Does the fossil record reveal the evolution of flight? Dr. Steve Falling

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Hello, I'm Terri Kammerzell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

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We are a group who loves to learn about our Creator God and we believe that the Bible, when read properly, disproves

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Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020.

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Since meeting online, we've been blessed with over 100 individual speakers. Our mission statement is 1

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Peter 3 .15. Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you.

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You can find most of our past presentations by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash cfsarchives.

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That's C like creation, F like fellowship, S like Santee, and the word archives. Dr. Steve Falling is our guest speaker tonight.

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He's an organic chemist and he can give a little of his background info for us, but I'll mention that he is very interested in the fossil record and how it contradicts

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Darwinian evolution. As an organic chemist, he sees the impossibility of molecules to man evolution.

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He especially loves nature photography and outdoor activities where he can enjoy God's creation.

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His emphasis is on pointing out nature's evidence of the Creator and showing the flaws of evolutionary explanations.

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Steve is a board member of Canopy Ministries and a member of the Creation Research Society. So with that,

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Steve, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you. Thank you, Terri. It's sharing going here.

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Okay, I believe

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I'm sharing now. Yes, you are. Yes, we can see your side perfectly.

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Okay. Well, again, my name is Stephen Falling. I have a

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PhD in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and I've been very interested in fossils, the fossil record, but I'm not a paleontologist.

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I'm an organic chemist, and so the fossil records is really just sort of an interest that I have.

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So I'd like tonight to mention a few things that I find interesting in the fossil record, and I believe it really does not support

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Darwinian evolution. I believe that the Bible is the inerrant

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Word of God and can be trusted in all it says. It's accurate when it comes to history, when it comes to talking about science, and certainly spiritual matters.

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So I'd like to begin with just a few definitions, just to make sure we're all on the same page.

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A fossil is the remains or trace of a once -living thing preserved by natural processes, and when

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I refer to the fossil record, I'm referring to all fossils, collected as well as undiscovered.

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Most, of course, will never be discovered, but there are a great many, of course, in museums all around the world.

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And paleontology is the name of the science, the study of fossils. It's the study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric or geologic times as represented by the fossils of plants, animals, and other organisms.

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Okay, I can't help myself but to show some examples of fossils. I could spend a whole hour just showing cool fossils to you, but let me just show a few examples.

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I'm sure folks that watch this, you all are quite familiar with fossils. Probably many of you know more than I do, but let me just show you some that kind of struck my fancy and are kind of representative of what you find out there.

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These, of course, are shark's teeth, and this is a tooth, said to be a tooth of a

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Tyrannosaurus rex. And here is a trilobite fossil, not a very impressive one, but it was,

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I think, probably the first fossil specimen I got as a kid. But trilobites can be quite large.

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Here are some pictures. That's my hand for scale there, and these trilobites are as big as a dinner plate.

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Trilobites are extinct marine arthropods. As far as we know, they're extinct, but they must have existed by the billions in the ocean because their fossils are very, very common, and everybody that has any interest in fossils usually ends up with finding them or obtaining some.

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I often buy fossils off eBay. Now, this is a very good specimen.

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I think I might have taken this picture at the Wonder Center near Nashville, Tennessee, of a crinoid.

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It's also called a sea lily, and there are still sea lilies extant living today in the ocean, and it's actually an animal, kind of like a starfish on a stalk.

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And interesting creature in the ocean, but many, many fossils are found like this, and I've used to find the little disc -shaped pieces of crinoids when

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I lived closer to Nashville as a child. This is a piece of petrified wood that's in my collection.

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I often joke that it looks to me more like petrified roast beef. But it's a nice little specimen

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I got out at Canyon DuChez in Arizona. Now, this is a picture

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I took of fossilized redwood trees in California, and you know how big redwood trees get.

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These were quite large. These were about six feet in diameter, as I recall. Now, when

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I'm talking about old fossils, I have to be real careful with this next slide because the old fossil is on the left, and for scale, my wife is sitting on the right.

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But I need to be careful with how I describe this one. Of course, the old fossil on the left is a skull from a triceratops.

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I think this was at the museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Now, here's an interesting fossil. We see a fish overlapping with a small dinosaur.

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I wonder how that might have happened. Actually, it's very, very common for marine creatures to be fossilized or found in the same layers or with mammals and land -dwelling creatures, and here's an example of that.

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Here's my hand again. For scale against a fossil, a trace fossil, it's a footprint of a theropod.

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I took this picture in Moab, Utah, and so an imprint, like a footprint, can also be a fossil.

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It does not need to be necessarily the remains or fossilized remains of tissue, of bone.

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And then, this is a picture of a dinosaur at the

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Dinosaur National Monument in the, overlaps a few states.

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I think it's Wyoming, Utah, Utah, and mostly

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Wyoming, I believe. But it's an excellent place to see fossils.

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They've excavated them, revealed them. Here's a dinosaur with the bones there that are still in the correct anatomical position.

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They call that articulated when they're in the correct anatomical position like this.

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Now, this, I think, might be one of the most famous fossils of all time. This is

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Archaeopteryx. It's an extinct bird, and I'll be talking about this quite a bit in a few minutes.

