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

tetrapod body plan. There are no mammals that are not also amniotes. These are familiar examples, and many more can be given. They are powerful generalizations. Life is like nested Chinese boxes of subsets within subsets within subsets. Life is comprised of nested similarities. This significant pattern must be explained (ReMine 1993, p. 344). Looking at the history of thinking on the pattern of life, Wood and Murray (2003, p. 30) noted: In like manner, a hierarchical pattern of life also appears to be a legitimate description of organisms. The hierarchy was strongly advocated by Sir Richard Owen, who interpreted it as a revelation of God’s design plan. Later, Darwin infused the hierarchy with an evolutionary meaning, transforming the design plan into a genealogical tree. Although we reject the historical interpretation of the evolutionary tree, the hierarchical pattern has a degree of authenticity to it. The idea that life forms a pattern, perhaps as a nested or reticulate (netted) hierarchy is quite commonly accepted by young-earth creationist biologists and paleontologists who actively use baraminological methods to examine living and fossil species (Wise 1998). Even those creationists who have reached different conclusions on the topic of birds and dinosaurs recognize the pattern and its non-Darwinian implications: Cladistics demands a nested pattern, and the fossil evidence fits into such a pattern relatively well, especially for higher taxonomic categories. However, neither evolution in general nor descent with modification in particular demand a nested pattern. Moreover, the nested pattern can be explained at least as well in a common design paradigm (Doyle 2011, p. 36). Therefore, rather than criticizing Darwinian interpretations of this pattern of life or rejecting the idea that life has a higher-level pattern, creationists would profit from developing better methods to understand the pattern and make predictions in a creationist framework. Further efforts to model-build by quantifying the pattern of life and developing better understanding of its larger structures are an important area for future research. Viewing the dinosaur-bird debate through the lens of folk and scientific taxonomies, and their relation to Scripture, allows us to resolve most of the issues that have bothered creationists in the past. First, we no longer have to be concerned that the phrase, “birds are dinosaurs” conveys any evolutionary implications. Since nested hierarchies and branching taxonomic trees were concepts developed by creationists to describe God’s creative pattern, we can use the terminology associated with them. We have no problem recognizing that bats or whales are mammals, even though we do not believe that bats or whales share a common ancestor with zebras or shrews. An evolutionist will say, “birds are dinosaurs” in the sense that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but we can say that “birds are dinosaurs” in the sense that birds are a subgroup of dinosaurs in a larger pattern of God’s creation, and that they are not all related through common descent. Whether we say the phrase or not, we can recognize patterns in the fossil record, while still disagreeing with evolutionists about the cause of those patterns. Secondly, this new perspective exposes how our own Western folk taxonomies have biased our understanding of the larger patterns in God’s design. When we think about tetrapods, our Western mind neatly divides them into four groups–amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals–following the pattern we see among extant animals. However, when we try to impose this paradigm on the fossil record, we run into issues. There are animals that seem to be neither reptile nor mammal (therapsids), neither reptile nor bird (feathered dinosaurs), neither amphibian nor reptile (diadectomorphs), and neither fish nor amphibian (non-tetrapod tetrapodomorphs). Thus, although the four-division system of tetrapods works very well today, it would not have been so useful before the Flood. In fact, it is likely that if all of these extinct animals were alive today, we may not have divided vertebrates into these exact categories. When we are determined to fit all animals into the four-part tetrapod scheme simply because we think the animals of the past can only belong to the groups existing in the present, we are inadvertently operating in a way similar to uniformitarians by saying that the past must conform to the present. Instead, we need to recognize that our current world is depauperate when compared to the pre- Flood world. This new understanding allows us to recognize that there is no reason why there cannot be feathered dinosaurs or “non- mammalian synapsids.” The fossil record reveals to us that God’s creation is much richer and more complex than we could have predicted given the animals that currently exist. CONCLUSIONS From our survey of feathered dinosaur species and our statistical baraminological analyses, we reached several conclusions. First, many species of dinosaurs were indisputably feathered. The available fossils have moved us permanently beyond questioning whether some dinosaurs were feathered and onward to interpreting the implications of feathered dinosaurs. Second, among the coelurosaurs, the major group of feathered dinosaurs, patterns of discontinuity and continuity indicate that there were likely multiple holobaramins of feathered dinosaurs. Third, the holobaramins of feathered dinosaurs are generally discontinuous with avialans, the group that includes living birds. The second and third points above once again disprove Phil Senter’s (2010) idea that baraminology should make creationists classify Mesozoic birds and many coelurosaurs as a single created kind. Not only do feathered dinosaurs not share common ancestry with extant birds, but the major groups of feathered dinosaurs are apparently not even related to one another by common descent. So, feathered dinosaurs, modern birds, and Mesozoic birds are not three different created kinds of animals, but rather three groupings with multiple created kinds per group, and the old dichotomy of bird versus dinosaur is unhelpful and incorrect. Birds could rightly be viewed as a specialized type of dinosaur without implying birds evolved from dinosaurs. Much of this confusion about the similarities between birds and dinosaurs in creationist circles actually stems from the misapplication of our Western folk taxonomy of a four-division Tetrapoda onto the past. Forcing fossil specimens to be either “bird” or “dinosaur” neglects the complexity of the design patterns among these kinds of animals and can mask God’s glory, which He determined to display through them. McLain et al. ◀ Feathered dinosaurs reconsidered ▶ 2018 ICC 508