Page 155 - The Transitional Form Dilemma

HARUN YAHYA

lutionist thesis that Archaeopteryx is the primitive ancestor of all birds.
Another fossil, found in China in November 1996, confused mat-
ters even more. The existence of this 130 million-year-old bird, known
as Liaoningornis, was announced by L. Hou, L. D. Martin and Alan
Feduccia in a paper in Science magazine.
Liaoningornis possessed a breastbone to which the flight muscles
cling in modern birds. It was also identical to them in almost all other
respects. The only difference was that it had teeth in its mouth. This
demonstrated that toothed birds did not possess the primitive structure
claimed by evolutionists. 130
Another fossil which tore down evolutionists’ claims concerning
Archaeopteryx was Eoalulavis. Some 25 to 30 million years younger
than Archaeopteryx, at 120 million years of age, Eoalulavis had
the same wing structure as some flying birds today. This
proved that creatures identical in many respects to
modern birds were flying in the skies 120 million
years ago. 131
In 2002, Ricardo N. Melchor, Silvina de
Valais and Jorge F. Genise announced in
Nature magazine that they had found foot-
prints belonging to birds which had lived
55 million years before Archaeopteryx:
The known history of birds starts in the Late
Jurassic epoch (around 150 Myr ago) with the
record of Archaeopteryx. . . . ... Here we describe
well-preserved and abundant footprints with
clearly avian characters from a Late Triassic Liaoningornis
redbed sequence of Argentina at least 55 Myr before the first known skeletal
record of birds. 132
It was thus definitively demonstrated that Archaeopteryx and other
archaic birds did not constitute transitional forms. The fossils did not in-
dicate that different bird species had evolved from one another. On the