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any modern birds; instead, it’s a member of a totally extinct group of birds.” 37
    So much for the power of archaeopteryx to authenticate Darwin’s claims. Even ardent evolutionist Pierre Lecomte du Nouy agrees:
We are not even authorized to consider the exceptional case of the archaeopteryx asa true link. By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds, or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediary stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown. 38
    Yet even if archaeopteryx had turned out to be a transitional creature, it would have been but a whisper of protest to the fossil record’s deafening roar against classical Darwinism.
    “If we are testing Darwinism rather than merely looking for a confirming example or two,” Phillip Johnson said, “then a single good candidate for ancestor status is not enough to save a theory that posits a worldwide history of continual evolutionary transformation.” 39
    FRAUDS AND TURKEYS
    Paleontologists, however, have been on a frenzy to try to locate an actual reptilian ancestor for birds. Driven by an all-consuming commitment to evolutionary theory, their zeal has resulted in some recent embarrassments for science. Wells was more than willing to regale me with some examples.
    “A few years ago the National Geographic Society announced that a fossil had been purchased at an Arizona mineral show that turned out to be ‘the missing link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could actually fly,’ ” he said. “It certainly looked that way. They called it the archaeoraptor , and it had the tail of a dinosaur and the forelimbs of a bird. National Geographic magazine published an article in 1999 that said there’s now evidence that feathered dinosaurs were ancestors of the first bird.”
    “That sounds pretty convincing,” I said.
    “Well, the problem was that it was a fake!” Wells said. “A Chinese paleontologist proved that someone had glued a dinosaur tail to a primitive bird. He created it to resemble just what the scientists had been looking for. There was a firestorm of criticism—the curator of birds at the Smithsonian charged that the Society had become aligned with ‘zealous scientists’ who were ‘highly biased proselytizers of the faith’ that birds evolved from dinosaurs.”
    Then Wells made a blanket statement that struck me at the time as being too cynical. “Fakes are coming out of these fossil beds all the time,” he said, “because the fossil dealers know there’s big money in it.”
    I remained skeptical about that charge until I subsequently read an interview with ornithologist Alan Feduccia, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When a reporter for Discover magazine raised the archaeoraptor fraud, Feduccia said:
Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it’s difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake-fossil factory in northeast China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found. 40
    Asked what would motivate such fraud, Fedducia replied: “Money. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business. These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit.” 41
    Other outlandish incidents occurred at about the same time the archaeoraptor fraud was coming to light. Wells was attending a conference in Florida, where the star of the show was a fossil called bambiraptor , a chicken-sized dinosaur with supposedly bird-like characteristics.
    “Again, paleontologists called it the