Type of Submission

Poster

Keywords

Feathered dinosaurs, dinosaurs, creationism

Abstract

Young-earth creationists hold to separate creations of birds and land animals due to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:20-25, which describes their creations on different days. As such, they oppose the conventional model of theropod-to-bird evolution. For many years, there were few Mesozoic birds known, namely Hesperornis and Icthyornis. Specimens such as Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, seemed to strengthen the argument for the proposed transition. However, even after John Ostrom reinvigorated the idea of dinosaur-to-bird evolution in 1960 with the discovery of Deinonychus, evidence of this transition was still sparse. In the 1990’s, exquisitely-preserved dinosaur fossils began to pour out of Liaoning Province, China sporting feathers and several feather-like filaments. Typical creationist responses to feathered dinosaur fossils include 1) denying that they are real fossils, 2) assuming that “dino-fuzz” is something other than integument, or 3) arbitrarily calling some fossils birds and others dinosaurs. Some creationists believe that no feathered dinosaurs have been found, despite there being evidence of feathers in most families within Theropoda.

Campus Venue

Stevens Student Center

Location

Cedarville, OH

Start Date

4-12-2017 11:00 AM

End Date

4-12-2017 2:00 PM

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Download file contains only the abstract

Share

COinS
 
Apr 12th, 11:00 AM Apr 12th, 2:00 PM

Understanding Feathered Dinosaurs

Cedarville, OH

Young-earth creationists hold to separate creations of birds and land animals due to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:20-25, which describes their creations on different days. As such, they oppose the conventional model of theropod-to-bird evolution. For many years, there were few Mesozoic birds known, namely Hesperornis and Icthyornis. Specimens such as Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, seemed to strengthen the argument for the proposed transition. However, even after John Ostrom reinvigorated the idea of dinosaur-to-bird evolution in 1960 with the discovery of Deinonychus, evidence of this transition was still sparse. In the 1990’s, exquisitely-preserved dinosaur fossils began to pour out of Liaoning Province, China sporting feathers and several feather-like filaments. Typical creationist responses to feathered dinosaur fossils include 1) denying that they are real fossils, 2) assuming that “dino-fuzz” is something other than integument, or 3) arbitrarily calling some fossils birds and others dinosaurs. Some creationists believe that no feathered dinosaurs have been found, despite there being evidence of feathers in most families within Theropoda.

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.