by Dr Jerry Bergman

A cover story in a recent Smithsonian Magazine focuses on the modern Chinese boom in dinosaur and other fossil discoveries.[1] Many of the discoveries were made in the Liaoning and nearby provinces in China. Actually, so many finds were made that a new 28 million dollar building is being constructed to display a few of the more valuable fossil discoveries. The building, located in a desolate area 250 miles northeast of Beijing, expects to attract millions of visitors to experience the epicenter of paleontological discoveries that rivals the dinosaur discoveries in the late 19th century American West. Among the early discoveries made in Liaoning include claims of the first “feathered” dinosaur, now named Sinosauropteryx, “the China dragon bird.” The finder sold one half of the fossil to a museum and the other half, a mirror of the first half, to another museum.

Thus began the fossil gold rush that, so far, has yielded what are claimed to be over 40 dinosaur species.[2] Many (but not all) secular scientists consider so-called “feathered dinosaurs” strong evidence of dinosaurs evolving into birds. Clearly defined anatomy-based species categories exist for ‘bird’ and ‘dinosaur,’ but evolution requires some bird-dinosaur transition, and this is where the fossils found in China fit in. [3] Only birds, not mammals or reptiles, have modern flight feathers. Furthermore, with a possible few controversial exceptions, all extinct animals with feathers were birds. Even the proteins in bird feathers, called keratins, are unique. [4]

Not only dinosaur fossils have been found in the Liaoning region, but an entire, well-preserved ancient world, a picture of the world as it existed in the distant past, which was dated in the Darwin timescale at 131 to 120 million years ago. This is an important window when evolutionists believe dinosaurs were evolving into birds; thus, we could expect to find some clear evidence of transitional creatures.[5] The cache of the Liaoning region so far includes 24 winged flying reptiles called pterosaurs, and over 53 ancient bird species, plus flowering plants, spiders, and a variety of crustaceans, insects, snails, clams, and even algae and moss.[6] The area must have at one time been a forest because ferns, pine, cypress, ginkgo and other trees were found there. The fossils found are mostly articulated skeletons located in slabs of stone that have to be split in half or broken open to locate the skeleton. They look like “something had swatted the bird out of the sky and instantly entombed it in rock,” something like a giant flood.[7]

One important result was that no evidence for the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds was found in the Liaoning Province fossils. This is a problem because in the Liaoning Province birds are found nearby the dinosaurs they supposedly evolved from, yet no transitional fossils which are part dinosaur and part bird have been found to link dinosaurs to birds. One claim was made of such a find which we will discuss. If the evolution of dinosaurs into birds occurred, we would expect that many transitional forms, or at least some, would be discovered among the thousands of fossils found in the Liaoning Province.

Thus, when a transitional form was announced in 1999, it caused worldwide excitement. The transition, called Archaeoraptor, made headlines. The November 1999 National Geographic cover[8] excitedly reported “It’s a Missing Link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could fly.” The full color article added it “is a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”[9] Later, an imaging technique called Cross Section Computerized Tomography revealed it to be a sloppy forgery, built from three separate layers. Two (the top and bottom) were constructed from natural material, and one (the middle layer) was human added. The bottom layer was a piece of shale that was used as the backing on which was placed grout to hold the dozens of separate pieces of rock and bone used to construct the now-proven forgery.[10]

Archaeoraptor is evidently only the tip of a large forgery pile. The “flood of ‘improved,’ reconfigured and composite” fossils now in existence is enormous. Many have ended up in the world’s museums, and have caused major problems in Darwinists’ efforts to defend various evolution theories.[11] What some describe as a “flood of sham fossils pouring out of China” has, with good reason, caused no small number of persons to be skeptical of all new fossil finds from China.[12] One report listed 107 journal retractions of research papers by Chinese authors whose research was questionable. [13] In 2003, evolutionary fossil bird expert Alan Feduccia, referring to the famous Archaeoraptor ‘feathered dinosaur’ fossil widely touted by the National Geographic that turned out to be a fake, stated that

Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark