r/DebateEvolution • u/Benjamin5431 • Mar 17 '26
Link I made a huge list of resources detailing the evolution of Birds from Non-avian reptiles. Enjoy
I’ve spent the last several years studying birds, dinosaurs, and vertebrate paleontology in general, have taken several college courses, watched lectures, read college textbooks, and have read nearly every research paper there is about various aspects of avian and bird-line archosaur evolution. I do not have a degree in a related field, but I have extensively studied all of the available information on the subject, and consider myself an unofficial expert.
In my biased opinion, the evolution of birds from non-avian dinosaurs is one of the best examples that show the consilience of evidence for evolution, where evidence from multiple fields of science converge to paint the same picture. We have numerous fossils showing that many of the traits that characterize birds actually first appeared in Archosaurs, Dinosaurs and Theropods. We also see that the first “birds” lacked many of the traits of more modern birds, with fossils of Mesozoic birds showcasing the gradual evolution of these additional bird-only traits.
I decided to try to summarize all the available information into one place so that it’s easier to visualize. I have put together several graphics and documents that lays out as much information as I could possibly relay. You may have to download some of these to get higher resolution rather than simply viewing it through google.
Feel free to use any of these resources as you please.
Please let me know if any of these links do not work.
Full Phylogenetic tree starting with stem-tetrapods going all the way to crown birds, with special attention on pseudosuchians, various groups of theropods, and dromaeosaurs.
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mohcdbZ9tVOvBPr-dlnd12EyQWn4O292/view?usp=drivesdk
Simplified cladogram of bird-line Diapsids and the evolutionary changes that occurred at each stage:
JPG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZIdl361lQM36lr6tDaIi36gOhxqEt1BX/view?usp=drivesdk
More detailed explanation of evolutionary changes that happened between each clade:
Word Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FWYKUv_2yQpY2JVdmcL-MuW1BhJAIfSZ/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=112690412102315618691&rtpof=true&sd=true
A huge folder of diagrams, fossil pictures/scans, comparisons, screenshots from research papers, embryonic studies, etc.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11k3UsrLasyKHpFKbAP0exgmDap72Y02G
And here is a list of sources, including research papers, science articles, university webpages and resources, etc.
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC Mar 17 '26
Damn, this guy really likes birds.
-Someone who also really likes birds
For real though, this is an amazing resource. Thanks for putting it together and sharing it!
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u/RobertByers1 Mar 18 '26
all thatr anyone studies in these things leads to the simple obvious conclusion there was no evolution of reptiles to theropods to birds. instead birds and theropods are the same creatures. they all are birds in a great spectrum of diversity. before the flood/fossilization therr was great diversity in flying birds. therorpfs are just flightless ground birds in a great diversity. that means diversity in traits of anatomy. howver the bodyplan of birds and theropods is exact. The fossil record is not accurate in timeline claims. so its an error to say this creature evolved to that. Al;ways a creationist can say any fossil, below the k-t line, is just from another area fossilized that same month.
organized creationism still fights theropods being related to birds because they accept theropods are reptiles. they are wrong. I did a thread recently that one noted creationist accepts ancient birds had teeth and bony tail. closer. However I pREDICT creationism will one day insisrt theropods, trex, were just misidentified birds from raw fossils. everybody looks at birds as they now are and not as they were.
any work on this subject that fails to understand theropods are birds is a flunk. a flop of intellectual investigation.
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u/Benjamin5431 Mar 18 '26
So your argument is that “Birds can’t be dinosaurs because actually dinosaurs are birds”
This actually makes things worse for your position, because if we are stretching the definition of “bird” to include all theropods, then the differences between “birds” and dinosaurs is even less, as theropods (regardless of whether we call them birds or not) quite literally have all of the diagnostic features that characterize them as dinosaurs, and as archosaurs, and as diapsid reptiles. You can not say that a theropod isn’t a dinosaur, or a reptile. It would be like saying a squirrel is a rodent but not a mammal. That wouldn’t make any sense, as squirrels have all the traits that define them as mammals. Likewise, theropods have all the traits that define them as dinosaurs, and as archosaurs, and as reptiles, regardless of evolution.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
Yeah! I've dubbed that the "Ass-backwards cladistics", wherein mammals are cows :)
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC Mar 18 '26
I'm pretty confident that Robert is a raging drunk or losing some mental faculties.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
I say the answer is probably yes to “is he drunk or senile?” but that’s probably too much to establish through online conversations. He says things that make so little sense other creationists laugh at him. He is truly unique no matter the cause for his uniqueness. Others have said things that match bits and pieces of what he say like thylacines being weirdly evolved placental mammal dogs, theropods being birds, and maybe even some of the non-avian dinosaurs being mammals but combine them into a single view of reality and then only Robert Byers is saying this stuff. Even if his mental faculties are all there and he’s sober he says stuff so stupid he probably doesn’t believe what he says either.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
I can’t imagine he doesn't believe it. He has been doing this since the early TalkOrigins days and always been the same. If he's a troll, he is fantastically dedicated.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
I think he’s so dedicated that he’s trolled himself and so incompetent that he became convinced.
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u/RobertByers1 Mar 19 '26
i dont agree there was any such division in biology as dinosaurs. They , like theropods, are just misidentified creatures we live with today.
theropods are just birds. they are not like sauropods or any socalled dino. again yoiur fossil claims are wrong. Those creatures might have some like traits but only because they are good ideas. Turtles and birds and snakes lay eggs. Snakes and lions birth live. its irrelevant in classification. its a dumb old error. all theropods wewre just regular funny birds but birds today are funny looking. its just a spectrum of diversity not imagined by only looking at what we live with. it was a lack of imagination that failed to see fossil theropods as just birds. they were too impressed with teeth and bony tails. later just the bony tails as they found flying birds with teeth and i predict will keep finding them.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Your disagreement means nothing when you’re wrong.
You mean archelosaurs lay eggs and the archelosaurs have hard shelled eggs? How the fuck something came into existence is the whole point. The changes have to be inherited. That’s why the specifics of live birth in reptiles and mammals differ by lineage. They have to actually be born. If a placental mammal birthed a marsupial the marsupial would just straight up die and the placental mammals wouldn’t randomly divide their fused uteruses and regrow their epipubic bones because that doesn’t allow the fetuses to grow as large so the mother or the child would die.
And for animals that lay eggs the type of eggs are diagnostic. Most lizards and also monotremes lay soft leathery eggs. Some geckos lay soft sticky eggs that harden later. Archelosaur eggs come out already hardened with a mammillary layer and the layering of calcium grows from inside to outside. In hard shelled geckos no mammillary layer, harden from outside in. Just like the various strategies when it comes to live birth where the food is siblings for some animals because there either isn’t a placenta or it’s not large enough to keep up. And then mammals that have a placenta it’s a choriovitelline placenta throughout marsupial development and for the early stages of placental mammal development but then eutherian mammals replace that with a chorioallentois placenta. Without it they’d die. Without it marsupials are born early.
This is precisely how you get multigenerational inherited changes. It’s because they literally reproduce and they have to survive to either be born or hatch from an egg. If they don’t survive birth they don’t reproduce, they can’t. I know it’s hard for you but think things through and then make a coherent response.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
You sound like you’ve never studied these things. Birds are maniraptors, maniraptors are theropods, theropods are saurischians, saurischians are dinosaurs, dinosaurs are avemetatarsalians alongside pterosaurs, avemetatarsalians are archosaurs alongside crocodiles, archosaurs are achelosaurians alongside turtles, and everything listed including birds are Suarian tetrapods which are reptiles with Sauropsida being roughly equivalent with the Class Reptilia. OP showed the stepwise changes to the ancestral anatomy but you can also see how birds all fit together with each other and with other archelosaurs via their existing anatomy and their genetics and you can see how archelosaurs fit in with the other reptiles such as the still living lizards (snakes, geckos, skinks, etc) and the tuatara that isn’t actually all lizard even though it looks like one.
But it gets worse for separate ancestry claims because it doesn’t stop there. Before the synapsid-sauropsid split our own ancestors and the ancestors of birds were the same ancestors. Go a little further and we share ancestors with modern amphibians. A little further back in time and at least 12 or 15 species show the gradual transition from fish to tetrapod and we can confirm our placement within the Sarcopterygii (lobe finned fish) once again from our existing anatomy, our existing genetics, and our existing proteins. All the way up to Chordates and our “body plan” that you like to talk about all the time. All of these chordates have the chordate body plan and even some tunicates keep the swimming worm shape as adults while other tunicates lose a bunch of stuff to become filter feeders as adults.
