The problem with pterosaurs

According to The Science ^TM pterosaurs (allegedly) lived between 228 and 66 million years ago. Does the existence of pterosaur fossils prove that Science is true, and the Bible is false? After all, a literal interpretation of the Bible suggests the Earth is young, between 6,000 to 10,000 years old. This number is achieved by adding together the chronological age of every named generation beginning with Adam through Jesus, plus another 2,000 or so years. Of course, the Bible also says that 1,000 years is like a single day to God, so there might be some wiggle room.

But 4 billion years versus 10,000? That’s a lot of wiggle room. However, the preferred method used to date rocks that are allegedly millions of years old is radiometric dating, which is notoriously unreliable means of dating. This fact was proved by dating rocks known to have been produced by the Mt. Saint Helen’s eruption in 1980 as being between 350,000 and 2.8 million years old. Oddly enough, the argument against using radiometric dating is that the age of the sample tested was known, which made the test invalid. Knowing the age of the rock is what made the test interesting. If the only way to get “accurate” readings from a rock is to not know the age of that rock, the results of the test are based on a guess. Then there is the problem of soft tissue being found in dinosaur bones. In 2005 paleontologist Mary Schweitzer made international headlines when she announced the discovery of collagen fibers in the fossilized bones of a young Tyrannosaurus Rex. Schweitzer nearly lost her job for accurately reporting her findings to scientific journals. Only after publishing another article speculating that the bones were still millions of years old but iron and iron compounds had dramatically slowed the decay process, allowing the soft tissue to be preserved for 65 million years, give or take.

The problem with pterosaurs is nobody really knows when they lived or why they died. All we really know about the animal is there are none living today; they became extinct. Charles Kingsley Levy wrote, “According to the best and most recent paleontologic evidence, the dinosaurs, pterosaurs (flying reptiles), and modern birds all evolved from a small, two-legged, lightweight ancestral reptile that inhabited the earth about 250 million years ago.  How the pterosaurs evolved to fully qualified aerialists is still a matter of speculation, but evolve they did.” (p198 – Evolutionary Wars by Charles K. Levy)

But if we honestly don’t know how pterosaurs evolved from a small, two-legged ancestral reptile that lived approximately 250 million years ago, why should we assume it happened? Evolution is not a theory in search of facts to support a conclusion, but a conclusion in search of a theory with facts to support it.  As long as enough time is involved, anything becomes possible. 

The question of how the pterosaurs evolved is not the only relevant one to ask…why did they evolve?  If you ask a biologist they’ll give you some nonsense about environmental niches, but that doesn’t really answer the question. How can we be so sure that the pterosaur was a transitional creature and not a prototyped model to be enhanced by further design? 

The problem with pterosaurs is we don’t know as much as we think we know. We think we have reliable dating methods, but they are questionable at best. We think we have evidence that “proves” evolution, but we don’t. We have speculation and conjecture.

All we really have are a few desiccated, old bones about which we can make a few assumptions, as long as they don’t contradict the conventional wisdom.