280 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
bones, or within the ankle (mesotarsus). The first row of ankle bones thus has little function
except as a passive hinge, and in many taxa, it actually fuses on to the end of the shin bone as
a little “cap” of bone. The next time you eat a chicken or turkey drumstick (which is its tibia
bone), notice that inedible cap of cartilage at the less meaty “handle” end of the drumstick is
actually a relict of the dinosaurian ancestry of birds! In addition, part of this first row of ankle
bones has a bony spur that runs up the front of the tibia (the ascending process of the astraga-
lus), another feature unique to saurischian dinosaurs and birds. Finally, the details and the
structure of the toe bones and the short hallux, or big toes, are unique to theropod dinosaurs
and birds as well, although Archaeopteryx did not have the opposable big toe that would have
enabled it to grasp branches well.
With all this evidence that Archaeopteryx is basically a feathered dinosaur, why call
Archaeopteryx a bird at all? In fact, it has only a few uniquely birdlike features not found in
other theropods: the big toe is fully reversed, the teeth are unserrated, and the tail is rela-
tively short but the arms are long compared to most other theropods. All the other features
of Archaeopteryx, including the feathers and the fused collarbones or “wishbone,” have now
been found in other theropod dinosaurs, although some say that the feathers of Archaeop-
teryx are more advanced than those in theropods and have the asymmetry that suggests that
Archaeopteryx could fly.
In light of all this overwhelming evidence, it is bizarre to read how the creationists dis-
tort and misrepresent Archaeopteryx. In their minds, the created “kinds” have to be distinct,
and transitional forms cannot exist, therefore they will do whatever it takes, no matter how
dishonest and unscientific, to try to discredit Archaeopteryx. Because Archaeopteryx had feath-
ers, in their minds it must be part of the bird “kind,” so the creationists will simply say that
it’s a bird and either distort or not even address the long list of dinosaurian features in the
specimen. For example, the creationist books by Davis and Kenyon (2004:104–106), Sarfati
(1999:57–68; 2002:130–132), Wells (2000:111–135), and Gish (1995:129–139) mostly quote out-
of-date sources to try to discredit Archaeopteryx and the “birds are dinosaurs” hypothesis.
Or they quote old papers by the tiny handful of crank scientists like Alan Feduccia and the
late Larry Martin, who disagreed with 99 percent of the profession—but they don’t mention
the devastating counterarguments against the ideas proposed by Feduccia and Martin. Gish
(1995) and Sarfati (1999) argue that Archaeopteryx teeth are not like those of theropod dino-
saurs but like those of other toothed birds (which is not true, by the way—they have both
primitive similarities with theropod teeth and their own derived features), but this whole
argument misses the point: no living birds have teeth, yet if fossil birds like Archaeopteryx
had them, it links birds and dinosaurs. (Recall from chapter 4 that birds still have the embry-
onic genes for teeth, but these are normally suppressed during development). Gish (1995)
and Sarfati (1999) briefly mention the long tail of Archaeopteryx and then blithely say that
some reptiles and some birds have long tails and some have short ones. The point is that no
living bird has a long bony tail (all the tailbones of living birds are fused into the “parson’s
nose,” or pygostyle, and the tail is supported by feather shafts instead), yet Archaeopteryx,
which even Gish admits is a bird, has the long bony tail of dinosaurs. Gish attempts to
discredit the three bony clawed fingers of Archaeopteryx by pointing to the hoatzin birds of
Central America, which also have these three fingers while they are chicks (although he fails
to mention that their configuration is entirely different). But one isolated atavism does noth-
ing to discredit the fact that the hand of Archaeopteryx is fundamentally dinosaurian. No other
living birds besides the hoatzin chicks have this type of hand, which is highly specialized