Archaeoraptor and Learning from Mistakes

Proponents of particles-to-poultry evolution have an unpleasant habit of seeing things that they want to see — even though there's nothing there to see. We keep seeing announcements about some or other"discovery" supporting evolution, only to find out that evolutionists saddled up the wrong horse again. Funny how the retractions don't get nearly as much press as the original objects of excitement, isn't it?

Modified Piltdown Gang by John Cooke (1915) with image from openclipart

The most notorious example of seeing what isn't there is probably the Piltdown Man fraud. That sidewinder fooled much of the scientific establishment for over forty years! Somewhat less famous was another fraud, Archaeoraptor. When this one was discovered, it was dubbed the "Piltdown Chicken". Something they have in common is that materialists were so intent on making the Creator irrelevant that they believed lies. (Perhaps they rush into believing nonsense because there's no real evidence to support their paradigm?) Here's a hint, fellas: follow the money and the glory, since you're giving neither to God.

Scientists still don’t know how the Archaeoraptor specimen was smuggled out of China and ended up in the United States. We do know that in 1998 Stephen Czerkas, curator of the Dinosaur Museum in Utah, purchased it for the tidy sum of $80,000. Czerkas labored with Xu Xing of China’s prestigious Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and Phillip Currie to study the specimen. The National Geographic Society sponsored the project.

Archaeoraptor’s debut was accomplished with widespread publicity. National Geographic’s November 1999 press release used language remarkably similar to other fossil forgeries—such as the 1913 description of Piltdown Man and the 2009 description of Ida, a lemur-like animal thought to document human evolution. In the Archaeoraptor press release, Czerkas states, “It’s a missing link that has the advanced characters of birds and undeniable dinosaurian characters as well.”

To read the entire article in context, click on "Major Evolutionary Blunders: The Imaginary Archaeoraptor". For additional in-depth information, click on these two: "The Frauds Of Evolution #11: Frauds Of A Feather –“Feathered” Dinosaurs, Homology And The Archaeoraptor Hoax" as well as "The Frauds Of Evolution #12: Frauds Of A Feather — NationalGeographic’s Archaeoraptor Hoax Part 2".