NATURE: Ducks: An Original DUCKumentary
A quote-worthy comment: "They were one of the first creatures to return from land, to the sea."
Endlessly, I have attempted to get this simplest of obvious truths across to (sadly) people who claim to believe in Evolution. Shame on them for not being able to think outside of the tiny atheist box where they behave like parrots! So hooked on dinosaur-bird hype, they cannot correctly picture the actual geological layout on earth, nor the unique ecosystems that existed then, alien to our own perceptions of what constitutes life on our present day planet, much less the earliest organisms on earth.
They can cite a few facts, to support some theories but lack the ability to actually visualize the larger picture of how the earth looked, back then... without highways and other infrastructure, totally devoid of all man-made interference. Swamps and seas covered the earth.
Animals emerged on land.
Earth looked something like this in many places, with exception to oceans covering the earth.
Also, the ancestors of birds were very similar to the creatures seen in these drawings and lived very much like them.
These creatures depicted in the drawings had left the water I hate to report to these certain individuals. Leg-bearing, and terrestrial, but had not yet ventured far from the water's edge.
Here are more of these creatures who had "left the water".
I am shamelessly of the Feduccia persuasion. See this article.
“We all agree that birds and dinosaurs had some reptilian ancestors in common,” said Feduccia, professor of biology in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “But to say dinosaurs were the ancestors of the modern birds we see flying around outside today because we would like them to be is a big mistake.
“The theory that birds are the equivalent of living dinosaurs and that dinosaurs were feathered is so full of holes that the creationists have jumped all over it, using the evolutionary nonsense of “Ëœdinosaurian science’ as evidence against the theory of evolution,” he said. “To paraphrase one such individual, “This isn’t science . . . This is comic relief.’”
Although a few artists depicted feathered dinosaurs as far back as the 1970s, Feduccia said the strongest case for feathered dinosaurs arose in 1996 with a small black and white photo of the early Cretaceous period small dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, which sported a coat of filamentous structures some called “dino-fuzz.”
“The photo subsequently appeared in various prominent publications as the long-sought “definitive’ evidence of dinosaur “œfeathers’ and that birds were descended from dinosaurs,” he said. “Yet no one ever bothered to provide evidence — either structural or biological — that these structures had anything to do with feathers. In our new work, we show that these and other filamentous structures were not protofeathers, but rather the remains of collagenous fiber meshworks that reinforced the skin.”
Belief in the existence of the “dino-fuzz feathers” caused some scientists to conclude that they served as insulation, and hence dinosaurs were warm-blooded.
The researchers also examined evidence from five independent, agreeing studies involving structural and genetic analyses related to the “tridactyl,” or three-fingered, hand, which is composed of digits 1, 2 and 3 in dinosaurs, Feduccia said. That is the most critical characteristic linking birds to dinosaurs. They found that embryos of developing birds differed significantly in that bird wings arose from digits 2, 3 and 4, the equivalent of index, middle and ring fingers of humans. To change so radically during evolution would be highly unlikely.
“If birds descended from dinosaurs, we would expect the same 1, 2 and 3 pattern,” he said.
Current dinosaurian dogma requires that all the intricate adaptations of birds’ wings and feathers for flight evolved in a flightless dinosaur and then somehow became useful for flight only much later, Feduccia said. That is “close to being non-Darwinian.”
Also, the current feathered dinosaurs theory makes little sense time-wise either because it holds that all stages of feather evolution and bird ancestry occurred some 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous fossils unearthed in China.
“That’s some 25 million years after the time of Archaeopteryx, which already was a bird in the modern sense,” he said. Superficially bird-like dinosaurs occurred some 25 million to 80 million years after the earliest known bird, which is 150 million years old.”
Feduccia said the publication and promotion of feathered dinosaurs by the popular press and by prestigious journals and magazines, including National Geographic, Nature and Science, have made it difficult for opposing views to get a proper hearing.