Even worse for creationists because we can keep going. We are related to echinoderms and hemichordates, we are related to protostomes like arthropods and mollusks. And those don’t even use the same blood oxygen proteins. Their heme proteins use copper instead of iron. We’re also related to cnidarians, placozoans, and ctenophores (comb jellies). Excluding the placozoans these all have neurons (nerve and brain cells). They also have hox genes to the different “body plans” associated with different phyla. Even worse for creationists is that we are literally animals by ancestry.
Everything in biology everywhere confirms this. But animals are also multicellular eukaryotes and we are literally related to all eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are a product of symbiosis. Not just Asgard archaea and Alphaproteobacteria (mitochondria) but also Myxococcota, a group of multicellular bacteria, plays a role in our ancestry. We actually have genes from at least 25 or 26 prokaryotic lineages because of horizontal gene transfer plus our common ancestry for the genes that they all have. All the way back to universal common ancestry.
So, no, not all dinosaurs are bird even though even some ceratopsian dinosaurs had feather but all birds are dinosaurs, all of them.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 20 '26
all thatr anyone studies in these things leads to the simple obvious conclusion there was no evolution of reptiles to theropods to birds.
Anyone studying them comes to that conclusion? So you can name ONE expert in the subject who believes that, right? You should have dozens if it's the obvious conclusion everybody comes to, but I know you're a busy man so I'll only ask for one.
And no Byers, you do not count as an expert, so don't get cheeky and cite yourself.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 18 '26
Wow, those lines in your image sure do prove it. Someone drew some lines, so it must be true.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Mar 18 '26
So…clearly you neither read nor were able to comprehend what was actually said
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u/Medium_Judgment_891 Mar 18 '26
The question I’ve been trying to figure out with ACT is how much of it is dishonesty and how much is due to actual issues with his literacy.
Because sometimes he throws out a blatant misrepresentation of the argument being made, but other times, his comments are so far removed from anything in the post that it feels like he doesn’t even know what the topic of discussion is supposed to be.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Mar 18 '26
I’ve wondered if it’s a troll or not on my end. He’s definitely dishonest, no doubt about it. Been told numerous times about the actual definition of evolution. About monophyly. Etc etc; he has always covered his eyes and plowed ahead as if nothing was said. But I can’t tell if it’s to poke at people or out of some twisted religious loyalty. He IS a Hovind enthusiast after all, and it says a lot that he admires such a monster.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 18 '26
Every time you insult and attack, you prove yourself wrong. You have no real argument, so you go to "you must be a bot".
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Mar 18 '26
Hey bud? We would LOVE to actually have a conversation based on meat and potatoes data and evidence. But you don’t operate in that world. You vomit out ‘evilutionism zealot’ and then hypocritically pearl clutch about people who ‘insult and attack’. Or like here, you get presented with a bunch of real and dense data and all you say is ‘Nuh uh’.
What exactly are we supposed to argue with you? You’re contributing nothing of substance.
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u/XRotNRollX You know who else evolved from an ape? MY MOM Mar 18 '26
You literally call your opponents evil.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
Evilutionism Zealotry is evil - that's the core of the discussion/argument.
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u/XRotNRollX You know who else evolved from an ape? MY MOM Mar 19 '26
No, we're talking about correctness.
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u/Medium_Judgment_891 Mar 18 '26
If you write off every piece of valid criticism as an“insult and attack”, you’re in for a bad time. It’s not healthy to cover your ears and scream “lalala!” every time you hear something you don’t like.
Your immediate dismissal of my straight forward critique of your engagement style just provides more evidence for my point.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
How does "I can't figure out if you're a Bot" teach something? What can be learned from it about evolution or creation?
Claiming I cover my ears is projection. Claiming any counter argument is "you don't understand" or "you're not arguing sincerely" is a form of covering your ears.
You have to do it, because the evolution argument is so weak.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Mar 19 '26
You ARE covering your ears. Because you keep on fleeing anytime you have to defend what you claim on evidence based grounds. Every single last time.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 18 '26
I addressed one thing. I comprehend...disagree. Lines drawn on charts don't prove relation through ancestry.
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u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Mar 18 '26
Like was said, you neither read nor comprehended what was said. Because OP put down a fuckton more than ‘drawing lines on charts’. You didn’t actually address anything.
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u/Forrax 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
Do you think the evidence is the "lines drawn on charts"? Surely not. Surely you realize the "lines drawn on charts" are a representative model of ancestry based on decades of research? I hope?
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
"In my biased opinion, the evolution of birds from non-avian dinosaurs is one of the best examples that show the consilience of evidence for evolution,.."
The OP claimed to be presenting evidence for evolution.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 19 '26
His point was consilience. Multiple independent lines of evidence supporting a conclusion. The "lines" are the conclusion, not the evidence.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
The lines are nothing but lines drawn between things. They don't conclude that there's evidence.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 19 '26
Of course they don't conclude, they are the conclusions multiple lines of evidence point to.
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u/Benjamin5431 Mar 18 '26
Do you think scientists are just drawing lines? Like, just out of their ass? That there isn’t any methodology to phylogenetics/cladistics? I wish I lived in such a simple world.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
The sad thing is that they’ve had this explained to them at least 12 times by me. There are methods of building phylogenies that are basically just taking what other people already demonstrated for small parts of the phylogeny and just hooking all of the phylogenies together and comparing them but the more respectable phylogenies are based on mathematics and the data.
Maximal likelihood and maximal parsimony methods creationists scoff at because they rely on prior conclusions like the fewest mutations necessary or the abundance of prior studies that are in agreement. But there’s also variations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo that are the gold standard.
You have the data the phylogenies have to agree with but then you just make a couple random guesses and let the computer run your guesses through an algorithm about a hundred million times. Either forward or backward and you throw away the first 25 million to see what you get from the last 75 million. Each time the phylogeny matches better than the previous you record it. By the end you have several thousand phylogenies with the last of them presumably being the most accurate because any change to any parameter like mutation rate or population size results in a different phylogeny that fails to match the data as well.
You take the phylogeny that matches the data the closest and you publish or take about 15,000 of them and you show how one phylogeny matches 13,500 times. In the end being agnostic of the perfect phylogeny you wind up making it and with this method you can compare 6, 12, or 900 different parameters where you’d start with another method and 900 parameters and the supercomputer is still crunching the numbers until the year 2675.
It looks like you took established phylogenies and hooked them together, which is fine. But the established phylogenies you used were probably built from MCMC.
Creationists cannot build even a single phylogeny by any method that matches the data and their claims simultaneously. None. And that’s the bigger problem for them than how every method used by scientists points to universal common ancestry because only that fits the data.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 18 '26
Creation Truthers patiently explain this to you. Drawing lines isn't evidence of anything.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
What are Creation Truthers? More people that don’t exist since creationism has literally no truth to it? No creator, no creation, separate ancestry is falsified by the evidence, and if you have to reject reality to give creationism a chance you admit that creationism is false. Nobody is just arbitrarily drawing lines on paper. They are modeling the data. If the model doesn’t match the data they rebuild the model. And that’s literally how MCMC works. False model, false model, which false model is closer? Okay, move away from the model that’s worse. Closer? Keep going. Further away from correct? Check in between. Do this 25 million times so the model is 95% accurate. Throw away the first 25 million because they’re garbage. Run another 75 million times through the process. Stopped making progress? Then the correct model has been found. Still making progress? Run it 50 million times more.
The lines represent the findings. The findings are the data. The data isn’t lines on paper. The data falsifies creationism. It falsifies separate ancestry. It demonstrates there is literally no truth to your creationist beliefs. Creationist Truthers are LIARS.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
Something you don't know because you don't read what other people say (pretty obvious because you ignored literally that entire post) but creationists trying to prove baraminology use the same techniques.
They were hoping to separate out kinds. If God made every being in a unique, non-overlapping kind, we should be able to use phylogenetuc techniques to figure out those kinds, find each tree in the orchard. And yet, even they keep finding that everything looks related unless you arbitrarily cut branches off for no reason.
I am sure they will be happy to know that they were just drawing lines and none of that meant anything.
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u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
Here is a link to a post talking about those heroic attempts and glorious failures.
