1

. Dr. Lee Spetner first made this allegation in a meeting of orthodox Jewish scientists held in Jerusalem in July 1980. Spetner studied the British Museum specimen in June 1978 and explained the discrepancies to Dr. Alan Charig, the museum’s Chief Curator of Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles, and Birds. [See “Is the Archaeopteryx a Fake?” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 20, September 1983, pp. 121–122.]  Charig has consistently denied a forgery.

For the most complete description and photographs of this evidence, see Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird: A Case of Fossil Forgery (Swansea, England: Christopher Davies, Ltd., 1986). This book also responds to counterclaims that Archaeopteryx was not a forgery.

2

. Ian Taylor, “The Ultimate Hoax: Archaeopteryx Lithographica,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, Vol. 2 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship, 1990), p. 280.

3

. Some defenders of Archaeopteryx will claim that three of the other four specimens also have feathers—the Teyler Museum specimen, the Eichstätt specimen, and the poorly preserved Maxberg specimen. Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, and Watkins put it bluntly. “Only people in an exceptional condition of mind can see them.” [F. Hoyle, N. C. Wickramasinghe, and R. S. Watkins, “Archaeopteryx,” The British Journal of Photography, 21 June 1985, p. 694.]

4

. “... these specimens [of Archaeopteryx] are not particularly like modern birds at all. If feather impressions had not been preserved in the London and Berlin specimens, they [the other specimens] never would have been identified as birds. Instead, they would unquestionably have been labeled as coelurosaurian dinosaurs [such as Compsognathus]. Notice that the last three specimens to be recognized [as Archaeopteryx] were all misidentified at first, and the Eichstätt specimen for 20 years was thought to be a small specimen of the dinosaur Compsognathus.” John H. Ostrom, “The Origin of Birds,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol. 3, 1975, p. 61.

“Apart from the proportions of its wings, the skeleton of Archaeopteryx is strikingly similar to that of a small, lightly built, running dinosaur, such as the coelurosaur Compsognathus.” Dougal Dixon et al., The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988), p. 172.

5

. Some evolutionists say that the modern, aerodynamically perfect feathers allowed Archaeopteryx, after climbing a tree, to glide down, maybe catching food on the way.  Reply: Simple hang-gliding-like equipment, as in a bat’s wing, would have worked better and been much easier to evolve.

6

. “Phylogenetic analysis of stem-group birds reveals that Archaeopteryx is no more closely related to modern birds than are several types of theropod dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurids and ornithomimids. Archaeopteryx is not an ancestral bird, nor is it an ‘ideal intermediate’ between reptiles and birds. There are no derived characters uniquely shared by Archaeopteryx and modern birds alone; consequently there is little justification for continuing to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird.” R. A. Thulborn, “The Avian Relationships of Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Birds,” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Vol. 82, 1984, p. 119.

7

. Herbert Wendt, Before the Deluge (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1968), pp. 40–57.

8

. Larry D. Martin, “The Relationship of Archaeopteryx to other Birds,” The Beginnings of Birds: Proceedings of the International Archaeopteryx Conference of 1984 (Eichstätt, Germany: Jura Museum, 1985), p. 182.

9

. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird: A Case of Fossil Forgery, p. 93.

10

. N. Wickramasinghe and F. Hoyle, “Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird?” Nature, Vol. 324, 18/25 December 1986, p. 622.

11

. Two milligram-size samples of the fossil material were tested, one from a “feather” region and a control sample from a nonfeathered region. The British Museum “contends that the amorphous nature of the feathered material is an artifact explainable by preservatives that they have put on the fossil.” [Lee M. Spetner, “Discussion,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship, 1990), p. 289.] If this excuse were correct, why were no “preservatives” found on the control specimen? Control specimens are tested for precisely this purpose—to dispel unique, last-minute excuses. The British Museum has refused further testing, a shocking position for a scientific organization, and one which raises suspicions to the breaking point.

12

. “Exactly 1 year ago, paleontologists were abuzz about photos of a so-called “feathered dinosaur,” ... But at this year’s vertebrate paleontology meeting in Chicago late last month, the verdict was a bit different: The structures are not modern feathers, say the roughly half-dozen Western paleontologists who have seen the specimens. [Instead, they are ‘bristlelike fibers.’]” Ann Gibbons, “Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, p. 1229.

13

. Tim Beardsley, “Fossil Bird Shakes Evolutionary Hypotheses,” Nature, Vol. 322, 21 August 1986, p. 677.

Alun Anderson, “Early Bird Threatens Archaeopteryx’s Perch,” Science, Vol. 253, 5 July 1991, p. 35.

Sankar Chatterjee, “Cranial Anatomy and Relationship of a New Triassic Bird from Texas,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B, Vol. 332, 1991, pp. 277–342.

14

. “Here we describe well-preserved and abundant footprints with clearly avian characters from a Late Triassic redbed sequence of Argentina, at least 55 Myr before the first known skeletal record of birds.” Ricardo N. Melchor et al., “Bird-Like Fossil Footprints from the Late Triassic,” Nature, Vol. 417, 27 June 2002, p. 936.

15

. Lianhai Hou et al., “Early Adaptive Radiation of Birds: Evidence from Fossils from Northeastern China,” Science, Vol. 274, 15 November 1996, pp. 1164–1167.

16

. Ann Gibbons, “Early Birds Rise from China Fossil Beds,” Science, Vol. 274, 15 November 1996, p. 1083.

17

. “The ‘Archaeoraptor’ fossil, once proclaimed as a key intermediate between carnivorous dinosaurs and birds but now known to be a forgery, is a chimaera formed of bird and dromaeosaur parts.” Zhonghe Zhou et al., “Archaeoraptor’s Better Half,” Nature, Vol. 420, 21 November 2002, p. 285.

Xu Xing, “Feathers for T. Rex?” National Geographic, Vol. 197, No. 3, March 2000, Forum Section.

18

. Lewis M. Simons, “Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail,” National Geographic, Vol. 198, No. 4, October 2000, p. 128.

19

. “The issue of bird origins continues to occupy center stage among scientists because these animals differ in so many ways from their flightless antecedents, making avian evolution a critical problem to solve.” Richard Monastersky, “A Fowl Flight,” Science News, Vol. 152, 23 August 1997, p. 120.

20

. “And let us squarely face the dinosaurness of birds and the birdness of the Dinosauria. When the Canada geese honk their way northward, we can say: ‘The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!’ ” Robert T. Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1986), p. 462.