Hi CTD

The picture is an artistic reconstruction of what the fossil may look like with muscle and skin.
= Imagination.
Is it ‘imagination’ to measure the muscle and ligament coneecting points and so to work out how big they were. From that to wrap the skeleton in muscles of the right dimentions and with bones articulated in the correct way based on the location of those connections?

Yes it’s imagination that gave it a colour but little else is. On the rare occasions when skin fossilizes it’s colour does not so that is artistic licence but dimensions, stance, form etc are quite tightly constrained by the evidence. To suggest that the picture ‘=imagination’ is a sign of ignorance, nothing more unless you are aware of how such reconstructions are accomplished!

Some of their bones are longer, some shorter, a few have disappeared...
Disappeared? You have evidence? I know you have the capacity to tell a story, but I said 'evidence'.
Evidence? Sure! Take birds as an example, they have fewer bones in their arms/wings than we do but the bone structures are otherwise virtually identical except for the dimensions. Same bones connect to the same bones in the same order. Of the bones that have ‘disappeared’ a couple are literally missing completely while some others appear to have merged. Now for the really cool part, all of that was worked out by anatomists long ago but they had no proof but like most things in science this hypotheses can be tested and it has been. After they worked what had apparently happened they also realize that you can watch it happening under a microscope. In the early embryo’s of birds they have the full set of bones that humans have for their arms but during their development some do indeed join together to form a smaller number of longer bones and a couple simply fade away so that, while the embryo has them the adult bird does not.

The same is true to a large extent in bats and horses and dogs and cats and many other organisms. Recapitulation is indeed false but our embryos do go through some very very tellingly similar stages in their development. Why would a creator god produce creatures which form bones that simply disappear? Why create embryo’s with virtually identical sets of bones when the adults have different configurations of bones?

...but the basic structure is the same. Do you understand the concept of Homology and how it is detected in organisms?
Perfectly I understand this. When things are similar, and they suit the evostory, they're called "homologous". When they don't suit the story, they're called "convergent evolution". When this happens I call it intellectual dishonesty.

I guess I’ll leave it to others to judge how ‘perfectly’ you understand this. Homology is detected physically by a rigorous method which involves measuring many traits of a given structure and it’s relationships to the structures around it.
Convergent evolution is detected by the same sorts of methods applied to the history of the organism. If it possesses wings but no feathers and produces live young and not egg’s is probably not of the same group so it’s wings are clearly an example of convergent evolution or are you suggesting falsely, as the bible does in fact, that bat’s and birds are of the same group?

Of course all of that was initially worked out by structural analysis but it has since been confirmed by DNA evidence. Bat’s and birds structurally appear to be of different groups yet both fly, DNA evidence confirms that they are indeed only distantly related and their wings are examples of convergent evolution.

There are many other really obvious examples, the eyes of invertebrates are built completely different to human eye’s, better in fact in some ways, they share many design features but they different to dramatically in others that it’s clear they did not evolve from each other. Again this is an example of convergent evolution.

In reason

Russell