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Notice one thing, that we have Archaeopteryx with its head bent way back, the dinosaur with its head way back, and the other dinosaur with his head stretched and way back.

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That's really very interesting. It's called the dinosaur death pose, and it has a long name that is covered up by some tool bar here, but, okay, yeah.

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Opisthotonus, or the dinosaur death pose, because it's very common in the fossil record.

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Here's another example of the Sinusiropteryx fossil. Okay, here's another

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Archaeopteryx photograph. You can see it has its head back, and this one's true

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Thiomimus, and, again, it's in the dinosaur death pose, and paleontologists have noticed this for years that this is a very common way to find the fossilized remains when they're still in the articulated position, and so scientists, secular scientists, have studied this and found that this pose is often created when creatures drown or when they are asphyxiated by dust or gases or so forth, and so secular scientists have found what they think are reasons for this interesting pose.

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Of course, that goes with a genesis flood mechanism for the death of most of these creatures.

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Here's a just an interesting picture of a very large turtle. I always laugh when

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I look at it because it looks like it's mechanical with little gears on the inside, like a wind -up toy, but this thing is huge, but, indeed, many, many creatures are extinct now.

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Evolutionists would say extinction is in the high 90 % of all creatures that ever lived.

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Of course, they say that partly because they think there has to be so many steps, intermediate steps of evolution, and those creatures went extinct, but, indeed, many, many creatures in the past have now gone extinct.

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This is a fossil that probably most of you have seen before. This is the

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Tyrannosaurus rex, the specimen nicknamed Sue, which is in the

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Chicago Field Museum, just said to be the most complete, the best specimen of a

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Tyrannosaurus rex, and there was a big battle about who owned this and who should be able to sell it or profit from it, but, anyhow, it is a wonderful specimen, and it is interesting.

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It's named for the discoverer, Sue Hendrickson, I think is her name, but years later, they thought, well, we don't think this dinosaur is female, which kind of brings to mind the

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Johnny Cash song of a boy named Sue, so we have a dinosaur named

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Sue here. Okay, just a quick bit about how fossils are formed.

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This is actually quite important. When a creature dies, like in this little cartoon showing a fish dying, sinking to the bottom, and then gradually over weeks and years and millennia, it's slowly covered up and slowly turned into a fossil, right?

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No, of course not. That's not what happens at all. When something dies, especially in the water, fish often float, and they're eaten by other creatures.

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The UV radiation breaks down the tissue. Bacteria are decomposing the creature.

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Bones are dissolving, and normally, when something dies in the water or on land, it soon disappears to scavenging and just general degradation.

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In order to form a fossil, you have to have rapid burial. So, in the silly little cartoon, we see a fish.

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This one's alive, but recently, a deceased fish could be inundated by a sudden drop of sand, sediment, silt, mud, whatever, and it's smothered, killed, and buried deeply.

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Now, this is important, and then over years or maybe not even that long, the tissue decomposes by bacteria.

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The bones may dissolve. Minerals in the groundwater can come in and precipitate minerals in the cavity.

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There's several ways where the fossil might be preserved in that kind of fashion. And so, that's how fossils are formed.

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It really requires rapid burial, and that's because otherwise the erosion, if the creature is not buried promptly, erosion occurs, scavenging occurs, the creature would just be consumed by scavengers and whatnot.

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And then, when it formed a fossil, it has to be buried and really buried deeply. And there's lots of proof that that's really the way it happens.

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I love this example. This is a fossil of a horseshoe crab, and I don't know if you can see it, but there are tracks behind the horseshoe crab.

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It was crawling along the sandy floor of the ocean until finally it was so exhausted it stopped, was buried, and it died there and became a fossil.

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And so, this is really good proof that it was alive when it was buried, and then it died and became a fossil.

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But this fossil is even more interesting because here's the whole thing.

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Down here in the bottom right is that horseshoe crab, and the tracks have been excavated and revealed all the way back here.

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It's like 15 feet long of this poor creature crawling along the ocean floor until it died.

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Just really good evidence of rapid burial. And this is at the

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Creation Museum in Kentucky. Now, some would say, well, soft tissue materials don't form fossils readily.

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There's no bones or anything, but that's not true. There are plenty of fossils of soft -bodied animals, like there's an octopus here on the left with the drawing describing the parts.

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Jellyfish leave fossils, upper right, and the Dickinsonia is a jellyfish kind of thing without bones.

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Again, it's a soft body. So, more evidence of rapid burial.

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Now, this one's important, polystrate fossils. And one of the best examples is just here in Tennessee, just a few hours from here in Cookville.

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The photograph on the left, this is a lycopod tree that is like 30 feet tall, and the sedimentary rock layers around it have been eroded away to expose the tree.

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And this is just great proof that there had to have been rapid burial because you all know that you can't, when you plant a tree, you don't plant it six feet deep.

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It would die. Any plant that's covered up with a tremendous amount of sediment would just soon die and rot away.

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It wouldn't be forming a fossil. And, you know, secular scientists would normally say that these layers are formed over thousands or maybe millions of years of time.

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And that tree is not going to tolerate that length of time as it's slowly covered up.

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So, this proof of rapid burial. The Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone is another great example.

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These upright petrified trees are in this area.

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Without going into detail, Dr. Stephen Austin has done some incredible, incredibly good work at Mount St.

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Helens that helps to explain the existence of these upright petrified trees because their roots are broken off, yet they're standing in place like they were growing there.

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Now, what's a great fossil graveyard? A fossil graveyard are sites where there's a high concentration of fossilized remains.

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And they're all over the world. Some of them are enormous, sometimes with billions of fossils, dead creatures.

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I mentioned already Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. And excellent place.

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That picture there is actually, that area is covered with a roof.

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So, you can see this without being out in the weather and the sun and the fossils are preserved.

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We often speak of fossil fuels, don't we? And I used to use that term without thinking about it much, but fossil fuels are fossils.

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Coal are plant fossils and oil, principally from plants as well and gas.

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This picture of this open pit mine for coal, incredible.

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Just think of how much vegetation must have been accumulated in this one place, covered up with sediment, creating high pressure and then high temperature to coalify the organic matter, the leaves and the bark and the trees and whatnot.

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All evidence of rapid burial and a worldwide flood to deposit that much material in one location.

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Now, in the Grand Canyon and spreading outside the Grand Canyon is a layer, the

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Redwall limestone layer, with literally billions of nautiloid fossils.

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I put a picture of what one looks like there at the bottom and then a fossil on the right.

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About two years ago, I went on a Grand Canyon raft trip 10 days down the river, and Dr.

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Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis was pointing out these nautiloid fossils everywhere, and they were amazing.

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Sometimes they were on end, which is hard to explain anyway, any way other than a global flood and rapid burial, because how would a ice cream cone shaped thing stand on end for thousands of years while it's slowly buried?

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And sometimes they were found upright like that. Often they were pointing in the same direction, showing some general direction of water flow.

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Evidently, southeastern Morocco is a great place to find fossils. If it were a safe place to go,

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I probably wouldn't try to go there. These are a the

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Green River Formation in Wyoming, Utah. Colorado has many fossils of many different creatures, a lot of fish especially, and especially the nightia herring.

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I'll hold this up here. Hopefully you can see these nightia fish.

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They're very common. I heard Tim Clary say recently they may be the most common fossil in the world, but they are very common in that formation.

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There's another one. I've never been here. I haven't been to the fluorescent fossil beds yet, but they actually have found insect fossils at this site.

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And then here we have a clam fossil. A pretty boring fossil,

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I guess you might say. I don't know if you can see. Here's my clam fossil.

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It's probably too dark. But the interesting thing about this, the important thing about the clam fossils is that they're closed.

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Both halves are tightly closed. And you go to the beach and look for shells, usually from a clam, from a bivalve, it'll be the half of the shell.

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Or if you're lucky, you'll find one that's still attached with the organic ligament hinge holding the two pieces together.

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But that rots away and leaves the shell eventually. And I'm not a beach guy, but I've heard and found pictures of clams that were taken out of the sand and then left on the surface, and they can dig their way back down.

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Probably some of you have seen this happen. And so clams can dig down or dig up.

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They are not confined to one spot. They are mobile. And so the point is the fossilized clams are so extremely common.

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You usually find them in the closed position. They're closed because they died when they were covered up.

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And so they were still complete. They were in a closed position, smothered by sediment, deeply and rapidly covered, and they fossilized in the closed position.

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And these are extremely common. Brachiopods are similar, and I have a number of those, and they're closed.

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So just excellent evidence of rapid burial with just a simple clam fossil.

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Now, I'm sure you all are very, very familiar with Genesis, the flood account.

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I want to read just a couple verses, if I may, just to skim through some of this to emphasize a point for the rest of the talk.

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So the flood comes and then Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark.

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They and every beast after its kind. Those that entered, male and female of all flesh, entered as God had commanded him and that Lord closed it behind him, closed the door of the ark.

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Then the flood came upon the earth for 40 days and the water increased and lifted up the ark so that it rose above the earth.

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The water prevailed more and more upon the earth so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.

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The waters prevailed 15 cubits higher and the mountains were covered. All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms on the earth and all mankind.

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Of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life died.

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I should mention that this was a just judgment. It was severe, but mankind was so severely, so extremely wicked that God chose, which is his prerogative as creator, to punish.

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He chose to do so with a flood, but he preserved eight individuals on the ark as well as creatures that breathe air.

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The point I'm wanting to make though here is that the entire globe, the entire planet was covered up to 15 cubits.

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A cubit's about 18 inches, so even the highest mountains were covered with water.

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Now, if there was a flood, and I believe there was, I believe the Bible is true in this historical narrative, then what would you expect to happen when those waters receded?

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Which the flood account was about a year, and so the erosion as the waters receding would have been incredible.

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The continents were moving during the flood and mountains were lifting up. Volcanoes were erupting.

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It was just a very climactic event. Now, Ken Ham is kind of famous for saying this quote

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I'm about to give you. He's the founder of Answers in Genesis, and he asked the question, if there was a worldwide flood described in the

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Bible, what should we find? We should find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.

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What do we find? We find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.

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These are sedimentary rock layers. So, we find in the geology of earth what we would expect if there was a worldwide flood.

