Page 215 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 213

dinosaurs have been found in China. Why should these fossils have not
emerged from anywhere else in the world—Feduccia draws attention to
this intriguing state of affairs:
One must explain also why all theropods and other dinosaurs discov-
ered in other deposits where integument is preserved exhibit no dino-
fuzz, but true reptilian skin, devoid of any featherlike material
(Feduccia 1999), and why typically Chinese dromaeosaurs preserving
dino-fuzz do not normally preserve feathers, when a hardened
rachis, if present, would be more easily preserved. 179
Feduccia states that some of these creatures portrayed as feathered
dinosaurs are simply extinct reptiles with dino-fuzz and that others are
genuine birds:
There are clearly two different taphonomic phenomena in the early
Cretaceous lacustrine deposits of the Yixian and Jiufotang formations
of China, one preserving dino-fuzz filaments, as in the first discovered,
so-called “feathered dinosaur” Sinosauropteryx (a compsognathid), and
one preserving actual avian feathers, as in the feathered dinosaurs that
were featured on the cover of Nature, but which turned out to be
secondarily flightless birds. 180
Peter Dodson, on the other hand, says, “I hasten to add that none of
the known small theropods, including Deinonychus, Dromaeosaurus,
Velociraptor, Unenlagia, nor Sinosauropteryx, Protarcheaeopteryx, nor
Caudipteryx is itself relevant to the origin of birds.” 181 He means that
these creatures cannot be the ancestors of birds because the earliest
known bird, Archaeopteryx, lived long before the Cretaceous Period.
In short, the fossils portrayed as feathered dinosaurs or dino-birds
either belong to certain flightless birds like today’s ostriches, or else to
reptiles possessed of a structure known as dino-fuzz which has nothing
to do with actual feathers. There exists not a single fossil that might
represent an intermediate form between birds and reptiles. Therefore,
the claim that fossils prove that birds descended from dinosaurs is
completely unrealistic.