It's not 'fake news', Answers in Genesis reality deniers.
The feathery tail of a tiny Cretaceous dinosaur (probable juvenile coelurosaur) has been found preserved in amber in Myanmar. Young earth creationist apologists at Answers in Genesis are agitated about this. As indeed are some others (one or two of them sound less panicked). See also responses by the Institute for Creation Research, David Coppedge at CREV (who used to be a scientist working for NASA), another prolific and hardline daily propagandist - and also another young earth creationist blogger at the Creation Club.
Cue more attacks upon the scientific community from higher profile young earth creationist vigilantes - who have decided in advance that certain facts simply 'cannot be' because they might support the theory of evolution in some way. Such as a dinosaur that possessed feathers on its tail (how utterly 'unbiblical').
Here's one news report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38224564
"Dr McKellar said examination of the tail's anatomy showed it definitely belonged to a feathered dinosaur and not an ancient bird.
"We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained."
"The feathers lack the well-developed central shaft - a rachis - known from modern birds."
However the Abstract of the paper in Current Biology does state "Many feathers exhibit a short, slender rachis with alternating barbs and a uniform series of contiguous barbules ...".
That said, AiG's most detailed response (12 December) informs readers that "the rachis (central shaft) of the feathers is somewhat thinner than that of most modern feathers".
http://www.inquisitr.com/3787683/ken-ha ... bird-link/
https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/ ... ther-tail/
https://facebook.com/aigkenham
"Evolutionists have a blind faith religion with a fictional story they impose on whatever fossil evidence they find. So, 1.5 inches of vertebrae with feathers and suddenly it's a dinosaur? Why? Because evolutionists clutch at straws!
Evolutionists have to justify their fictional belief that dinosaurs evolved into birds so they have a spin about a tail. Yes, evolutionists are desperate to brainwash people with a false belief, so they make up fanciful stories about a tail."
(Ken Ham - who prefers his own dogma to facts - with yet more hysterical false accusations against scientists, posted on 11 December.)
https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/ ... -in-amber/ (the brand new article by David Menton of 12 December)
I find the reasoning in Menton's Conclusion (which wrongly flags reference 3 instead of 4) highly contrived. Viz:
"We conclude that DIP-V-15103 is a bird, and not a 99-million-year-old theropod dinosaur. This is supported by the discovery of 99-million-year-old bird wings including bones and feathers found by Lida Xing et al. in the same type of Burmese amber as DIP-V-15103. I reject the age assigned to these fossils, but it shows that small birds, perhaps juveniles, left evidence of their unquestionably bird-like anatomy in Burmese amber. So where is the evolution?"
He doth protest. And rush to get a 'rebuttal' out.
http://www.icr.org/article/9759 (Sherwin makes statements such as "why didn’t the authors explain the very close resemblance of these feathers to those of birds living today?" - ignoring the rachis point quoted in the BBC News article, though see my above comment regarding the Abstract of the Current Biology paper.)
http://crev.info/2016/12/proof-of-dinosaur-feathers/ (this article is more even-handed than his usual efforts and mentions two YECs who apparently ARE open to the probable facts of this creature's identity and morphology)
http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/2016/12 ... amber.html
http://thecreationclub.com/a-new-fossil-tail/#
So. If you are a YEC and you have decreed that dinosaurs NEVER had feathers because that is 'unbiblical', then you must either deny the existence of the feathers or deny that they were possessed by any sort of dinosaur. After all, why shouldn't YECs respond thus? Because they believe the Bible (or their dogma that is loosely inspired by the Bible) they know better than all those scientists. And they are declaring that those horrible scientists are making up stories. And the horrible media are spreading those stories to the public!
And that this feathered tail belonged to a bird, maybe an extinct one. Which bird that might be is not speculated upon by AiG or any other YEC. But no dinosaur - certainly NOT one of those. Problem solved. For now.
Because the AiG and ICR responses are knee-jerk reactions based upon dogma rather than a dispassionate assessment of evidence and the wider context of what scientists believe they already know from other evidence previously examined.
PS It is the case that one of the subgroups of the coelurosaurian clade does includes modern birds. Evolution does not of course require that this fossil in amber must have belonged to a dinosaur not some sort of bird.