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The sedimentary layers, the fossils we find in those layers, and so forth.

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The flood is really the subject of other talks. What I want to move on to, though, is how fossils do or do not support evolution.

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So far, I'd say I know I've done this an injustice going so fast, but that was an introductory part about what fossils are.

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I would say that the Genesis flood is the best explanation for the fossil record in the sedimentary rock layers.

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So, what we have coming up next is this part. Evolution is not supported by the fossil record.

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This subject is so gigantic that we can't do it justice in an hour.

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We can't do it justice in days or weeks. I've chosen to take as my test case, as my example, the evolution of flight.

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But first, let me say a word about paleontology. Again, this is the study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric or geologic times as represented by the fossils of plants, animals, and other organisms.

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This is Pierre -Paul Grasset. He wrote, he was the most famous, the leading evolutionist zoologist,

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French zoologist of the last century. And he wrote this quote.

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I think this is an interesting quote. He said, naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms.

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The knowledge of paleontology is therefore a prerequisite. Only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms.

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Okay. So if paleontology is where we'll find the evidence, then we need to know something about paleontology either to find that evolution is true or to show that it's not true.

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And so I feel all Christians should have a bit of understanding of paleontology.

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I am not a paleontologist. I just have an interest in it. And I think everybody can understand the important points against evolution that come out of paleontology.

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Of course, Charles Darwin is considered the founder, the father of evolutionary theory.

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There's a picture of him about the time of publishing his magnum opus entitled,

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On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the

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Struggle for Life. It was interesting to me that the only diagram in the entire, his entire book is that one

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I pasted in at the bottom there. It's a phylogenetic tree, a tree of life showing descent from a common ancestor, which would be at the bottom.

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And so referring to just a cartoon -like caricature of a evolutionary tree of life, we have one here at the bottom is some simple -celled organism, quote -unquote for simple because they're not so simple when you look at them.

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But some common ancestor, they say, evolved over time into plants and insects and reptiles and invertebrates and mammals and so forth.

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And so this tree kind of lines up the order in which they evolve from one of another.

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For example, fish would be down here lower on invertebrates below them, and then fish evolved into amphibians, reptiles, and so forth.

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So interesting thing about this tree though, the branches that I've highlighted here, these are where the transition forms are.

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The intermediate links, the missing links are here.

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This should be where all the intermediate forms of life would be that link up, say, reptiles with mammals or with birds.

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There should be a countless number of intermediate steps between reptiles and birds.

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But a tree drawing like this only shows extant and a few extinct creatures.

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It doesn't show any of the intermediate links. Now there's an important concept in evolutionary theory called phyletic gradualism, which means that complex life forms evolve from simple life forms in numerous small steps over long periods of time.

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So there ought to be many, many, many intermediate forms linking up these different plant and animals.

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Now just to be absolutely certain we understand what a transition form is, here's a silly example of the evolution of an automobile where the coach in the middle would be the transition form.

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And then here's a simplified drawing of an alleged evolutionary sequence for whales from a land mammal.

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And so the transition forms are the ones in the middle here. But as is often the case, these forms were never found.

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It's simply an artist's imagination of what these must have looked like to link these together by a series of gradual steps.

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But the fossils, intermediates, have never been found. Now just a quick summary of the two different,

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I'm calling them models of evolution versus creation.

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In evolution these simple life forms appear at first. And by that I mean in the lower sedimentary rock layers, the older rock layers would have the simple ones below.

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And then you'd gradually, as you climb up the geologic column, you'll see more and more complex creatures as you go up.

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There should be vast numbers, because of phyletic gradualism, there should be enormous numbers of these transition forms in between known species.

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And in this model there should not be any missing links. And if there is one missing it's because it hasn't been discovered yet.

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So it's just truly missing. Now in the creation model we have complex life forms appearing subtly in great variety.

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The Cambrian layers show very complex creatures and with nothing in lower layers leading up to them.

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No transition forms leading up to those complex trilobites and whatnot. There would be therefore huge gaps because God created creatures, plants and animals in kinds and they're separate.

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So in this model there's no transition forms because there's not evolution occurring. There's diversity occurring, yes, but not gradual evolution.

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And so in this model you might say that there's many missing links. Well, that's really a misnomer because they're not missing, they've just never existed.

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But if I called my bank and said, hey, I'm missing some money in my bank account, and they say, oh, how much is missing?

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I'm missing a trillion dollars. Well, that trillion dollars never existed. It's not missing, it never did exist.

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And that's what I'm saying about these transition forms. They are not, they never existed.

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So I contend that the observations from nature, from the world, is that there are no transition forms.

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And I want to try to support that a little bit today.

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But Charles Darwin, no one, none other than Charles Darwin knew about this problem.

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He said in his Origin of Species, the number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on the earth must be truly enormous.

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Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

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Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this perhaps is the most obvious and the gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.

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I give him credit for being honest about this and putting this into print.

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Charles Darwin felt like, well, paleontology was a new science as it studied these intermediate links.

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So it will be found by paleontologists. And so his theory will be supported.

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But it's been 165 years and really the situation is no different than Darwin explained right here.

