Page 93 - The Origin of Birds and Flight
P. 93
The enormous differences between bird feathers and
reptile scales—and the feather’s exceedingly com-
plex structure—utterly invalidate the claim that feath-
ers evolved from scales.
According to evolutionist claims, the fossil record
should contain a great number of intermediate sta-
ges between reptiles’ scales and birds’ feathers. In A fossil feather that dates back some
the fossil record, we do find reptile scales, bird feath- 100 to 110 million years to the Early
ers and skin and mammalian hairs. But no part-scale, Cretaceous, found in the Koonwarra
part-feather structures indicating any gradual transi- fossil beds in southern Australia, is
tion to bird feathers have ever been encountered in identical to the complex structures in
any fossil, much less in any living vertebrate. modern-day feathers.
Feathers are complex structures. Their abrupt appearance in the bird
fossil record has been difficult to explain, mainly because no interme-
diate structures are preserved in the related theropod taxa. 63
Some forty-five years ago, the evolutionist W. E. Swinton referred
to the lack of evidence in the chapter titled “The Origin of Birds” in his
book Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds:
The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction.
There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarka-
ble change from reptile to bird was achieved. 64
The situation remains exactly the same today. This is made clear by
the statement by an evolutionary biologist from Columbia University: “.
. . we lack completely fossils of all intermediate stages between reptilian
scales and the most primitive feather.” 65
The evolutionist paleontologist Barbara J. Stahl makes this confes-
sion:
