Genesis 1:20
“ And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
Archaeopteryx always seems to cause confusion. Is it a bird or is it a dinosaur? It used to be very easy, when I was a child. I remember reading through my big book of dinosaurs with fascination, especially when I came to the last page, which showed an archaeopteryx. It was a neat evolutionary explanation, in those days, that dinosaurs had evolved into birds, and archaeopteryx was the proof.
Unfortunately, evolutionary timescales caused problems for that analysis. Evolutionists believe that the therapod dinosaurs, from which they believe birds evolved, became extinct 65 million years ago, but they date archaeopteryx at 150 million years old. For that reason, most evolutionary sources classify archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than a dinosaur-like bird, though a quick internet search will reveal that there is a significant minority of evolutionary researchers who disagree and still insist on classifying the creature as a bird.
How do we, as Bible-believing Christians, assess the situation? Although many evolutionists refer to feathered dinosaurs, no fossils show conclusive evidence of feathers. Even the nodules, which supposedly indicate the roots of feathers, can be interpreted differently. Archaeopteryx, on the other hand, clearly had feathers, and its differences from known birds, such as its teeth, merely point to it being of a different created kind than the many, many kinds of birds which are still with us. A pair of archaeopteryx must have been on the Ark, but the creature presumably became extinct some time after the Flood.
Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that we can trust Your word in everything it says. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Encyclopaedia Britannica, < https://www.britannica.com/animal/Archaeopteryx >, accessed 5/31/2019. Image: NobuTamura http://paleoexhibit.blogspot.com/ http://spinops.blogspot.com/, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.
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