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It's kind of amusing that I think every week at least there's some new article about somebody has discovered the missing link or calls it one.

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And it's just kind of funny. Sometimes I just chuckle that here's one that fills in an evolutionary blank.

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Every paleontologist wants to do that. Now here's my absolute favorite one.

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It was from one of those grocery store rags that you get at the checkout counter.

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Half alligator, half human found in Florida swamp. Okay, so this is all very fun, very teasing of evolutionary science really.

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But I think it's just hilarious. And my wife told me about this.

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And I said, oh, you need to give me a copy of that next time you go to the grocery store. And she was so embarrassed to buy it.

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She had to explain to the cashier why she was buying this silly, silly newspaper. Okay, now

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I want to turn to my test case, my model, my example of to study whether or not there's fossil evidence to support evolution.

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And we'll look at the evolution of flight as the test case. And so I've included this,

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I think it's a very beautiful painting of Icarus. And you remember the

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Greek myth of Icarus and his father Daedalus. They were imprisoned on Crete in the

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Mediterranean. They wanted to escape to the mainland. The father built wings out of feathers he could collect and wax and built them both a pair of wings.

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The dad told Icarus to not fly too high because the wax will melt and you'll fall.

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Don't fly too low or you get wet and you'll fall in. Of course, I guess Icarus must have been a teenager.

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So he flew high, melted the wax, and fell to his death in the ocean. The point of this, you can probably see where I'm going with this, is that we all know that you don't just fashion some wings, strap them on your body, and fly off over the ocean.

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There are many, many, many anatomical changes that would have to occur between a terrestrial creature and a volant creature, a creature that can fly.

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The bones need to be lighter. You need devolved wings and the right muscles.

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You need excellent respiration. There's many, many different anatomical changes that would need to occur between a terrestrial creature and a flying creature.

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So as in the case of Icarus, we just don't believe it's that easy.

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So I want to look in some detail in the evolution of flight.

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And now scientists feel like flight, the capability of flight, has evolved a few times.

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It's evolved in birds. The ostrich is a non -volant bird. And here's an example of a volant bird, a bald eagle.

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Here's an example of a non -volant insect, an ant that has no wings.

42:27

And here is an example of a volant insect, a goliath birdwing butterfly.

42:37

It has a wingspan like 12 inches. These are amazing. I think I took that picture too. Now in mammals, here's a non -flying mammal.

42:49

It's a gerbil. And so what would be an example of a, or is there an example of a flying mammal?

42:57

And I'm sure you're raising your hand saying, bats, bats. Well, I chose the flying monkey.

43:03

And well, I saw this on TV, so it must be true. It was on the internet too. So this must be true, right?

43:10

No, we don't, of course, we don't remember. We don't believe everything we see on the internet. And as you know, the only flying mammal is the bat.

43:20

Amazing creatures. Well, what about amphibians? Do we have flying amphibians? And if you do one of those famous internet searches, you'll find flying frogs.

43:31

And here's a drawing of one. And you know, just a pretend thing, but this is a real frog.

43:39

Now, and it's called, it's a common name is a flying frog. And you can see that it's, its feet are especially large with big webs between the toes.

43:50

And this, this frog is really more of a glider. It can jump out of a tree, spread its toes, and you can get a little bit of flight, a little bit of drift in one direction because it is gliding because of its feet.

44:09

Kind of like a flying squirrel. And so I should have qualified this. We're talking about powered flight.

44:16

We're not talking about gliding in this part of the talk. So here's a flying frog, but it's really just a gliding frog.

44:24

But there, there are no, there's no real flying, powered flying amphibians.

44:32

What about reptiles? Here's a non -volant reptile, an iguana. And here is an example of a flying reptile, a pteranodon, extinct flying reptile.

44:46

So what we have here is we've had, evolutionists will say that, wow, this is remarkable.

44:53

Flight has evolved four different times in birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles.

45:00

So surely as many anatomical changes that would have to occur to go from a terrestrial to a flying creature, surely there's fossil evidence of that because there's such a dramatic change in the body type.

45:19

So if anywhere there's evidence of evolution, it should be in the fossils of flying creatures.

45:27

Here is a picture of Quetzalcoatl. It says it's a pteranodon or pterosaur.

45:35

Has a wingspan of 36 feet. That's, that's as much as a, as a fighter jet.

45:43

This is, this was found in Texas. Of course, they find big things in Texas. So it's only natural.

45:50

But this is said to be the largest flying creature that ever has lived on the earth.

45:57

And I had the good opportunity to visit this museum,

46:03

Memorial Museum in University of Texas in Austin and see this fossil myself.

46:10

So I was really interested to see what they would say about it. So there was this, this plate next, next to it, this poster.

46:19

And I'm going to focus on this section here for time. It says, when pterosaurs are first seen in the fossil record, their flight apparatus is well formed.

46:30

Truly intermediate stages in evolution from a bipedal archosaur are not known at present.

46:36

So they have, they've admitted that there's no fossil evidence for, for this creature, for this flying or any flying pterosaur.

