By Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

Sankar Chatterjee says he wrote The Rise of Birds for an audience beyond the paleontological community. If one is willing to skim through the technical details, there is much the layman can learn about bird distinctions and alleged bird evolution. The many detailed drawings are especially helpful for people who know nothing about bird anatomy.

Chatterjee seems to have written this book to convince his peers, and all who read it, that Protoavis texensis is a bird. I was convinced. Chatterjee’s graduate students uncovered two crow-sized skeletons May 21, 1986 in the Dockum Formation of West Texas. If Protoavis is a bird, it replaces Archaeopteryx as the earliest bird although Archaeopteryx is still the most "primitive". Evolutionists portray Archaeopteryx as the best example of a transition form, even though few experts think it is the ancestor of birds, ancient or modern. Chatterjee considers Archaeopteryx a "living fossil" of the late Jurassic. It is an evolutionary side branch, a dead-end with no descendents. It did not give rise to modern birds. Protoavis was a sister group of other early birds that produced modern birds (p. 222). John Ostrom already felt that Archaeopteryx wasn’t on the main line to modern birds before Protoavis was discovered. [Ostrom]

If few paleontologists regard Archaeopteryx as the ancestor of birds, why do people still teach that it is the best example of a transition form? It is because it seems to be a mosaic of reptilian and avian features. They ignore the fact that many living birds have wing claws. Because Archaeopteryx has them, it makes Archaeopteryx special and proves it was a straying evolutionary descendent of the actual bird ancestor.

Protoavis is more like living birds than Archaeopteryx but Chatterjee found it in sediments 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx, which is 150 million years old according to evolutionists. For the last 12 years, most bird experts have rejected Protoavis as a bird. Due to the poor condition of the Protoavis fossils. Larry Martin, a bird paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas, considers their poor preservation "road kill." However Martin says, "There’s going to be a lot of people with Archaeopteryx eggs on their face." [Anderson] Road kill it may be, but one is not hard pressed to identify a bird smartly hugging the road. From Chatterjee’s extensive characterization of Protoavis, it is clear that Protoavis qualifies as a bird. For instance, it has quill knobs on its forearm, avian brain shape, avian eye sockets, and bird-like jaw joints (pp. 44-76).

If Protoavis is truly a bird, the timing of bird origins presents an awkward problem. Chatterjee originally reported that the Protoavis fossils are 225 million years old. [Nature] Calibration of the fossil record puts the origin of birds into early or mid-Triassic Period (p. 222). In the book’s forward, Lawrence Witmer writes that there are not many dinosaurs of any kind older than Protoavis (p. ix). According to Witmer, the evolution of theropods, the supposed ancestors of birds, must have happened in a very short time, because Protoavis appears so early in the fossil record.

The maniraptors, which gave rise to the dromaeosaurs, appeared only a few million years before Protoavis according to Chatterjee’s time line (p. 223). Protoavis does not represent the start of bird evolution, because it is already a bird in every respect, being more "advanced" than Archaeopteryx. Instead, it represents a long period of evolutionary history, a history that surely saw the beginning of the first bird and the evolution of "primitive" birds leading to Archaeopteryx and Protoavis if evolution is true. There had to be a history of animals not much different than a coelurosaur, a small theropod called Deinonychus antirrhopus, which sequentially evolved into the hypothetical Proavis, the first bird. Archaeopteryx was mistaken for one of these small theropods until John Ostrom discovered the error.

Chatterjee says that a descendent of coelurosaurs became a tree dweller, a creature able to climb trees and spend most of its life in or near trees. Chatterjee details the specialized skeletal features evolved to produce the first birds (p. 163). Included in his hypothesis is the development of the brain and specialized visual features. One seldom considers the tremendous changes that would have to take place to produce a new type of organism. Here are the basic evolutionary steps from dinosaur to bird as Chatterjee imagines them:

1. A theropod that was a two-legged ground walker (cursor) with small forelimbs not used in locomotion. This creature was digitigrade, meaning it walked on its digits with the hind part of the foot raised up, similar to cats and dogs, but having only three toes (tridactyl).
2. A coelurosaur capable of browsing in trees, its brain enlarged to view the world in 3-D rather than as the 2-D ground walker, having better coordination and balance, long grasping hands, with forearms capable of a wide range of motion.
3. A maniraptor capable of climbing (scansorial adaptation) and an able parachuter with swivel wrist joint, elongated ilium, reversed pubis, bony sternum, a stiffened tail for climbing tree trunks, symmetrical movement of limbs, rudimentary flight stroke, and ability to stretch out forelimbs with patagium to parachute. Deinonychus and Velociraptor belong to this group.
4. An avian, such as Archaeopteryx, with flight feathers, a furcula (wishbone) is the most "primitive" bird.

Chatterjee describes many skeletal changes that must have taken place for the evolution of non-avian dinosaurs into avian dinosaurs. You can see he’s already hedged his bet by the terms he uses. He often employs the use of cladograms, showing the evolutionary progression from dinosaurs to birds. A cladogram is a branching diagrammatic tree used to illustrate the assumed evolution and descent of diverse groups of animals.

Drawings in the book show the difference between the "lizard-hipped" pelvic girdle of the theropods, like Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus, and that of the modern birds. Chatterjee explains that the three pelvic bones of the dromaeosaurs—the ilium, ischium, and pubis--were remodeled as assumed proavian dinosaurs evolved into birds. These three bones became fused in birds and the pubis was rotated backward in the process (p. 26).

Both his consistent use of cladograms and making statements about analogous structures in theropods becoming more like the structures in birds shows that he assumes these changes must have occurred. It probably has not occurred to him, and to most evolutionists, that his assumptions concerning evolutionary sequences are not the same as empirical observations. It is very difficult to get some evolutionists to realize that evolutionary theory is not empirical science because they believe evolution is a fact.

Anderson, Alun, "Early Bird Threatens Archaeopteryx’s Perch," Science, p. 35, 5 July 1991.

Nature 322:677 (1986), "Fossil bird shakes evolutionary hypothesis."

Ostrom, John, "Origin of Birds," lecture for MACUB Conference at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York (1983).