“With the advent of “Ëœfeathered dinosaurs,’ we are truly witnessing the beginnings of the meltdown of the field of paleontology,” he said. “Just as the discovery a four-chambered heart in a dinosaur described in 2000 in an article in Science turned out to be an artifact, feathered dinosaurs too have become part of the fantasia of this field. Much of this is part of the delusional fantasy of the world of dinosaurs, the wishful hope that one can finally study dinosaurs at the backyard bird feeder.
“It is now clear that the origin of birds is a much more complicated question than has been previously thought,” Feduccia said.
I will not be persuaded without evidence to the otherwise as Feduccia presented it so eloquently. Just makes a rational reasonable argument. If we are to accept the geological fossil layers, in order and natural progression, please do not ask me to accept a fable based on a fantasy that birds evolved from dinosaurs, long after birds already existed. Such a thing is simply nonsense.
However, back to my point. The atheist I was embroiled in a discussion with was quite upset that the text in Genesis says, God commanded birds to come from the water. Well, according to the drawings about early earth, that's quite a reasonable statement.
Here is the verse that was cause for so much unnecessary angst,
Genesis 1:20 KJV
King James Version
And God said , Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Though other translations tend to differ from the King James Version,
Genesis 1:20 NKJV
New King James Version
Then God said, "Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens."
Genesis 1:20 NIV
New International Version
And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky."
Interesting, some translations imply the verse is not even implying "birds came from water." The King James Version may read like that but other translations lend credence that context and meaning is a matter of translation. Atheists would like to discard Genesis 1:20 as a "myth" that birds flew out of the ocean, and for people to erroneously believe bird ancestors began like reptiles or lizards, crawled to the desert, and *ALL 100%* moved into dry, desert land, living like the roadrunner in the cartoon, and then trekked thousands of miles back to swampy lands and returned to the water. It simply never happened that way.
However, it needs be stated it was never even the verse itself in Genesis that captured my great fascination with bird evolution. It was the birds, themselves. Are they not the embodiment of what Charles Darwin himself predicted with the theory of Natural Selection. Modern day terrestrial varieties of birds, still possess the nictitating membrane, an ancient transparent inner eyelid (found in birds, reptiles, and some mammals). What all important purpose does such a protective eyelid serve for a cardinal, pigeon or other terrestrial bird? Birds still possess their water-resistant feathers, whether aquatic, or fully terrestrial and living deep inland. They still possess their scaley feet. The anatomy of these creatures, birds, tell an important story about their origins. They originated from aquatic ancestors.
I diligently tried to explain to the atheist, that ancestors of birds came out on land yes, indeed, of course, they have legs, but they never truly or completely left the water's edge. This is common sense for any person who understands what evolution has taught us. The early ancestors of birds diversified... branching into around 10,000 species according to modern estimates. Today, many species are primarily terrestrial whilst others are primarily aquatic such as ducks, geese, cranes, etc. Some like the Albatross wander far out to sea, some migrate hundreds of miles over ocean waters. Bird ancestors... like modern day birds stayed near the water's edge... they never wandered that far from the water. And, according to the NATURE "DUCKumentary" clip, birds were one of the first groups to return to their ancestors' aquatic habitat.
An Atheist Respondee: "....it’s wrong compared with modern science: Creation of fish and birds to fill the seas and the sky."
Genesis/Science: zat so? 
http://eol.org/pages/8245/overview
Flying fish, family Exocoetidae, are a diverse group of about 60+ fish in 7 genera (some classifications claim up to 9 genera). These mainly pelagic marine fish are widespread and abundant in the tropical and subtropical areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. Flying fish primarily eat zooplankton, and are in turn an important food source for many marine predators including dolphinfishes, tunas, billfishes, cetaceans, as well as pelagic seabirds. Although they can’t actually fly, they are well known for their enlarged pectoral fins (“wings”), which allow them to make gliding leaps out of the water, a behavior believed to help them escape predation. Some species of flying fish have enlarged pelvic fins as well as enlarged pectoral fins, which allows them to fly further than two winged gliders (up to 400 meters), and have far greater maneuverability. A recent molecular phylogenetic analysis of the flying fish supports previous hypotheses that the evolution of four-winged gliding evolved once from a two-winged ancestor, perhaps in a three-step progression of gliding abilities (Lewallen et al 2011; Kutschera 2005). Flying fish have evolved a diversity of reproductive and life histories strategies: some lay their eggs in the open ocean, and have buoyant eggs that float on the ocean surface or non-buoyant eggs that have stringy filaments which get wound up in floating debris, others spend their lives in coastal areas, or return to coastal areas to breed; the different species also show a great diversity in how wide a range they occupy.
