Real dinosaur feather photos, claims palaeontologist Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in a report to Nature Vol 416, p.36, 7 March 2002.
Norell and a team of Chinese colleagues describe a dromeosaur fossil collected in the Liaoning Province, China. The report includes two photos, one of which does show imprints of some fibres organised in a symmetrical feather-like pattern.
However, some scientists are not impressed. Storrs Olsen, Senior Zoologist at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution said he was “unable to discern from photographs any modern feathers or feathery structure.” Storrs Olsen is an ardent critic of the dinosaur-bird theory, and was one of the scientists who revealed that Archaeoraptor, a fossil claimed to be half bird/half dinosaur, was a fraud. “I’m not impressed” said Olsen “I would want to be very certain that the fossils had not been deliberately salted with feathers from another source.”
Larry Martin of the University of Kansas, described by New Scientist as “a long term sceptic of the notion that dinosaurs evolved into birds” commented that “researchers have been duped before by elaborate fakes such as Archaeoraptor and it is important that the fossil is a true dinosaur and not an elaborate fake”. (New Scientist 9 March, 2002, p.11)
Editorial Comment: It is interesting that this fossil did not receive the widespread publicity in the popular media that previous claims about “feathered dinosaurs” were given. Perhaps even true believers in dinosaur to bird evolution have learnt caution after the embarrassing Archaeoraptor affair. That specimen was displayed triumphantly by National Geographic magazine as a half-bird, half-dinosaur, and that’s what it was – half a bird fossil and half a dinosaur fossil, cleverly glued together. Further study of the specimen proved it to be made from “two, possibly five separate fossils”. (Nature Vol. 410, p.539, 29 March 2001)
Scientists who have studied the original “feathered dinosaur” Caudipteryx, now consider it to be a flightless bird just as Creation Research predicted when it was first announced in a blaze of publicity in 1998. (See Creation News, Vol 12. No. 3)
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