists make up "Bible scenarios" that don't exist? Evolution does not require change, so any question or statement on the basis of stasis is moot. Likewise, rapid diversification of only one linage of related organisms is perfectly normal.
"However, other 'relatives' of Mahakala diversified to a far greater extent at a much earlier period. They seek to justify this by claiming that small theropods like Mahakala are more unlikely to be preserved than their larger 'relatives'."
Then small dinosaur fossils including Mahakala and Confucisornis would have never been discovered if that was the case. It's obvious Doyle made the statement up because he couldn't stomach the fact that Mahakala is a sub-adult basal dromaeosaur that changed the way scientist thought about the origin of flight. It was thought that dinosaurs become real small once they are able to master the art of flying, but that was before scientists found out from studying the fossil that small size was commonly sighted among early species within the two dinosaurian lineages most closely related to birds and was well evolved before the ability to fly. Furthermore, the dinosaurs within each lineage did not get uniformly smaller as time went on; in fact, in some major lineages dinosaurs' size increased by about four factors. In other words, while Mahakala maintains its small size, other dinosaurs like Utahraptor, Velociraptor, Achillobator, and Deinonychus got real big over time.
In the next section entitled Archaeopteryx strikes again, Doyle feebly tries to use Archaeopteryx to debunk the concept of bird ancestry,
"Archaeopteryx, dated to around 150 million years, and a recognizable bird, should squash claims these supposed 'feathered dinosaurs' mean anything for bird evolution. This is no different for Mahakala, since it is about 70 million years younger than Archaeopteryx according to the [sic] evolutionary dating scheme."
It should in their eyes, but it won't.
"However, evolutionary critics of dino-bird orthodoxy have pointed out the inconsistency here. That is, the older fossils (Archaeopteryx) bear more morphological similarities to today's birds than their supposed dinosaurian ancestors."
It doesn't. Archaeopteryx is not a bird, but an Avialan dinosaur, feathered dinosaurs that's part of a lineage separate from Paravians (close to the ancestors of birds) which Mahakala is a part of.
"Personally, I continue to find it problematic that the most birdlike maniraptoran theropods are found 25 to 75 million years after the origin of birds". Ghost lineages are frankly a contrived solution, a deus ex machina required by the cladistic method. Of course, it is admitted that late Cretaceous maniraptorans are not the actual ancestors of birds, only 'sister taxa'. Are we being asked to believe that a group of highly derived, rapidly evolving maniraptorans in the Jurassic gave rise to birds, as manifested by Archaeopteryx, and then this highly progressive lineage then went into a state of evolutionary stasis and persisted unchanged in essential characters for millions of years? Or are actual ancestors far more basal in morphology and harder to classify? If the latter, then why insist that the problem is now solved?"
That's a quote taken out of context and twisted to make the reader falsely think that there's no such thing as feathered dinosaurs never mind all the factual evidence for the exact opposite. Creationists, like Doyle used this out-of-context quote frequently to counter dino-bird transitional fossils to try to claim that heavily relying on "ghost lineages" (lineages that don't exist in the fossil record, but the presence of which is inferred from related organisms separated by vast stretches of time) or anything else is absurdly waste of time, never mind the many discoveries of appropriate intermediate fossils that debunks the creationists' false notion of transitional fossils being just like "created kinds" — non-existent.
Then Doyle lies again, stating that evolutionists would also try to shuffle Archaeopteryx off to the sidelines of bird evolution by citing Archaeopteryx's difference from modern birds such as the presence of teeth. Looks like this is the only thing Doyle mentions about Archaeopteryx while being blatantly ignorant of the other characteristics that appear more of theropod dinosaur than a bird, never willing to know about Archaeopteryx's theropod characteristics including its beakless jaw, saurischian hip, tiny hallux, and the fact that some of the specimens were for a long time mistaken as different species of Compsognathus before their faint feathered impressions became noticed.
