Knocking Archaeopteryx off Its Paleontological Perch

In the war of worldviews surrounding the creation/evolution debate, one iconic figure has stood out among the evolution-believing community for quite a while now—the legendary Archaeopteryx.

I can remember being enthralled with depictions of Archae that were in the dinosaur books I read as a kid, and even though it wasn’t a dinosaur as such, it was almost always included (if not featured) somewhere among the pages as incontrovertible evidence for the story of evolution.

And if someone had asked me back then to list out my top 10 proofs of evolution, Archaeopteryx would definitely have been on that list.

But alas, its time has also come.

Archaeopteryx was once touted as the “first bird,” a supposed transitional form between reptilian dinosaur-like creatures and modern-type birds in evolutionary literature for well over 150 years (pretty much since it was first discovered in 1861), but now, one can find numerous scientific publications such as Nature magazine, National Geographic, and Scientific American with articles having titles such as the following, respectively.

“Archaeopteryx No Longer First Bird”1

“Archaeopteryx’s Evolutionary Humiliation Continues”2

“Archaeopteryx Knocked off Its Perch as First Bird”3

And I suppose one could simply leave it at that. You could read this (or many other articles from both creationists and evolutionists) that debunk Archaeopteryx’s once-celebrated, evolutionary, dinosaur-to-bird, missing-link status.

However, there are much deeper concepts to be explored here along the way as we examine the historical and scientific information surrounding this icon of evolution that may surprise you if you stick to the end.

The “Dino Bird” Archaeopteryx

Now, when I say Archaeopteryx is legendary, it’s not an overstatement. It wasn’t just me that was enamored by this supposed dino-bird discovery.

One can purchase pretty well everything from mugs, jewelry, T-shirts, ball caps, plush and plastic toys to even a full line of outdoor clothing with a very similar name and an icon bearing the classic fossil logo of Archaeopteryx. So what made this fossil find so famous?

Well, it was only two years after Darwin had published his famous Origin of Species book that it was found and initially classified as a bird. But after closer examination, it was then changed and claimed to be the first bird (and a missing link between dinosaurs and birds) based on some off-beat anatomy it displayed.

As an American Museum of Natural History article described,

The first Archaeopteryx skeleton was found in Germany about the same time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. This was a fortuitously-timed discovery . . . it helped convince many about the veracity of evolutionary theory. In fact, the first suggestion that birds are related to dinosaurs was made by early proponent of evolution Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860’s. “Archaeopteryx is the poster child for evolution.”4

And what made this birdlike creature so unique?

Well, unlike modern birds, it had teeth and a long, bony tail which today’s birds don’t have. It also lacked the keeled breastbone most modern birds have. To top it off, Archaeopteryx had a set of claws on its wings, traits that evolutionists pointed to as reptilian, which were used as proof to portray this creature as having evolved from dinosaurs.

So much so, that Archaeopteryx has been called the dino-bird, was (and often still incorrectly is) referred to as the first true bird, and was often touted by evolutionists in defense of the story of evolution as a perfect transitional form found in the fossil record—exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to find from their perspective.

Transitional No Longer

Now, I said that Archaeopteryx is still being called the first bird incorrectly by some evolutionists because evolution-believing scientists have now found and confirmed fossils of admitted true birds that supposedly lived up to 60 million years before Archaeopteryx (who supposedly lived 150 million years ago).

And so, because you can’t be older than your own grandparents, Archaeopteryx obviously wasn’t the transition from dino to bird that evolutionists had been crowing about up to that point. Indeed, even the world-renowned Dr. Alan Feduccia, an evolutionary ornithologist, has stated rather sarcastically (in contradiction to some of his fellow evolutionists),

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of “paleobabble” is going to change that.5

And so, because you can’t be older than your own grandparents, Archaeopteryx obviously wasn’t the transition from dino to bird that evolutionists had been crowing about up to that point.

Just like a duck is different than a woodpecker which is different than a hawk which is different from a hummingbird, Archaeopteryx was just another unique kind of bird that God made. And just like so many other creatures living in a sin-cursed world, it’s now extinct.

Still Promoted

However, a quick trip around the internet with “Archaeopteryx” in your search engine will demonstrate that not everyone in the evolutionary community has gotten the memo, so to speak, as several popular websites6 still call it the first bird.

And I predict that—just like most evolutionary evidence that keeps coming and going—it will take a long time for the “first true bird” and “dinosaur-to-bird link fossil” branding to be discarded.

After all, my daughter’s grade 10 science textbook had pictures of Haeckel’s infamous embryo drawings7 in it less than 20 years ago here in Ontario, Canada, and they have been known to be completely fraudulent for over 140 years!

And similarly to how Haeckel’s original argument (that these embryo drawings showed humans recapitulate, or relive, their evolutionary ancestry inside the womb) was shown to be complete nonsense and was then modified to claim the pictures were still viable proof of evolution because they demonstrated the similarity between various creatures at the same stage (which of course has also been debunked now), we see the same type of “modification argument” happening with good old Archae.

Case in point, the title of a 2014 Nature article8 defending this very idea was “Rival Species Recast Significance of ‘First Bird’: Archaeopteryx’s Status Is Changing, but the Animal Is Still Key to the Dinosaur-Bird Transition.” So, as they say, “the cope is real.”

