The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

the membrane. The body was almost entirely covered in a thick coat of quill-like, tufted feathers (Fig. 14). While most reports of feathers have come from theropod dinosaurs, they are not exclusive to them. While rare, filamentous integument has been documented in ornithischians. Psittacosaurus , a small ceratopsian, was found to have long quill-like structures near the base of the tail (Fig. 15).The bristles are clustered andfilledwith pulp (Mayr et al. 2002). Tianyulong (Fig. 16), a heterodontosaurid, had bristly integument along the neck, back and tail (Zheng et al. 2009). In 2014, the neornithischian Kulindadromeus was found with three different types of feather-like integument, including a type similar to Sinosauropteryx , in addition to scales (Godefroit et al. 2014).  It is not certain if the structures in ornithischians are homologous to those in theropods, though the structures on Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong are similar to those on Beipiaosaurus . To date, there are nearly fifty genera of non-avian dinosaurs that are known to have possessed feathers or feather-like filaments, most of them theropods (Barrett et al. 2015). In many cases, such as Microraptor and Serikornis , preservation conditions allowed the feathers themselves to be preserved as fossils. While this is not always the case, features like quill knobs and pygostyles have proven to be reliable indicators of feathers being present. 4. Baraminology Introduction The great variety of feathered dinosaurs provokes us to ponder how many created kinds might exist among them. There are easily recognizable groups within the non-avialan feathered dinosaurs, members of which appear very similar to one another and obviously distinct from other dinosaurs. Ornithomimosaurs, for instance, all share a common body shape resembling a long-tailed, long-armed ostrich (except for the bizarre Deinocheirus ). Other instantly recognizable groups include Oviraptorosauria, Therizinosauroidea, Troodontidae, Dromaeosauridae, andAlvarezsauroidea.We suspect that these distinct groups of coelurosaurs will be discontinuous from each other. Five previous studies have used statistical baraminological methods to discern the relationships of coelurosaurs. In a response to Senter’s (2010) attempt to use baraminology to prove birds evolved from dinosaurs, Wood (2011) found evidence of discontinuity between birds and non-avialan maniraptorans. Although not discussed heavily in the paper, he also detected discontinuity surrounding Oviraptorosauria, Deinonychosauria, and possibly between Troodontidae + Buitreraptor and Dromaeosauridae (without Buitreraptor ). Cavanaugh (2011) also reanalyzed the Senter (2010) character matrix, this time using Analysis of Patterns (ANOPA). The 3D ANOPA results revealed three clouds of taxa among coelurosaurs, all of which overlapped slightly. Cavanaugh concluded that all theropods, including Archaeopteryx , may be in the same created kind, with Archaeopteryx as the ancestor of other theropods rather than their descendant. Garner et al. (2013) analyzed six datasets including traditional birds and traditional dinosaurs using baraminic distance correlation (BDC) and 3D multidimensional scaling (MDS). The results varied with the datasets, but revealed several patterns. First, discontinuity exists among animals traditionally considered birds. For instance, Ornithurae—the group containing all living birds and some fossil species (e.g., Ichthyornis )—showed a tendency to cluster together and away from extinct birds like enantiornithines, Confuciusornis , or Archaeopteryx . Depending on the dataset, some of these non-ornithuran avialans could be grouped with dromaeosaurid dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx most consistently correlated with dromaeosaurids in several of the analyses, but in one analysis appeared to group with avialans. The authors concluded that the use of dromaeosaurids as a composite taxon could skew the results, but that Archaeopteryx might have been a dromaeosaurid. Finally, Aaron (2014b) analyzed several different datasets of tyrannosauroids with statistical baraminology and concluded that Tyrannosauridae + some non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroids ( Appalachiosaurus , Dryptosaurus , Raptorex , Xiongguanlong , and Eotyrannus ) probably constitute a holobaramin, to the exclusion of other “basal” tyrannosauroids such as Dilong and Guanlong . METHODS In order to detect discontinuity among feathered dinosaurs, we used statistical baraminological methods on five different coelurosaur datasets: 1) Brusatte et al. (2014) (modified by Cau et al. (2015)), which is an updated version of the coelurosaur dataset of Turner et al. (2012); 2) Lee et al. (2014a)) (modified by Cau et al. (2015)), which is an updated version of the coelurosaur dataset of Godefroit, et al. (2013); 3) van der Reest and Currie (2017), a paravian-heavy McLain et al. ◀ Feathered dinosaurs reconsidered ▶ 2018 ICC 478 Figure 10. Feathered manus of Sinornithosaurus , a dromaeosaurid. Photograph by Paul Garner and used with permission.