A response to an article by Science News August 7, 2004, page 86, "Bird Brain? Cranial scan of fossil hints at flight capability."
This article reviews an article in the August 5 Nature about giving the braincase of an Archaeopteryx fossil a CAT scan. Archaeopteryx is known as "the world’s oldest known bird," and the study revealed that "several features of the ancient feathered creatures brain and inner ear were highly developed and similar to those of modern birds."
The article closes by saying that "scientists can look at braincase structures and more-recent flightless feathered dinosaurs,... to see whether those creatures might be descendants of early birds." It seems to me, however, that there will always be the same problem: there’s no way to be sure that a fossil creature was going one way or the other, or perhaps was simply something similar but unrelated. The article notes that "Pterosaurs... had similar enhancements of the brain and inner ear," although obviously the only relationship is that both creatures could fly. When pressed, most evolutionary experts will admit that none of the famous birdlike dinosaurs could be ancestral to Archaeopteryx, and likewise it is generally considered that Archaeopteryx and other early birds in the pre-Tertiary strata do not appear to be ancestral to modern birds. Evolutionists and creationists alike would probably benefit by viewing Archaeopteryx as neither simply another bird nor a transitional form, but a separate kind of flying vertebrate.
Since I have that issue of Nature, and may as well point out that the review article about this study, "Inside the oldest bird brain" by Lawrence M. Witmer, does refer to Archaeopteryx as "the near-perfect transitional form" and "a compelling example in the case for evolution." It seems to me, however, that the key aspect of this transition is the development of flight, and such studies as this that show that Archaeopteryx was fully capable of flying, even though they are "the oldest undisputed avian fossils, and the most primitive" and also older than any other relevant fossil, starkly contradict the evolutionary fairytale that mutations could confer on a line of animals the ability to fly.
Witmer refers to the "heretical notion that some of the most bird-like Cretaceous theropods (such as Velociraptor) are actually the secondarily flightless descendants of early, Archaeopteryx-like birds," but it is only heretical because certain evolutionists are determined to cobble together a line of transitional forms in spite of a number of contradictory considerations. They ignore, in this case, their own sequence of dating, the fact that loss of a complex ability is far more likely than its development (even if developments of flight by mutation were possible), the incredible if not impossible changes that would have to occur in the lungs, etc.
Until Next Time,
David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.
http://home.att.net/~david.bump
