Eodromaeus | Playing Chess with Pigeons

A visual approximation.

Casey Luskin, the Discoveryless Institute’s resident attack chihuahua, is on a roll. This time he’s gone off on a tangent about a recent find of yet another dinosaur fossil with evidence of protofeathers, Sciurumimus albersdoerferi and dinosaur evolution in general.

Luskin: The media that loyally serve Big Science are at it again, overstating the finds of a scientific paper to promote an evolutionary icon. This time, the icon is feathered dinosaurs, representing the purported ancestral relationship between dinos and birds. (Luskin 2012)

Ah, if only. If only Mr. Luskin’s conspiratorial fantasy were true and the media was that on the ball. The fact of the matter is that defenders of science education like me often cringe at the mischaracterizations and overstatements that come out of the popular media regarding evolution. I am constantly shaking my head and yelling at the TV or radio “no, that’s not what that means at all”, or words to that effect.

I wish I had a nickel (because being underemployed I could really use the money) for every time a silly reporter, while talking about some fossil discovery, described it as “overthrowing everything we thought we knew about the evolution of X”.

That is absolute bollocks, 99% of the time.

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The Institute for Creation Research has graced us once again with a brilliant display of their scientific prowess. This time the focus of their efforts revolves around the recently published description of a newly unearthed dinosaur species Eodromaeus murphi.

Eodromaeus is a small (slightly over a meter in length) South American dinosaur from the mid-Triassic (230 MYA). This date makes it one of the earliest dinosaurs and its describers, Ricardo Martinez et al., argue that it should be classified as a basal theropod ―the carnivorous branch of the “lizard-hipped” or saurischian dinosaurs (Martinez et al., 2011).

What has ICR’s, or more specifically ICR “science writer” Brian Thomas‘ knickers in a twist is that in the same paper in which they describe Eodromaeus the authors also argue for the reclassification of another dinosaur, Eoraptor (described back in the early 1990’s), which is from the same location and roughly the same time period as Eodromaeus.

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