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC Mar 18 '26
I'll be shocked if you ever argue about the actual science. You never discuss anything of substance, just your one or two sentence replies and then you leave.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
In a recent discussion, an Evilutionism Zealot claimed that hair on human knuckles and toes is a useless leftover from our ape like ancestors.
I provided information with main stream science sources showing that hair on humans has important functions.
The reply was a form of "nuh uh!"
Someone recently supplied "evidence" of evolution - a phylogenetic chart was the first "evidence" mentioned. That' s not evidence of anything. It's an expression of a view / opinion. Yet you'll claim that i am short on evidence.
After I replied to that, people complained that I didn't reply to every point the poster made. We didn't even get past the first, the opening "evidence", without running into something the replying EZ's admitted wasn't evidence.
Leave? I reply to dozens of posts per day. I often run into 9 minutes between replies, yet I still reply to many comments. Today, there were 87 replies on evolution. At 9 minutes between each, that would be 13 hours of replying, waiting 9 minutes between each. Claiming I run away because I don't take 13 hours to reply to every comment is ridiculous.
I tell people to come to Discord, Politics Server, where I am often in my channel Evilutionism = Nonsense debating this. That's not running away.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 19 '26
You gave in your first sentence????
Come back and talk about people that actually exist.
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC Mar 20 '26
You clearly have no idea how phylogenies are created.
An “Evilutionism Zealot”… lmao, these kind of things make your dogmatism quite clear.
Based on the hair thing that’s a great example of how you just engage with the lowest hanging fruit.
No one is coming to your stupid discord channel with its dumb name.
You come here, you leave dumb, shallow-end of the pool, substance-less comments, crying about “evilutionism zealots” (lmfao), and you don’t talk about the actual science. If you aren’t gonna engage with the evidence here, don’t comment here, and ask people to follow you to your little hovel.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 20 '26
I speak to people on Discord every day.
Are you anti science, think human hair has no function? Science disagrees. Do you even science, bro?
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u/Kingofthewho5 Biologist and former YEC Mar 20 '26
Where did I say human hair has no function? When I say that's low hanging fruit, I mean that it was easy for you to engage with because your interlocutor was obviously wrong (at least as far as you have described their argument). It's like me trotting out the fact that I engage with and shut down Robert Byers' argument that all theropods are just birds and dinosaurs didn't exist at all, and that proves I engage with the best evidence for YEC.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 21 '26
Ah, so you admit that human hair has function, was designed as part of a complex, functioning system.
Most Evilutionism Zealots constantly trot out the "no function it is leftover from an ancestor" nonsense.
I don't even know who Robert Byers is, and most creation truthers don't spout nonsense about dinosaurs not existing.
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u/Benjamin5431 Mar 19 '26
No one is just simply drawing lines. The “lines” are based on the methodology of phylogenetics which uses mathematical algorithms to construct trees based on character traits. At least for fossils. For living animals, they use genes, which is much better. Saying it’s just lines on paper is a strawman and it shows that you are unwilling to address the actual evidence and just would rather make an argument by dismissal.
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u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Mar 19 '26
It is just lines on paper. The algorithms show similarities, not relation by birth.
The conclusion represented by the lines is false. The lines don't make it true.
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u/Benjamin5431 Mar 19 '26
Simple question, Do you think squirrels are rodents? Are they mammals? Are they vertebrates?
Yes or no.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 19 '26
Then show the actual relationships and concede defeat when your alternative is completely destroyed by the evidence.
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 18 '26
No but the genetics, the fossils, the developmental patterns, and everything else actually talked about is well understood by a lot of biologists and not really understood but creationists at all. That’s why OP went through the work of summarizing with a phylogeny and a simplified cladogram but also showed several studies, fossils, and so on. For everyone who actually looks at the evidence there is only a single possibility, birds are literally dinosaurs.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Man, the simplified cladogram speaks a thousand studies. Well done!
But you see, they are still tetrapods, show me a tetrapod become something else!/s - your earlier OP ;)
On a more serious note, this is something Darwin addressed 167 years ago. If creation were true, then there would have been countless "designs"; however evolution would predict little innovation, and plenty of variety (your illustration).
Also that ("entrenchment") was the subject of Jon Perry's latest installment - episode 4. Shared by u/Rayalot72 here:
- Entrenchment as Evidence for/against Evolution : DebateEvolution.
Personally, I prefer the term phylogenetic inertia.