46:49

Here's a pterodactyl. This one is a specimen that the

46:57

Creation Museum has in Kentucky, again. Its name means a wing finger, ptero meaning wing, dactyl meaning finger from the

47:09

Greek. And so there, and there's no evidence of intermediate transition forms for the pterodactyl.

47:18

Now, now look, look at this a little bit. They're talking about the, the finger. The finger is this long bone right here.

47:26

And then there's the other fingers of the hand are short up here. But, but the front edge of the wing is, is held in place, oops, by that, that I think it's,

47:39

I think it's the, the ring finger of the, of the animal. And the, and the membrane wing is held back from it.

47:48

If, if, if evolution is true, then there, there had to have been a lot of intermediate forms that, that had that, that finger only half as long or a quarter as long.

48:01

It should, it can't just in one step go from, from a crawling creature with normal fingers to one that has one finger that's as long or longer than its body.

48:16

So let's move on quickly to chiroptera, the order of, for bats.

48:22

Beautiful picture. Bats are just amazing creatures. And I, I'm just always blown away by this, this picture here.

48:31

This is, this is the front cover of Science Journal. This is the, the world's most prestigious science and nature journal.

48:43

Everybody wants to publish here if they can. And what they have on the, they put on the cover here is a fossil bat called

48:51

Ichoronichorus index, said to be a fossil skeleton of an early Eocene bat.

48:57

The oldest known flying mammal was found in southwest Wyoming. Now the, the remarkable thing about this picture is the fossil is this part here.

49:09

You can see he's kind of all crunched up like he was hanging or something.

49:14

He's all, all folded in. But what they've done is they've, they've, they've done a double exposure with a modern bat over, over laying the spread out wings of a modern bat.

49:31

And they did that to emphasize that this fossil, this oldest fossil bat looks so much like a modern bat.

49:41

It's so very similar, so similar. They, they did this, this amazing double exposure.

49:48

I think that's a remarkable admission of the situation there.

49:55

So from Michael Denton's Evolution, Theory, and Crisis, one of the greatest books on evolution or disputing evolution ever written.

50:06

And there's a, there's an updated version. These pictures come from that. And so the theory is that Ichoronichorus evolved from some ground creature, like a shrew, a mouse kind of thing.

50:20

But just think about the, what the intermediate forms must have been. The, the shrew can dig, it can run, it can climb trees and so forth.

50:30

The, say, say for example, the halfway point between the shrew and, and this extinct bat.

50:38

The, the front arm, the front legs, I'll call them arms, were maybe half as long as they are.

50:44

The fingers were only half as long as they are. That creature would have to have been more fit to, to survive than, than others to pass on its genes and, and continue evolution.

50:59

Yet it would not be. It would be a monster. It would be a pathetic creature that could not dig, cannot fly, could not run.

51:09

It, it just would be, wouldn't be viable. And it would, it would be, it would, it would die to predation.

51:16

So the whole idea of intermediate forms between the shrew and, and the bat, just doing a thought experiment, you just can't, you can't imagine how that could have come about.

51:29

And so there are a lot of bat fossils. There's a modern bat fossil in the middle, all very, very similar.

51:38

This is a great quote that ties in the last two subject, subjects from a, from an evolutionist who said, for use in understanding the evolution of vertebrate flight, the early record of pterosaurs and bats is disappointing.

51:52

Their most primitive representatives are fully transformed as capable flyers. So no, no intermediates there.

52:03

Same is true of insects. All these insect fossils here, one in amber, you can recognize them.

52:11

There's a dragonfly. There's a dragon butterfly and a wasp. So you don't see evolutionary intermediates for insects as well.

52:23

But I want to focus on birds because birds are sort of the penultimate flying creature.

52:30

I guess we, we see them so much and we're so familiar with bats, with birds.

52:37

And so, and I love birds. I love taking pictures of birds. And so let's talk about birds a little bit.

52:45

And that brings us to what I think might be one of the most famous fossils ever discovered.

52:52

Archaeopteryx lithographica. Archaeopteryx is an extinct crow -sized bird said to have lived 130 to 150 million years ago in the late

53:02

Jurassic, I think it says under there, period. Yeah, Jurassic.

53:10

I got a, I got a toolbar here I don't like. Sorry about that, but it does say

53:16

Jurassic, yes. I moved it. Okay. So what an amazing, what an amazing fossil.

53:25

I had the good opportunity, the good fortune to go to the

53:31

Berlin Natural History Museum in Germany and see that fossil with my own eyes.

53:38

This is my picture of it. And it is a gorgeous specimen. Just, just look at what we have here.

53:45

We have the, the wings, the feathers are beautifully preserved. The tail feathers down here, long tail, a beautiful creature, again with the neck and the head bent way backwards.

54:03

And archaeopteryx is important because evolutionists say, well here's a, here's a good example of a, of a transition form between reptiles and birds.

54:15

Here, here's a, a poster at the, the British Museum. They had a different archaeopteryx fossil and it, they said, archaeopteryx is particularly famous as it seems to provide a missing link between modern birds and dinosaurs.

54:34

Well, it has the impression, impressions of feathers, unique, feature unique to birds.

54:40

It also has many reptilian characteristics, such as teeth, clawed fingers, and a long bony tail.

