Dino to Bird Finger Evolution

18 June 2009

A fossil dinosaur called Limusaurus inextricabilis was found in Junggar Basin of Xinjiang in northwestern China and is said to be a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds. The basis for this claim is centered around the skull having no teeth (indicating it may have had a beak) and its finger bone structure.

Humans have five finger digits labeled from thumb to pinky I, II, III, IV, and V. Since most animals have a common design they also share common arm/wrist/hand structures. Some people that believe in evolution have attributed this to a common ancestor and therefore label dinosaur and bird hand digits using the same numbers 1 through 5. This becomes a problem for evolutionists because developmental observation has shown birds have digits II, III, and IV while fossil evidence indicates dinosaurs have digits I, II, and III. If dinosaurs evolved into birds then the dinosaur hand would have had to evolve a fourth digit and loose the first digit.

This new Limusaurus fossil shows something very different from the standard model of how bird digits evolved. The digit number is determined by where the bone is anchored to the wrist and by the number of bones in the finger. Limusaurus has what appears to be a very short first digit and a extended second digit with no signs of a new fourth digit. This fossil therefore shows evidence contrary to the standard model of loosing one digit and adding another. James Clark of George Washington University and Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing have hypothesized a new model of finger evolution claiming that instead of loosing one digit and adding another the fingers must have somehow changed the number of bones in the digit while maintaining its location on the wrist. There is no experimental or observational evidence of this and most evolutionary scientists would say the observational embryonic development shows just the opposite.

This fossil is not proof that evolution happened but is proof that evolution could not have happened due to the dissimilar bone structure. No fossil is proof of evolution. No amount of observational science performed on a fossil can tell you if that creature turned into a different kind of animal sometime in the past. The evidence supports that this creature was designed to function just fine in its environment and does not show any signs of useless or vestigial features. There are several other odd creatures around today like the platypus, the aye-aye lemur, or the tarsier that are each uniquely suited for their environment.

The finger evolution is the least of the worries if you are trying to turn a dinosaur into a bird. There are thousands of differences between birds and dinosaurs and changing one piece at a time would be detrimental to its survival. Slow gradual changes won't leave you with a new better animal, it will leave you with a deformed mutant that is unable to survive.

Note: No evidence of feathers was found. The artist drew feathers because of the presupposition that dinosaurs turned into birds.

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