ICR uses a fifteen year old article against Jurassic World

ICR put out, What Would Need to Change for a Dinosaur to Evolve into a Bird?, in response to Jurassic World.  It was lacking.

"Feathers: Feathers are not at all similar to scales. Even if scales were frayed, they would not be interlocking and impervious to air as are feathers. Actually, feathers are more similar to hair follicles than scales. Could such precise design arise by mutation? In all the recent discoveries of dinosaur fossils with "feathers," the "feathers" are merely inferred. What is actually present is better described as thin filaments which originate under the skin."

Who is still advancing the idea of frayed scales evolving into feathers?

"Birds have delicate, hollow bones to lighten their weight while dinosaurs had solid bones."

Not all dinosaurs had solid bones.

"Lungs: Birds are unique among land-dwelling vertebrates in that they don't breathe in and out. The air flows continually in a one-directional loop supporting the bird's high metabolism. Reptilian respiration is entirely different, more like that in mammals."

Unidirectional breathing has been discovered in crocodiles.

"A recent "mummified" dinosaur, with soft tissue fossilized, proved to be quite like a crocodile, and not at all like a bird."

Which one? Without citing which dinosaur mummy this argument is meaningless, especially when crocodiles are proving more bird-like.

Citation at the bottom of the article

I noticed this article was written in 2000. We know in 2015 that some dinosaurs had hollow bones and another archosaur, ie crocodile, has unidirectional breathing. Especially since the discovery of unidirectional breathing in crocodiles, I have been extremely frustrated in the reluctance of creationists to update their media. Why knowingly share fifteen year old outdated incorrect info?

People need to watch more Dinosaur Train II

The more I read some blogs, the more I thank my High School English teachers for all their emphasis on reading comprehension. Simile is not a declaration. If you say that something is like something, you are categorically saying that that thing is not that something, just like that something.

One of my last blogs was about how watching Dinosaur Train could correct the following misconceptions about mammals in the Mesozoic Era.

Many still think that mammals and dinosaurs, for example, never coexisted, or if they did it was only for a short period when only small shrew-like mammals were present.

Read People need to watch more Dinosaur Train for a brief overview why this supposed popular misconception has been known to be wrong since at least the 1850's.  Most mammals in the Mesozoic were small with the largest known fossils being about the size of a badger, but they were contemporaneous throughout the age of dinosaurs.

Werner argues in his books that modern animals are found in the Mesozoic fossil record.  Smith and Scordova share this view, Scordova being of the impression that mammals would be glossed over as contamination.  I do not have ready access to Werner's books, but his method strikes me as suspect.  Apparently, he is mainstream in creationist circles, both Creation.com and Answers in Genesis sell his work.  With all the millions of dollars at the disposal of Liberty University, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International, we have some guy going to museums taking photographs.  If this had merit could not a scientist have done comparative analysis from the peer reviewed publications.  Perhaps when I get a chance I will watch his full presentation.

Smith was kind enough to footnote his claims so that I can easily analyze them.

To the surprise of many, ducks,1 squirrels,2 platypus,3beaver-like4 and badger-like5 creatures have all been found in ‘dinosaur-era’ rock layers along with bees, cockroaches, frogs and pine trees. Most people don’t picture a T. rex walking along with a duck flying overhead, but that’s what the so-called ‘dino-era’ fossils would prove!

Let's look first at the duck.  Vegavis iaai was uncovered in 1992, but the concretions delayed its description until 2005.  As far as I can tell from the paper the V. iaai has 20 points in her skeleton that are only found in Anseriformes.  While there seems to be some controversy, I am willing to concede that V. iaai seems to be a true water fowl and that there were probably some ancestors of Galliformes in the Cretaceous.  However, I would not know how Smith would make such a prediction.  One, to call V. iaai a duck, seems to allow for more diversity than creationists normally allow in their "kinds".  Two, the prediction about galliformes assumes a genetic relationship between Galliformes and Anseriformes.  Three, it is important to note here that V. iaai, is a duck only in the broadest sense like geese are ducks.