54:47

Okay. Well, there, there they've got it. They finally got themselves a transition form, but wait a minute.

54:53

Do they really? Here, here's some closeups of archaeopteryx. Indeed, it has claws on its wing.

55:01

That's interesting. Look at those claws. Very, very visible. And you should be able to see down here, it has teeth.

55:09

The, the bird has teeth, which is very unusual. There's no modern birds with teeth.

55:18

The teeth in birds are as rare as hens' teeth. And so, so it does have some interesting characteristics.

55:26

And, and evolutionists will say, well, it's, it's therefore a transition form because it had these reptile -like features.

55:33

It has teeth, and modern birds don't have teeth. Had a long bony tail, which is the vestige of its reptile ancestry.

55:40

Had a shallow breastbone, so it must have been a poor flyer. And it has claws on its wing, showing transitional development of the wing from the leg.

55:51

Okay. Well, not so fast. Let's consider instead that there are fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals with and without teeth.

56:03

If you were an older crowd, I might say some of you have teeth and some of you don't. But probably everybody here has teeth.

56:11

And some fossil birds, other fossil birds had teeth as well. And its teeth differ distinctly from those of reptiles.

56:22

Archaeopteryx, they can, they can tell it had hollow bones. And its tail was actually very similar to that of a swan.

56:31

The Archaeopteryx had a furcula, which is the wishbone for attachment of flight muscles and feet designed for perching.

56:39

So, it's considered to be a volant bird, capable of powered flight.

56:50

And considering the claws on the wings, some modern birds have claws on the wings, like the ostrich, the hwatsin, and the turaco.

56:59

Now, in the hwatsin, I think the turaco, it's the juveniles that have claws on their wings, helps them to climb back up into the tree if they have to jump out to avoid a predator.

57:12

And I've seen pictures of these. So, they're, but they lose them.

57:18

Those claws are lost in those two birds when they, when they develop, when they become adults.

57:27

Now, Archaeopteryx, they can tell it also had a bird -like skull with a movable upper and lower jaw.

57:34

And I don't know if you can see my hand here, but with reptiles, it's only the lower jaw that moves, like us.

57:46

And with birds, they can move the upper and lower parts of their beak.

57:53

So, Archaeopteryx had that kind of beak. And importantly,

58:00

Archaeopteryx had feathers, modern flight feathers. Now, I wanted to introduce feathers, and I had picked this picture because I thought it was just beautiful.

58:12

Then it occurred to me, it has a Donald Trump hairstyle. So, I've been keeping this one in there.

58:19

I took this picture in Austria, and I used it for years before Donald Trump came on the scene.

58:27

I thought, hey, this is a Donald Trump bird. So, let's say just a couple words about feathers.

58:36

Feathers are incredible. You could spend hours talking about feathers and the design that we see in feathers, the barbs and barbules seen under microscopic examination.

58:52

But the important point I want to bring up is that the evolutionists will say, well, feathers aren't so hard to explain.

58:58

The reptile scales, they just elongated, frayed a little bit, and then finally, over many, many thousands or millions of years, they evolved into feathers.

59:11

I think that's a ludicrous idea. Reptile scales are just skins.

59:19

They're just skin folds. They're like pleats in your drapes. And that's why there's a snake skin up there, showing how they're all connected there.

59:30

But the scales, what we call scales, they're actually all connected and just like little folds.

59:39

And also, feathers grow out of a follicle. The hair, mammal hairs grow out of follicles also.

59:48

So, the evolutionists would have to explain how a scale would form a follicle and form a feather as well.

59:58

I think they should instead say that birds evolved from mammals with hair.

01:00:04

So, anyhow, feathers are a huge problem for evolutionary explanations. So, my conclusions about Archaeopteryx is that it is not an example of a transition form and does not provide support for evolution.

01:00:22

It's better understood as just a unique extinct bird species. Here's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould, probably the leading evolutionist, paleontologist of the last century.

01:00:40

He was a Harvard professor. He's deceased. He wrote, the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

01:00:54

The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches.

01:01:00

The rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

01:01:07

He did have a way of being honest about the evidence, and I appreciate that in that scientist.

01:01:16

So, my conclusions are then that the fossil record reveals the appearance of complex plants and animals with no evidence of transition forms, and therefore contradicts the major prediction of evolutionary theory.

01:01:35

Here's a picture I took at the Grand Canyon. Really, these layers, the fossils, are a testament.

01:01:44

They're stones crying out for attention, crying out that there's a creator.

01:01:51

And just as Noah trusted God for salvation from the flood, so too we must repent and trust

01:01:58

God for salvation from the penalty of our sins through faith in his son alone, the

01:02:04

Lord Jesus Christ. There are many, many, many, many books and videos and resources, websites to consider here.

01:02:17

I just put up a couple here. This fairly recent book, The Fossils Still Say No, by Jeffrey Tompkins from from ICR, Institute of Creation Research, is excellent.

01:02:30

It's quite recent. It's a follow -up of Duane Gish, who's really the famous scientist with ICR that talked about fossils and wrote a couple books on the subject.

01:02:44

This is kind of like the third book in that sequence. After the groundbreaking work of Duane Gish.

