Feathers and Fossils: How Are Birds and Dinosaurs Different?

“What did dinos really look like? Was Microraptor really a bird? And do they use other animal bones to make some kind of dinos? Any tips on how to tell a dino from a bird? Sincerely, someone with bad grammar.”

Great questions, Sarah! (And don’t worry about your grammar—I’m a baraminologist, not an English professor.)

When you ask what dinosaurs really looked like, I assume you are asking if they had feathers or not. And the answer to that is “it depends.” If you define dinosaurs the way evolutionists currently do, there are lots of feathered dinosaurs. Some of them live in your backyard. We call them birds! Sound ridiculous? It should. If you use the original definition, dinosaurs most likely resembled reptiles with scaley skin. Movies, like the Jurassic World series, have popularized a false vision of dinosaurs based on evolutionary presuppositions.

What about all the so-called dinosaurs with feathers, then? This is where microraptors come in. A microraptor is supposedly a dinosaur, yet it has very obvious birdlike feathers. What do we do with it? Well, our research here at Answers in Genesis indicates that it was a bird. An odd bird, one unlike any we see today, but a bird nonetheless.

So how can we tell a bird from a dinosaur? Well, first, dinosaurs and birds walk differently. Dinosaurs walk from the hip. Birds walk from the knee. Dinosaurs also have larger, heavier tails than birds. And birds have true feathers, something lacking in all dinosaurs. Finally, birds have specialized swivel wrists and tripod-like shoulders that are both different than anything found in dinosaurs.

As for whether there are bones of other creatures mixed into dinosaur fossils, it is difficult to say. Many dinosaurs are found disarticulated, meaning they are not found still put together. Paleontologists may find a bone or two here, a tooth there, and so on. Are those pieces from the same dinosaur? Sometimes, when we have articulated specimens, we can answer that question. Sometimes, we have to make educated guesses. We don’t have live dinosaurs to study, so we can’t compare the fossil bones to living ones. That said, it is unlikely that there are many instances of non-dinosaur bones being incorporated into dinosaurs.

Great questions—thank you for asking. Hopefully this helps you and all the other kids out there who are curious about the world God made and the organisms that live, and have lived, in it.

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