He then states,
"Not only that, there is no guarantee that modern bird morphological diversity represents the original condition between different bird kinds, which may have been wider since some are likely to have gone extinct post-Flood."
The sky would definitely be incredibly over-crowded if what creationists claim to be the case with birds and pterosaurs bumping into each other point blank and falling down to earth, killing themselves in the process.
"Therefore, from a biblical point of view there is no need to bow to evolutionary limits on significant bird morphology."
Rather, from a real point of view there is no need to bow to creation unlimited imagination of "bird kinds" because such created bird kinds don't exist. Otherwise we would have seen remains of cloned versions of Archaeopteryx and other extinct birds lying alongside humans in the fossil record, but none are found. The rest of the article falsely and stupidly claims that Archaeopteryx is a [sic] "fully formed chimera" that poses a problem for evolutionists who have to "deal with a recognizable bird (with feathers and powered flight to boot) that (by their reckoning) is 70 million years older than this latest find." Never mind the 2 dinosaurs being a separate genera each, one an Archaeopterygidae closely related to Compsognathus, the other a basal dromaeosaurid closely related to Velociraptor.
In the last part of the article entitled Tempest in a teacup, Doyle claims,
"The more fossils that get unearthed, the more complicated the evolutionary [sic] storytelling gets to fit all the data in. Mahakala adds to the confusion. However, 'feathered dinos' and other such fossils that are regularly paraded in the media reinforce the myth that evolution is a fact. They are unusual and capture people's imaginations, and because they're always presented in an evolutionary framework, people assume there is no plausible explanation for these creatures based on the Bible."
Scientists are trying to learn how Mahakala is related to other dinosaurs (including birds) based on credible evidence. There's no myth or storytelling to it. The ones doing all the storytelling and parading lies to enforce religious dogma are the creationists themselves. Like the alleged evolutionists, creationists only rely on made up stories and ignorance they paraded to the world to reinforce everything they accuse evolutionists of. Every accusation creationists made to evolutionists translates to, "I'm a judgmental hypocrite who does the same thing myself." And this judgmental hypocrite at the conclusion of the article tries to misrepresent some evolutionists who claims that the feathered so-called dinosaurs nothing more than "flightless birds" in which in Doyle's eyes it means, "..they would be extinct birds instead of dinosaurs from a biblical view." Try creationist view.The Bible is entirely neutral when it comes to the existence of feathered dinosaurs. The Bible was written and compiled way long before anyone is ever aware that there were once such animals living on this earth long before the Dawn of Man. This is something creationists made up as an attempt to deny the truth that debunks their misrepresentations about feathered dinosaurs being just "flightless birds" or "fully formed chimeras." Furthermore, just saying that Mahakala had no feathers doesn't make it a scaly dinosaur. Despite what he claims in the conclusion of his article, Doyle blatantly ignores the fact that the reason the dinosaur seems to have no feathers is because the feathers have rotted away just like the other soft parts that once covered the dinosaur.
As mentioned before, feathers don't fossilize and the feathered markings found on many dinosaur fossils are all imprints left behind after the actual feathers rot away. Such fossils with feathered imprints on them is kind of rare. It seems creationists would like to think in order for a fossil to truly be a feathered dinosaur, one must find a fossil of a dinosaur that's really covered in feathers which is just what we found and unearthed from the fossil record over the past 10 years. But every time creationists find out about the discovery, they'll just brush it off saying that they're just "flightless birds" or "fully formed chimeras" while ignoring the dinosaur characteristics found in the fossils, including in some cases beakless jaws, bony tails, saurischian hips, and dinosaurian arms and hands. More and more than ever, scientists are making one credible discovery after another of fossilized remains of dinosaurs with feather imprints on them that's definitely changing the way people think of what dinosaurs were like forever. Denying their existence just won't make the fossils disappear into thin air ever.
References:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5843/1378
http://www.physorg.com/news108307836.html
New Mini Dinosaur Explains How Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs
Mahakala entry from dinodata.org