Let's look at the squirrel.   Volaticotherium antiquus did actually make an appearance on Dinosaur Train as Vlad the vampire like mammal.  Just look at those canines! He wants to suck your blood! Wait! Do squirrels have canines?  Actually, one of the reasons that V. antiquus is not a squirrel is his presence of canines which most rodents do not have and no squirrel has.  V. antiquus actually was not a member of the order Rodentia, but a member of an extinct order of mammals called the Eutriconodonta which do not appear in the Cenozoic fossil record.

According to Smith, this is not common knowledge, but I have grown up knowing that platypuses are living fossils.  Among other things, they lack nipples and lay eggs.  However they are very poorly represented in the fossil record.  Like Anseriformes, monotremes have possible cretaceous fossils.  While molecular biology studies put platypuses and echidnas diverging 10-80 million years ago, the fossil evidence pushes this back 40 million years into the Mesozoic.  While it is surprising that platypuses may be older than we think, these possible monotremes are still 100 million years younger than the oldest mammals.  Yet as I read this article Smith uses at a source, I see a bit of a problem with his conjecture that "many more tens of thousands of fossil mammals in ‘dinosaur rock’ are likely being similarly ignored in other parts of the world, with the likelihood of finding even more representatives of the same kinds as modern-day mammals."  Consider this paragraph.

Tom began digging along the south-eastern coast of Victoria some 25 years ago in his original quest to find Australia’s oldest mammals. He kept finding dinosaur bones, but in 1996 the first mammal jaw finally turned up, causing international scientific headlines when it was published in 1997 in Science.

At the time of this article, Dr. Tom Rich had been digging in Australia for a quarter of a century looking for mammal fossils.  While dinosaurs may be more in vogue, there are certainly paleontologists researching Mesozoic mammals.  Also, a cretaceous (pre-flood) platypus may not help Smith, because now an Australian platypus needs to migrate to the Ark and then coincidentally migrate off the Ark back to Australia.

I'll deal with the rest of the claims in another post.

People need to watch more Dinosaur Train

Recently, an author going by Scordova wrote something for the blog, Uncommondescent.com.  Uncommondescent markets themselves as an intelligent design blog and like most in the intelligent design movement, they have a biblical creationist (young earth) bent.  In this particular entry, Scordova relies heavily on two articles written on Kent Hovind's Creation.com.  Neither site has proven to me their trustworthiness and this post is no exception.  

Scordova starts by listing Bill Nye's request for a mammal to be demonstrated in the "trilobite layers" (the Paleozoic).  This author seems to be one of those creationists that denies the geologic column (unlike many creationists), so one wonders if he understood Nye's request.  When he begins to present his evidence that would absolutely change Nye's mind, we know that he did not understand Nye's request.  Quoting extensively from Calvin Smith's The so-called ‘Age of Dinosaurs’ at Creation.com, he begins to attempt to prove that mammals are contained in "dinosaur rock".

"Dinosaur rock"?  When Nye said "trilobite layers", he clearly understood that he was talking about the Paleozoic Era.  Dinosaurs and mammals first show up in the beginning of the next era, the Mesozoic Era, which Smith refers to three times as "dinosaur rock".  So what is the big deal? Google Books has a book from 1979 called Mesozoic Mammals and those authors note a 1854 discovery of a Mesozoic mammal.  This is not even listed as the first discovery.   I grew up on PBS, Discovery Channel, Walking with Dinosaurs, and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.  My children watch a PBS show called Dinosaur Train which teaches about these mammals along with dinosaurs and birds.  

Well, according to Smith, unlike my family, "Many people are surprised when they hear of these creatures being buried together and wonder why they never heard of it before."  Good question, why are the public not as educated on this subject as maybe they should be?  Perhaps, the Mesozoic needs to be taught better in schools.  Perhaps more children need to watch Dinosaur Train.  Well as you may expect, Smith has another answer quoting from one of Carl Werner's interviews.  Dr. Donald Burge notes that he does not have the time to process the fossils.  Burge specializes in reptiles and dinosaurs so he does not have the time or expertise to sort through the extra 20,000 pounds of clay containing mammal fossils.  