Your problem is "Modern Science" can only make guesses, hypothesis... at best, "theories' based on scant fossil evidences about "what was" hundreds of millions of years ago.
"Modern Science" does not offer DEFINITIVE ANSWERS about the fossil record which primarily remains shrouded in mystery on such issues as "bird evolution." Many atheists, who are akin to fundamentalists, knowing there are no clear answers, DEMAND instant, patent packaged theories... fairy tales to fill in the gaps, and can not deal with unknowns, and prematurely connect a relationship between birds and dinosaurs. And dinosaurs? So little is known about them too! Yet, Atheists have ALL THE ANSWERS, patent and packaged, ready to sell you, whether its not true... doesn't enter the equation. A lie is as good as any truth. Truth takes effort, it takes work, it takes research, it takes facts... but religions like Atheism like the easy route.
Oh, and these flying fish... just when did they evolve? Do they know with all certainty? Did this phenomena arise when fish first evolved and carried with the earliest species who ventured out on land like the modern Mud Skippers, and then they went extinct and replaced by "birds," evolving the ability to fly in the open air.
There's no positive way to know with all certainty, is there?
Just like (militant atheist pseudo-darwinists) were espousing the belief that "polydactyly" were some proof of "Modern Evolution"... then empirical fossil evidence turned that argument on its head, noting that six digits arose 100's of million of years ago, and disappeared. Only to arise again and again from perhaps, merely, junk dna...
Polydactyly in the earliest known tetrapod limbs
M. I. Coates & J. A. Clack
University Museum of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UKNEW specimens of the earliest known tetrapod limbs shows them to be polydactylous. The forelimb of Acanthostega has eight digits and the hindlimb of Ichthyostega has seven. Both of these come from the Upper Devonian of East Greenland, complementing the only other known Devonian tetrapod limb, that of Tulerpeton from Russia1, which has six digits. The morphology of the specimens suggests that limbs with digits may have been adaptations to an aquatic rather than a terrestrial environment. The pattern of digits corresponds to a recently proposed model for limb development2 in which digit number is unspecified, rather than earlier models3–10 which are rejected because they postulate a fixed number of elements in the ancestral limb. We challenge pentadactyly as primitive for tetrapods3,11. The form of these limbs suggests early specialization in the evolution of the tetrapod limb bud.
Source: Nature.com
A quote-worthy comment about "Ducks: A DUCKumentary":
"They were one of the first creatures to return from land, to the sea."
Don't know if you got that. The significance of what the narrator is saying:
Archaeopteryx: The Transitional Fossil
"..Archaeopteryx lived around 151 million to 149 million years ago — during the Tithonian period, the late stage of the Jurassic era — in what is now southern Germany. At the time Europe was an archipelago and was much closer to the equator than it is today, providing this bird-like dinosaur with a fairly warm home close to the sea in which it could thrive."
http://www.livescience.com/24745-archaeopteryx.html
"...a fairly warm home close to THE SEA..."
Thank you.
NOW, THE CASE IS SOOOO CLOSED on that issue. Birds did not evolve on land like the cartoon rendition of Wiley E. Coyote and Roadrunner in the middle of the desert. Birds... evolved in and around the waterways, they came from water, they are suited for moist terrain, and habitats, and inevitably descendent species returned to live the majority of their lives in water, such as ducks, geese, cranes, swans, albatross, etc.
Charles Darwin would roll his eyes, and ask, "How could it be that two people who believe in my theory are even arguing over this question?! OF COURSE birds derived their physical characteristics from their (wet) environment. This Atheist should know better!"