01:02:54

This Evolution's Achilles Heels is good in many ways, not just not just paleontology, but biology and genetics and everything.

01:03:05

The DVD is wonderful and the book is good. And then

01:03:11

I put a recent podcast or YouTube video down there of Joel Tay from Creation Ministries International.

01:03:23

I thought he did a good job of talking about dinosaur evolution into birds, so -called evolution into birds.

01:03:33

So you could find it by searching those words.

01:03:39

So anyway, Terri, that concludes my talk. Well that was very, oh go ahead

01:03:47

Robin. I was gonna say that was really good. I don't think we had any questions in the chat, but I had a few questions.

01:03:58

Did you want to ask some on the recording? I just, well I had asked where that location,

01:04:05

Fostrum, what is it? Fluorescent? Yeah, right, the fossil beds.

01:04:12

Fluorescent, but it was answered by Jeff and by Terri. Yes, I think it's in southern

01:04:19

Colorado, southwestern Colorado. Yeah, and it turns out that someone we know actually just moved there.

01:04:29

So that was weird. Road trip. Yeah, there you go Terri, take a road trip to see your friend.

01:04:37

There was, I'm trying to think of what other question I had. I had that and - I have a question for Steve, if I could, when you're finished

01:04:45

Robin. Sure, go ahead. So Steve, you know, the scientific method says, you know, you're supposed, theories are supposed to be based on observational evidence and then repeatable experiments in the laboratory if possible.

01:04:59

So, you know, so they say they can't, well okay, so two questions I have. One, have they tried to do any experiments in the laboratory, you know, to try to see any makings of how fossils would be formed?

01:05:13

And then my second part of the question is, okay, so you can't get the time frames involved obviously, but have they done any kind of, you know, detailed computer simulations?

01:05:22

You know, you had your slide at the beginning there showing the fish, you know, and it dies, it sinks in the water and stuff like, have they done any computer simulations to try to simulate, like when creatures die, how they would actually get buried and how they actually get to these fossils we see, besides from a global flood?

01:05:43

Yeah, one book, I have a small book by, I think it's

01:05:50

Jared Coyne, a famous dinosaur paleontologist, and he talks about fossils can be formed in a matter of weeks.

01:06:04

They show examples, principally when the plant or the animal is put into like a yellowstone kind of a situation with a high mineral content of a bed or something, or a hot pool.

01:06:26

And so they actually can form fairly rapidly. But modeling on it,

01:06:34

I don't know how you would model necessarily. There wasn't time to talk, and I'm really not an expert on the so -called feathered dinosaurs.

01:06:46

You know, the evolutionists are desperate to see some sort of evidence of birds evolving from dinosaurs.

01:06:53

So, they're finding, if they find some sort of fuzz that, you know, on a dinosaur fossil, they say, oh look, it's proto -feathered.

01:07:03

Beginning of feathers or whatever, yeah, proto -feathered. Yeah, and that's mostly been disputed and discredited by other evolutionists.

01:07:15

That Joel Tate talk down there, it used to be on the screen there, he talks about that quite a bit.

01:07:24

There have been studies by secular scientists of burying like shark and dolphin in the ground and digging them up after a year, and they find that the skin has frayed into that same kind of fuzz.

01:07:44

And they say it's just the breakdown of collagen, the skin collagen, that will break down and create these long hairs or fuzz that folks want to say is our proto -feathers.

01:07:57

So, that's sort of an experiment you might think about. I think

01:08:02

John Whitmore, geologist at Cedarville University, has done some work.

01:08:12

He's looked at why some fish look like they've exploded, and he has a lot of examples, and I think some experimental work showing how the buried creature can build up pressure and blow apart.

01:08:33

Wow. Okay, thanks. Well, I think we're going to wrap up the recorded part of our program for tonight.

01:08:41

So, I'm going to turn off your sharing, and I'm going to ask you, Steve, if you could just share with everybody how they can find your website,

01:08:49

Canopy Ministries, is that right? The ministry that you're a part of? Yeah, it's canopyministries .org,

01:08:58

and that will take you to our website. It has the other speakers that we have.

01:09:06

We're a small group up here in northeast Tennessee, and founded by a businessman originally.

01:09:16

I became a close friend of Ken Ham and Gary Parker, and knows many of the folks in the creation science area, and I joined him.

01:09:29

You're having Dr. Alan White speak in a couple of weeks. He's another organic chemist, just like myself.

01:09:37

He's trained at Harvard. So, you know, that bastion of a conservative think in Harvard.

01:09:48

But another Bible -believing creationist. All right, well, and we are

01:09:59

Creation Fellowship Santee, and you can find a list of our upcoming speakers by going to tinyurl .com

01:10:06

forward slash CF Santee. That's C -like creation, F -like fellowship.

01:10:12

Santee is spelled S -A -N -T -E -E, and just to let you know, our next presentation will be two weeks from tonight.

01:10:20

It's February 13th, and we'll be welcoming back Dr. Aaron Judkins. He's the maverick archaeologist, and he'll be asking the question, is there evidence for a six -day creation?

01:10:32

So, you won't want to miss that. In the meantime, thank you again, Dr. Steve Fowling for joining us tonight.