In his book, Werner argues that Mesozoic mammal fossils are constantly misidentified, because they actually belong to Cenozoic families.  Werner draws his conclusions not from professional research, but from combing through tens of thousands of photos his wife took at museums.  The 2001 Burge quote suggests to Werner and Smith that there are fossils of modern mammals coexisting with dinosaurs and they are just falling through the cracks due to massive evolutionary bias.  In the Uncommondescent blog, Scordova demonstrates his lack of understanding by taking it a step further.

So is there a possibility anomalies are edited out and instead a practice of false reporting (perhaps innocently done) has been perpetuated. They probably think something like: “We found a mammal, that’s clearly contamination because we know mammals aren’t in that era”. So thus we never hear official reports of the anomalies because the anomalies are regarded as contaminants since according to the false narrative, certain creatures didn’t live in certain eras.

Again, Mesozoic mammals have been known for at least a century and a half.  In the comment section of Smith's article someone makes this point.  Smith responds with this anecdote.

Your statement "...this comes as no surprise to anyone." is absolutely incorrect. I can tell you from personal experience that I have met many hundreds of people (both creationists and evolutionists) that have been exposed to this type of information at CMI presentations that were completely surprised by the fact that birds like ducks and mammals like platypus and beavers etc lived with dinosaurs.

Maybe these people should watch more Dinosaur Train?  Museums are filled with fossils that need to be studied.  I have little doubt that there are more people digging up mammal fossils than there are qualified researchers studying them.  However, the claim that paleontologists are missing modern mammals, this I doubt.  I'll deal with the following misconception in my next blog.

To the surprise of many, ducks,1 squirrels,2 platypus,3beaver-like4 and badger-like5 creatures have all been found in ‘dinosaur-era’ rock layers along with bees, cockroaches, frogs and pine trees. Most people don’t picture a T. rex walking along with a duck flying overhead, but that’s what the so-called ‘dino-era’ fossils would prove!

Walking with Feathers II

Yesterday, I wrote Walking with Feathers about how AiG seems inconsistent since they accept some Troodons, Dromaeosaurs, and Oviraptorosaurs had feathers, but find "no evidence" that other Troodons, Dromaeosaurs, and Oviraptorosaurs had feathers.  The definition of a "kind" is only going to grow broader and therefore the number of dinosaur "kinds" is only going to shrink.  It is hard to imagine how they count fifty.  Not only is increasing diversity going to decrease the number, but increasingly dinosaurs are being called birds by Answers in Genesis and the number is only going to grow.

Given the lack of visible feathers, the data about these ornithomimids remains inconclusive. Without definitive feathers, they may just be dinosaurs. Or they may be extinct birds, descendants of the birds God made in the beginning. God made all kinds of birds on the 5th day of Creation week and land animals such as dinosaurs on the 6th. And nothing about this study demonstrates the evolution of feathers or the evolution of birds.

To be fair, as much as some creationists seem to argue for a firm line between birds, created on Day 5, and dinosaurs, created on Day 6, there is no reason why such a distinction should exist.  God could easily create a crocoduck.

Instead of invoking a back-and-forth evolutionary process of land animals to birds and (in the case of oviraptorosaurs) back to land animals, how much more sensible it is to discard evolution altogether and to accept special creation instead! Owing to the fact that the Creator was under no obligation to use a nested hierarchy of created living things, at least in every case, it is not difficult to understand why evolutionists have such problems in their attempts to force ‘nonavian’ and ‘avian’ traits into any sort of evolutionary lineage.

Also:

If you could plot all the distinct created “kinds” of organisms on a graph, based on their features, you would see that God filled the graph with a tapestry of distinct kinds. Between these different kinds God scattered mosaics.1 For instance, between deer and antelope kinds He put pronghorns; between raccoon and bear kinds* He put pandas; and so it goes...All examples of evolutionary links that have ever been claimed, such as australopithecines**(between tree-dwelling apes and earth-dwelling humans), archaeocetes (between quadrupeds and modern whales), mammal-like reptiles (between reptiles and mammals), Archaeopteryx(between reptiles and birds), and Tiktaalik and Acanthostega (between fish and amphibians) are, in fact, mosaics, not links.

*Pandas are placed in the bear kind in the recent paper on Mammalian Ark Kinds.
**Australopithecus sediba was called an earth-dwelling human by a 2010 creationist paper.