And because of Archaeopteryx’s iconic status, I’ll bet it will continue to be milked for all it’s worth until it finally drops on the battlefield of ideas surrounding the origins debate. At least until another evolutionary hero takes its place.

What About Those Differences?

The evolutionary community has put a lot of effort into hyping up Archae with many now claiming it was in fact a dinosaur with feathers rather than a bird with reptilian features.

Remember, the original argument made in Darwin’s day was that Archaeopteryx was a transition from dinosaur to bird, and it was really the genesis of today’s popular evolutionary feathered-dinosaur arguments revisited years later.

However, evolutionists continue to point out that Archaeopteryx exhibits traits that are unlike modern birds, which evolutionists then declare demonstrates irrefutable—literally rock-solid—proof that there was large-scale evolutionary change over millions of years of time.

However, just like most claims from the evolutionary hype machine, once you look a little deeper, you begin to see the rather large holes in their arguments very quickly. So let’s walk through these anatomical differences between Archaeopteryx and modern birds to see whether their arguments are as powerful as they claim them to be.

Unique Breastbone?

As mentioned, evolutionists have attempted to paint Archaeopteryx as a type of hybrid creature—either as a dinosaur-like bird that was just beginning to be able to fly, or conversely, as some kind of a birdlike dinosaur with feathers it used to hop around or perhaps glide short distances with.

A key feature that evolutionists pointed to as proof Archaeopteryx was some kind of transitionary creature that links birds to dinosaurs was its lack of a keeled breastbone. As an example, here’s a University of California Museum of Paleontology article describing their unique, comparatively flat sternum and its likely effect on its flight capability this way.

As you know if you’ve ever cut up a chicken, living birds (except for flightless birds like the ostrich and kiwi) have a keeled sternum to which the large, powerful flight muscles attach. Archaeopteryx, however, had a comparatively flat sternum. Although it is currently thought that Archaeopteryx could sustain powered flight, it was probably not a strong flier; it may well have ran, leaped, glided, and flapped all in the same day.9

The depiction of Archaeopteryx being a clumsy flyer that likely tended to hop around tree branches, gliding here and there with short intermittent bursts of flight is almost ubiquitous in evolutionary literature. And most point to its lack of a keeled breastbone as a key reason for it being such a poor flyer.

However, I would now like to introduce a key piece of evidence in our examination of the mystery surrounding the enigmatic Archaeopteryx and introduce you to a remarkable bird living in South America today called a hoatzin.

With its blue face, red eyes, and spiky crest on its head, this pheasant-sized avian is quite unique for a wide variety of reasons that we’ll be exploring. First, we’ll look at a clue connected to the reason for some of their more colloquial nicknames.

You see, as exotic-looking as hoatzins are, they’re often referred to by several rather unflattering monikers by people who study them—such as skunk bird, stinkbird, and “flying cow.”

This is because the hoatzin (unique among all other living birds today) practices foregut fermentation of plants as its method of eating. It’s the only avian whose digestive system ferments vegetation in the stomach, producing methane and an odor that has been compared to cow manure (hence the tag, flying cow).

Morphologically, this results in hoatzins having an extended crop that hangs down in front, which means their “anterior sternum is much reduced to make room for large fermentation chambers, resulting in drastic reduction in area available for flight-muscle attachment.”10

And furthermore,

This enlarged crop has consequences for the flight of these birds. There is only space for some pretty small flight muscles to attach to the sternum (breast bone), so they are not strong fliers. They are quite clumsy flying around their Amazon forest home.11

Indeed, a quote from a very recent 2019 study on hoatzin morphology stated,

Grajal et al. (1989) described the hoatzin as a poor flyer based on its reduced carina [the ridge of a bird’s breastbone, to which the main flight muscles are attached] which decreased the area of attachment for flight muscles. However, they specify that its flying abilities allow the hoatzin to have a selective diet and to perform fermentation efficiently. Grajal (1995) described further that the hoatzin prefers to hop from branch to branch.12

So, instead of their flattened breastbone being caused by their so-called reptilian ancestry, perhaps Archaeopteryx had a unique diet like hoatzin. After all, there may have been a variety of plant-eating birds that have gone extinct since the flood.

Besides the idea of Archae having had a rather flat breastbone due to a design feature, there could even be another explanation for what’s been found so far. As this quote from an evolutionary paper regarding Archaeopteryx stated,

The absence of the bony sternum in most archaeopterygid specimens is probably a preservation artifact, as the sternum is first to be lost from a decaying avian cadaver (Bickart 1984).13

Indeed, several other experimental studies in taphonomy (the study of how creatures decay) have confirmed this early loss of sternum in dead birds, particularly in watery environments.14

It is absolutely illegitimate for evolutionists to declare Archaeopteryx was uniquely “reptilian” based on that characteristic.

Regardless, the fact is there is a bird living today that exhibits flight and mobility characteristics identical to how Archaeopteryx has been described (a clumsy flyer) because they have the same physical characteristic—a flattened sternum.

So it is absolutely illegitimate for evolutionists to declare Archaeopteryx was uniquely “reptilian” based on that characteristic.

In part 2, we will dig even deeper into this supposed masterpiece of materialism’s mysterious morphology and see how Archaeopteryx clawed its way into being an evolutionary icon.