Page 551 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

UNTIL RECENTLY, THERE WERE STORIES

OF THE DINO-BIRD

ithin the last ten years, dinosaurs with avian feathers, or imaginary "dino-birds," have been
one of the Darwinist media's favorite pieces of propaganda. A series of headlines about dino-
W birds, reconstruction drawings, and persistent explanations from evolutionist "experts" per-
suaded many that half-bird, half-dinosaur creatures once existed.

The last, most exhaustive defense of this premise was undertaken by Richard O. Prum and Alan
Brush, both well-known ornithologists, in the March 2003 issue of Scientific American. In their article,
"The Feather or the Bird? Which Came First?", Prum and Brush were assertive, as if to finally put an end

to the on-going arguments as to the origin of birds. They claimed that their findings had led them to a
supposedly amazing conclusion: Feathers had evolved in dinosaurs, before birds came into existence.
Feathers, they proposed, had evolved not for the purpose of flying, but for insulation, impermeability to
water, to attract the opposite gender, camouflage, and defense. Only later were they used for flight.
However, this thesis in fact consisted of speculation devoid of any scientific evidence. The new the-

sis, developed by Prum and Brush and adopted by Scientific American, was nothing more than a new, but
hollow, version of the "birds are dinosaurs" theory, furiously defended with a blind fanaticism in recent
decades. In fact, like the other icons of evolution, this was also completely rotten.

One person whose views may be consulted on this matter is one of the recognized authorities in the
world on the origin of birds: Dr. Alan Feduccia of the Biology Department of the University of North
Carolina. He accepts the theory that birds came into existence through evolution, but he differs from
Prum and Brush and other proponents of the "dino-bird" in thinking that the theory of evolution is not
clear on this matter. He refuses to give any credence to the hype over the dino-bird, deliberately pre-

sented as a fact, without evidence.
He wrote an article in the October 2002 issue of The Auk, a periodical published by the American
Ornithologists' Union and which serves as a forum for highly technical discussions of ornithology. His

article, "Birds are Dinosaurs: Simple Answer to a Complex Problem," explains that the theory that birds

Adnan Oktar 549