What are the 60 dinosaur kinds?

I keep asking about these 60 or 50 dinosaur kinds.  This was one of the main questions that led me to reject Young Earth Creationism.  What are the orders of mammalia? Google it.  You will find a debate over whether there are between 19-29 orders.  Start looking for Dinosaur kinds.  What you will not find is a debate among creationist about 60 or 50 kinds of dinosaurs.  What you will find is an assertion of it's validity and one or two examples of a Dinosaur kind.  The most common example of a dinosaur kind is ceratopsia.

The sub-order ceratopsia includes both bipeds and quadrupeds.  This transition from semi-bipedal to quadrupedal is accepted by both evolutionists and creationists.  However if we accept that the sub-order ceratopsia is one dinosaur kind, how can there be half a hundred dinosaur kinds?  That level of diversity would seem to imply that Oviraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex were the same kind or for comparison that hyenas and cats are the same kind.  That is just what Carl Kerby seems to do in his blog post, Phylogenic Charts

He gives fourteen different sub-orders and clades of dinosaurs that he terms as "one thing, stayed one thing, and never changed from, or into, anything else."

• j Deinonychosaurs. 
• h Oviraptorosaurs. 
• m Carnosaurs and Coelurosaurs. 
• n Segnosaurs. 
• o Prosauropods.
• p Sauropods. 
• q Fabrosaurids. 
• r Scelidosaurs. 
• s Stegosaurs. 
• t Ankylosaurs. 
• u Ornithopods. 
• v Heterodontosaurids. 
• w Ceratopsians. 
• x Pachycephalosaurs.

Creation.com shrinks the groups even further in their Dinosaur Fairy Tales with only eight kinds (in fairness they leave out Heterodontosaurids, Scelidosaurs, and Fabrosaurids).

• Ceratopsians
• Pachycephalosaurs
• Ornithopods
• Stegosaurs
• Ankylosaurs
• Theropods (Segnosaurs, Deinonychosaurs, Oviraptorosaurs, Carnosaurs, and Coelurosaurs)
• Prosauropods
• Sauropods

The point is that if ceraptosia is a dinosaur kind, what are the other 49?  How can there be another 49 let alone another 59?  More importantly where is the list of 50 dinosaur kinds?  In trying to find this list, I was amazed at how much evolution had been accepted by creationists as microevolution.  Also, I was amazed at how often creationists made the claim of tens of dinosaur kinds, but never backed it up.  What kind of worldview does that?  Not a worldview that I could continue to hold.  I did not only abandon young earth creationism, because of this, but it was a start.  

Sauropodomorpha and correcting myself

Original Source for the image http://www.gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs/Cladogram/SaurischiaSauropodmorpha.jpg

I said, I would source a rant about phylogeny later and this is my attempt to do so. Already, I have blogged about Crocodilians and Ceratopsians. In the original rant, I wrote:

May I ask, what is your view point? You point to this chart as evidence that “one thing, stayed one thing and never changed into anything else! What we see in the world today and what we read in the Bible is consistent and true.” As already mentioned “W” is Ceratopsians. Do you hold that transitioning from a biped to a quadruped is not changing? “O” is Prosauropods and “P” is Sauropods. Do you hold that quasi-quadruped prosauropods transitioning into sauropods is changing? If “W” is OK, then why is “O” to “P” not OK?

As I already mentioned there are at least three bipedal families in the generally quadruped ceratopsians. By Kerby [1] and Answers in Genesis [2], this is considered variation within a kind. However in this particular phylogeny, prosauropods and sauropods are separate branches. Kerby seems to suggest that each separate branch are their own separate “one thing” that “stayed one thing”.

Prosauropods, like ceratopsians, are both bipedal and quadrupeds[3]. They are named “prosauropods”, because they were thought to have evolved into sauropods. They seemed to be transitioning into obligatory quadrupeality. They grew bigger and their necks grew longer.[4] 

It is difficult to know what Answers in Genesis thinks about prosauropods. The word, “prosauropod”, does not occur on the Creation Museum website. It appears only once on the Answers in Genesis website. [5] Searching for “sauropod” on Answers in Genesis, yields over 300 hits. One contains the following quote:

Sauropods just appear and disappear in the fossil record, without connection and without explanation. According to The Complete Dinosaur, “The ancestry of the sauropods, before they burst onto the world scene on almost every continent in the Middle Jurassic, is obscure.”

