The Flap about Bird Wings in Amber
Amber is rather well known as jewellery, and people can see tiny insects and things that have been trapped inside this tree sap (resin, really) before it hardened. (Then it gets assigned several million Darwin years so they can propagate the false notion that Earth is old.) The stuff is very sticky and has led to the doom of many creatures (sort of like sin does to us), and some critters are a bit large, such as the gecko pictured below.
People got mighty agitated when bird wings were found in amber. The bones of the wings were tiny, but what was there was very well preserved. These were wings with feathers — and interfered again with the dinosaur-to-bird evolution timeline. What's an evolutionist to do, especially since the journal making the report didn't see the need to bow to evolution? Some atheopaths were using the news as refutation for creation science. Not hardly! Using scientific circular reasoning and convenient re-dating, these owlhoots tried to blow smoke in our eyes. But they can't escape the fact that by their own dating assumptions, birds were contemporaries of dinosaurs — just like the Bible indicates about creation week.
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| Image credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 / PG Palmer |
The modern appearance is empirical. The date is philosophical.To stick to the subject, click on "Bird Wings Found in Amber". UPDATES: On July 8, 2016, Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research was interviewed on Real Science Radio about this subject. To hear that, click on "Brian Thomas: Two Bird Wings in Amber Means..." Also, Mr. Thomas' article at the ICR Website was published on July 11. To read that, click on "Stunning Amber Bird Wings".
All the science journalists are talking about the bird feathers found in amber (solidified tree sap). The unique specimens from Myanmar (formerly Burma), announced in Nature Communications, provide the clearest evidence yet for bird feather structure and color in fossils. The asymmetrical flight feathers, with claws on the wing tips, indicate that the extinct birds that were strong flyers. Some secondary feathers, tissue and bone were also preserved, including the alula. The remains are said to be mummified, but no original biological material was reported. The feathers show patterning with stripes and spots, and for the first time in amber, show attachments to bone, giving paleontologists additional anatomical details to work with.