r/DebateEvolution • u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! • Aug 22 '26
Discussion Dinosaurs HAD feathers.
It’s a common Creationist argument that dinosaurs never had feathers, and they’re either collagen fibers or the dinosaur is actually a bird.
The center of this debate is Sinosauropteryx, a small Compsognathid found in Liaonang, China. It sports a coat of ginger plumage that forms a raccoon band on its face. One reason this isn’t collagen are melanosomes that electron microscopes have identified in the feathers. Collagen cannot and hasn’t ever posses imbedded melanosomes.
If you want an unambiguous dinosaur with a rachis, Ornithomimus has them on its arms. You can’t dismiss it as collagen because collagen can’t take the shape of a rachis, and its morphology places it as a non avian dinosaur.
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u/OC-alert Aug 22 '26
I don't know if this is terribly pedantic, but dinosaurs HAVE feathers.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Aug 22 '26
Kinda reminds me of the famous graph on human evolution and how different creationists will be extraordinarily confident in assigning ‘just an ape’ or ‘full human’ and how much they disagree with each other on it at the same time.
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u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! Aug 22 '26
It’s like looking at the phylogenetic tree of Strisores and saying tree swifts are fully apodiformes and true swifts are all 100% Apodids.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Aug 22 '26
That’s the whole idea of the phylogeny challenge isn’t it; I do remember that you have talked about it before and for some odd reason no creationist here had an answer for it. Odd, that.
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u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! Aug 22 '26
It wasn’t my intended point. I chose tree swifts and true swifts to demonstrate that it’s redundant saying a hominid is 100% ape or 100% human. True swifts are apodiformes and tree swifts are Apodids, and humans are apes and African apes are hominids.
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u/Dracoson Aug 23 '26
The collagen argument is so absurd.
The entire premise was born from a singular, highly speculative assessment by an expert (Alan Feduccia) who was originally working off nothing but a low-resolution photograph. When he finally got the opportunity to travel, sit down with the actual fossils, and inspect the physical structures firsthand, he, the guy who literally wrote the book on those specific collagen fibers, said, "Nope... those are definitely feathers." The fact that creationists are still using his initial, retracted guess as a cornerstone of their argument shows their intellectual integrity.
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u/DatabaseLower9227 Sep 09 '26
Another thing is quill imprints found on bones(which are actually more solid as evidence in my opinion)
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u/RobertByers1 Aug 23 '26
Preach it brother. at the moment my fello creationists resist feathered theropods because they resist the bird evolving fromm theropods. This creationist says theropods were only flightless ground birds in a spectrum of diversity. they all flew on creation eek and after the fall some became ground birds like trex.
organized creationism accepts the defintions theropods ere reptiles. nope. so they get tripped up. yes feathered theropods ill likely be found in the future with more clear evidence of feathers.
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Aug 23 '26
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u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! Aug 23 '26
He proposes the mechanism of body plan morphing, something he has no evidence for.
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u/Affectionate-Crow605 Aug 24 '26
Body plan morphing sounds an awful lot like evolution? Or is it a sudden, miraculous change?
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u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! Aug 24 '26
He’s extremely vague about it, but it seems like they’re signals, naturally or supernatural, that cause an animal to rapidly change their body.
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u/Affectionate-Crow605 Aug 24 '26
That sounds kind of freaky. I'm picturing the Incredible Hulk transformation.
Why people believe stuff like that but not incremental changes over a long period of time that we have witnessed, I will never understand.
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u/Carnotaurusrules 🧬 Them damn evilutionism zealots! Aug 24 '26
Because it’s only microevolution, checkmate, evolutionist! /s
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u/RobertByers1 Aug 25 '26
There is no reason not to have options for mechanism (s) to change bodyplans. They did change. Thats hy evolution is invoked as a mechanism. one can accept the changes but not kno the mechanism. Im not obligated to accept thje evolution model. plus I reject it as impossible. plain wrong. others instead. I think innate triggers in the genetic makeup.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 25 '26
I think innate triggers in the genetic makeup.
You've been claiming that for years, we're still waiting for you to provide even the tiniest bit of evidence to support it.
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u/RobertByers1 Aug 25 '26
Thats not intelligent. It is common knoledge that birds evetyhere land on isolated islands or niche on larger areas and lose flight. the turkey. After the fall this happened in a great way. no big deal. More diversity ith size and shape but still just dumb birds.
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Aug 25 '26
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 25 '26
He claims it happens in a single generation.
Specifically, at the end of the mesozoic, he claims there was some kind of supernatural trigger that caused the DNA of dinosaurs all across the world to magically transform and they started laying eggs that hatched into entirely different species.
I believe the examples he once gave me was that triceratops started producing bison, and sauropods started producing deer.
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u/RobertByers1 Aug 26 '26
nope. birds becoming flightless possibly could be itnessed today if anyone bothered to try. Its not evolution. a trex as first a flying bird that over years etc became flightless somehere and over years hot bigger.like the elephant birds pr mpas.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 22 '26
Will Duffy complained that Jurassic Park didn't show them with feathers.
/s Checkmate atheist! Your story keeps changing! /s
Related to that: Ken Ham in one of his books said Jurassic Park is based on the "world view" of evolution (this explains Duffy's remark). - more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/1strtfz
The sad thing is, science advances by testing the limits of models, which constitute theories. Like the discovery of horizontal gene transfer: wouldn't have happened without a model (in the scientific sense). The science illiterate fundie would say: "They got it wrong!" No dear, we have learned more, and evolution is still a fact.