No known process of change could derive them from any other known organism, and no evidence of such change is found in the fossil record. [6]

The rest of the paragraph in The Complete Dinosaur, reads:

Seems obvious
when you read
the chart :)

The frequent assumption that they arose from prosauropods, probably melanorosaurids, has yet to be verified. Furthermore, some characters, including the reduction of the fifth digit of the hind foot in all prosauropods (but not in sauropods), suggest that these animals were already too specialized to have served as sauropod ancestors, and that the sauropods may have arisen as a sister group in the Late Triassic. Indeed, the traditional assumption that the quadrupedal sauropods developed from bipedal prosauropods was questioned as early as 1965 by A.J. Charig, J. Attridge, and A.W. Crompton. [7]

So now we come to the portion of this blog where I need to
correct something in my rant. The current prevailing hypothesis is not that prosauropods evolved into sauropods, but that both prosauropods and sauropods share a common ancestor. I stated the following:

Do you hold that quasi-quadruped prosauropods transitioning into sauropods is changing?

As mentioned in The Complete Dinosaur this has long been known not to be the likely case. However, the question can be redeemed...I hope. Why is it not likely that both prosauropods and sauropods are the same kind or in Kerby’s language, “one thing”?

Grazing through Answers in Genesis, it is difficult to know what they think. Again, they only mention prosauropods by name once. They also seem reluctant to assign a non-sauropod ancestor.[8] [9] [10]

Dracorex hogwartsia

The 66 million-year-old skull of a dinosaur whose name was inspired by the Harry Potter series has found a permanent home in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

Dracorex hogwartsia will be housed permanently at the museum, officials and paleontologist Robert Bakker announced Monday.

The dinosaur's name was taken from the Latin words for dragon and king, and the fictional Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. Rowling agreed to the name because her two children are dinosaur fans. "The naming of Dracorex hogwartsia is easily the most unexpected honor to have come my way since the publication of the Harry Potter books," Rowling said in a written statement.

The dinosaur, a member of the pachycephalosaur family, had a flat skull with spiky horns, bumps and a long muzzle. Other pachycephalosaurs had domed foreheads.

Scientists believe the pachycephalosaurs, which were herbivores, used their knobby heads to butt other dinosaurs.

Three Iowa residents who found the 18-inch-long skull in South Dakota donated it to the museum in 2004, before it was named. "When we found the skull, all that was showing was a little of the snout and some teeth," said Steve Saulsbury, one of those who found the skull. "But as we excavated more of it, it was clear we had something unique."

The fossil skull, left encased in a layer of rock and mud, was shipped to the children's museum, where it was reassembled by paleontologist Victor Porter. Porter also made casts that were used by other scientists to confirm the dinosaur was a new species.

Porter and Bakker agreed upon the name after children visiting the museum suggested it resembled a dragon.

"This is the first new dinosaur found, restored and named by a children's museum," Bakker said.

The fossil will be displayed on the second level of the museum this summer and later will be moved to its permanent home in the Dinosphere wing. [1]

Jack Horner: Shape shifting dinosaurs

Paluxy River Footprints

Necks Lie!

Here’s the irony: for practically as long as sauropod neck posture has been contentious, giraffes have been held up as THE example of the most extreme (dude!) elevated neck postures out there. But in fact giraffes have to really reach to achieve vertical cervical postures that “ordinary” animals like cats, rats, guinea pigs, chickens, and, yes, rabbits, reach or exceed all the time.

Good paleobiology has to start with good biology. It’s high time that the sauropod neck posture debate got a reality infusion. Giraffe necks are extreme in terms of length, but not in terms of posture. [1]

Ice skating dinosaur make you happy?

Denver Museum of Science "Dino" from Smoke & Mirrors on Vimeo.

Atheist Shermer joke about the creation story

Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story
by Michael Shermer




In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created from Quarks) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what He was doing, so He created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.


And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 B.C. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.


And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.


And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.


And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in one chapter He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.


And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.


Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists.


By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.


By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend.
It was a good idea.[1]

If you want to know what atheism is then ask an atheist

I AM NOT AN ATHEIST 

I saw this the other day and I immediately thought that strawmen are not your friend.  A strawman is a logical fallacy when you criticize someone for an argument they do not actually hold.  Quickly let us look at this.

The belief 

OK, we have to stop already.  While I consider atheism a "belief"  and a religion. Many atheists consider atheism not a belief, but a lack of a belief.  The saying typically goes something like: if atheism is a belief/religion then not stamp collecting is a hobby.  Some might say, "I do not believe in a God."  For many atheists the idea that atheism is a "belief" is not something they argue.

Perhaps here we should also define atheism.  Dictionary.com defines atheism in both ways.

1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

Atheism simply has to do with theology or lack of theology.  There is not embedded in the definition an origin of the universe or an acceptance of a scientific view point.  

that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing 

What is nothing?  First, I may need to do more research, but most of the atheists that I can remember are materialists.  Nature is eternal.  Those that do not believe that nature is eternal are agnostic on the subject.  They do not believe in an ex nihilo creation.  Maybe some do, but I do not think that any atheists that you can name believe in such.  

Also "nothing" in physics can produce something.  Empty space has stuff in it.  Some atheists mean this when they say "nothing".  Also the Big Bang is something, a singularity extending through all space at a single instant.  You can say where did the singularity and space come from?  You might get some answer about a multiverse, but most would not say from "nothing". (meaning no spatial or temporal dimensions, no particles, no energy, no force)

and then nothing magically exploded

Magic?  The point seems to be that there can be no natural explanation for the Big Bang, so an atheist must invoke some unnatural or supernatural explanation.  I don't think that this is so much of a strawman, but more of sarcasm.  Obviously with no supernatural source for fairies, goblins, ghosts, witchcraft, miracles, cursings, blessings there is little place for magic in an atheism.  

Exploded?  I presume that this is in reference to the Big Bang.  Big Bang is a little bit of a misnomer. In the Theory of the Big Bang the singularity did not explode in a conventional sense, but it was rather an event filling all of space with all of the particles of the embryonic universe rushing away from each other. The Universe expanded increasing the distance between particles.  

for no reason,

Apparently natural law is no reason?  It would be true to say that most atheists do not believe in supernatural  reasons, but as long as time has existed there has been a macro cause and effect.  

creating everything 

Yeah according to Big Bang, quarks arranged into atoms clumped together to form stars which their own mass caused the single proton Hydrogen to fuse into Helium.  Still all of this occurs under natural law.

and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.

There is that M word again.  My problem with strawmen is thus:  It is OK to joke as long as everybody gets the joke.  Not everyone believes this to be a joke.  More and more we seem to be inventing arguments for our opponents to fictionally hold.

1. We have enough to discuss without inventing arguments that our opponents do not even hold.
2. We lose trust when our students find out that their opponents do not actually hold said argument.
3. We lose trust of our opponents when we ascribe things to them that they do not hold.

PS - I am a little troubled by the use of the word "magic".  One, there are some notable atheists that are magicians (Penn & Teller, James Randi, Rebecca Watson) however most atheists do not believe in supernatural forces.  Two, most atheists argue that natural forces are sufficient to explain the universe, however most of the people that I have seen using this image believe that natural forces are insufficient.  In fact the tone of the text seem to ridicule atheists who believe that natural forces are sufficient.  This seems ironic to mock atheists for needing the magical/supernatural forces that you hold are necessary.  Three, this seems to set up a false dichotomy.  Most Christians also believe in the Big Bang, Abiogenesis, and Evolution.  They may also believe like Behe that nature was guided or needed a little miracle here and there.  This is the doctrine of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations.  Atheists like most Christians believe in the Big Bang, just some believe that God helped it along.  

Dr Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner

Dinosaur soft tissue


The 60 minute piece

Dinosaur Feathers Preserved in Amber

Beautiful pictures

DINOSAUR FEATHERS FOUND IN AMBER: PHOTOS  By Jennifer Viegas