Page 240 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

Adherents of the dino-bird theory maintain that the small, carnivo-
rous theropods were the so-called ancestors of birds. They point to certain
fossil species discovered in the Liaoning region of China as an evolution-
ary ancestor, ignoring the fact that even before the theropod dinosaurs
had even appeared, there were already birds on Earth capable of regular
flight. Archaeopteryx, the oldest bird, lived 150 million years ago—tens of
millions of years older than theropod dinosaurs.
Alan Feduccia therefore says that in terms of evolution,
Archaeopteryx represents an insurmountable problem:

There are insurmountable problems with that theory. Beyond what we
have just reported, there is the time problem in that superficially
bird-like dinosaurs occurred some 25 million to 80 million years after
the earliest known bird, which is 150 million years old. 1
Asked during an interview why he does not believe that birds are
descended from dinosaurs, he replied:
First, the time line is all wrong. These alleged dinosaurian ancestors
of birds occur 25 million to 80 million years after Archaeopteryx . . .
Second. . . Evolving flight from the ground up is biophysically implau-
sible. Third, many of the features of birds and dinosaurs—the hands
and teeth, for example—don't match. The theropod dinosaur hand
consists of the thumb and the next two fingers. The bird hand is made
up of the middle three fingers. You can’t just flip a switch to go from
one type of hand to the other. Of course, it doesn’t matter what line of
evidence you come up with, you are automatically wrong if it is
anything contrary to the dinosaurian origins of birds. 2
Evolutionists resort to the cladistic technique in order to resolve this