Creationism in Crisis - How Dinosaurs Evolved Feathers

Latest News and Views from University College Cork

Psittacorus (reconstruction)

Artwork by Walter Myers

This paper is enough to send a dedicated creationist disinformation specialist into intellectual summersaults. On the one hand, they hate the fact that dinosaurs lived so long ago and are evidence of life on earth tens and hundreds of millions of years ago, so they bend over backwards to prove they were around just a few thousand years ago, and then, horror of horrors, along come some clever scientists and show evidence that some dinosaurs even evolved into birds!

And now, courtesy of Palaeontologists at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland , we have evidence of the transition from scales to feathers in pre-avian dinosaurs.


But it gets even worse! Creationists frauds have ben claiming for several years now that 'fossilised' soft dinosaur tissues prove they were just a few thousand years old because, despite the perfectly rational explanation of how 'soft' tissues can be preserved for many millions of years in the right circumstances, like the presence of iron, the evidence of this transition from scales to feathers would found in fossilised soft tissue!

So, a creationist disinformation specialist must now argue that fossilised dinosaur soft tissues don't exist, and when they do, they prove dinosaurs lived recently. One problem they face is that the fossilised skin isn't skin at all, or even the fibrous protein parts of skin; it has been entirely mineralised aa silicate, preserving only the morphology, including the surface patterning - which is where the evidence lies.

The University College Cork scientists have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications and in a UCC news release: