When I was first told about it in an email, it seemed such an impossible suggestion that I was sure that I had not understood, so I kept on asking until it was absolutely clear that it really was what he was saying. Therefore, this kind of mutations would never have been preserved. In some species, the tongue is coated with a sticky substance, used as bait to catch ants. The tongue of the woodpecker is long and ends in a barb. (Figure 26) When the tongue … When woodpeckers search for food or bore holes to make their nests, they peck trees without rhythm and not very loudly, but during breeding season they drum regularly to announce their territory. A slight change in the order of the amino acids in a protein will often change a functioning protein into a disease. So the woodpecker's tongue can create glue and later become a barb factory—all arriving at the right time so the bird can survive. Circling around behind the head and neck under the loose skin gives the tongue enough extra length so it can shoot out about six inches into Mr. grub's burrow inside a tree trunk! which must be quite perfectly coordinated, it is very difficult to imagine changes of one amino acid in one protein bringing any organ into existence. The mutation scenario, however, could never have evolved a normal bird's tongue into woodpecker's tongue. The fact that they are all present and functioning indicates that these various systems were designed and created to work together. The woodpecker’s split tongue is attached to its right nostril. By hammering on a steel chisel, men can cut into trees like the woodpecker does with his bill. After that it would have starved to death. Their feet have two toes pointing forward and another two pointing backwards, with sharply curved claws, and the four feathers in the center of their tail have very hard, curved shafts. The tongue is also sticky, so it catches the ants and pulls them directly into the woodpecker’s mouth. 12, March 1976, p. 183). It … Woodpeckers also produce large amounts of sticky saliva that coats the tongue, enhancing their ability to capture insects. They are born with shorter tongues and with time, their hyoid horns grow up to the top of the head, forward, and into the nasal cavity. The woodpecker catches its food with its tongue which has barbs and a bit of glue on the end, so it can pick up grubs hiding in their little tunnels inside a tree. Dr. Luther Sunderland, a scientist who is an expert in design engineering, was fascinated by the skeleton of a woodpecker that he found which had recently died out in the woods. In humans, the horseshoe-shaped hyoid is an attachment site for certain throat and tongue muscles. To insinuate that evolution was a non-factor is an outright lie. The brain is relatively light only at 0.1-0.5 grams, has few wrinkles on its surface and is tightly packed within the skull, making it hard for the brain to move against an impact. The tongue system splits in two, like a Y, exits through a hole in the back of the beak. Why jump to the conclusion that if mutations cause diabetes, they must also have formed the pancreas, the liver, the fish, the monkey and us? 1 to 1.5 times the length of its body? To eat the insect that exists in the tree, the woodpecker has a tongue very long in which it can insert it also in a thin space. To clarify, I reached out to a local expert at Columbia University, Dr. Walter Bock, who informed me that “The tongue of woodpeckers and its musculature is clearly the same as that in other birds. Dorsal, lateral, and ventral views of the skull of a Hairy Woodpecker. Did you know that a woodpeckers tongue is . For example, the skull is thick and composed of sponge-like hollow bone that wraps around the brain like packing material. Neither would the bug location mechanism been of any value without a tongue long enough to reach the grub. by Thomas F. Heinze, Answers to my Evolutionist As he examined the skeleton, he noticed a very strange thing: Small flexible bones exited from the woodpecker's right nostril, circled around behind its head and neck, and went into its beak on the other side of its head. The unique complex tongue of the woodpecker is extended by a complex system which includes a very long hyoid (tongue-base) extensible bone- sheathed muscle apparatus which help to control the protrusion and retraction of the tongue. The unique arrangement of the woodpecker's tongue could not have evolved. The tongue of some woodpeckers does not come from its throat up into its mouth like other creatures. In fact, neither the long tongue nor the location mechanism would have been of any use if the tongue were not equipped to stick to or into the grub to bring it back out of the hole. When the hole is drilled, the woodpecker uses its extremely long tongue (6 inches or 2.34 cm) to reach inside to get the insects. A woodpecker tongue goes around all the way around his head and comes right on top of … Then it worms its tongue into the tunnel to try to locate the grub. If it were a simple thing that could happen by small accidental changes, some blacksmith, or metallurgical scientist would have figured out how to make self sharpening steel chisels. Unfortunately, for many the evolutionary faith is a part of a total religious structure into which everything must be jammed whether it fits or not. Can evolution explain all of these characteristics? According to evolutionary theory, any system without a function will be eliminated by natural selection. Furthermore, the base of the long tongue is on the back side of the bird’s head: the bone at the base of the tongue wraps around the skull curving from the jaw to back of the skull to the crown, then to the front of the head and ending at the nasal cavity, functioning almost like a seatbelt. The toe structure and associated arrangement of tendons and leg muscles form a functional complex of features enabling the woodpecker to climb tree trunks and to maintain its position while pecking the tree." The long tongue helps the woodpecker reach insects inside the tree trunk, in addition to helping cushion its brain from its pecking activity. This design detail no doubt gives greater accuracy as the woodpecker guides its tongue toward a target grub. Most birds have tongues that are fastened to the back of their beak. The tongue of some woodpeckers does not come from its throat up into its mouth like other creatures. Furthermore, the base of the long tongue is on the back side of the bird’s head: the bone at the base of the tongue wraps around the skull curving from the jaw to back of the skull to the crown, then to the front of the head and ending at the nasal cavity, functioning almost like a … The only way the tongue's root could get to where it could exit from the side of the beak was to move foreword from its spot in the back of the throat. In this way, according to the story, each little movement was favored by natural selection because the tongues length increased, and the longer the tongue was, the farther it could stretch out into the passageways the grubs had dug in the tree trunks. Often extending five times farther than the beak itself, the tongue is so thin that it can reach into ants’ nests in trees. For example, the European Green woodpecker’s tongue goes down the throat, out the back of the neck around the back of the skull beneath the skin, and over the top between the eyes, terminating usually just below the eye socket. 4. While I understand the merit of avoiding competition by only using tree trunks that other birds don’t use, I want to ask, “Do you really need to go that far?”. Evolutionists call it an “adaptation” which means it just happened that way because woodpeckers wanted to eat beetle larvae way inside trees–and were willing to wait a million years or so for their tongues to grow long enough to reach them. The woodpecker's tongue must have come all at once, a product of complex design. The beak is flexible, almost straight with a thick base, and the lower beak is shorter than the upper. Imagine trying to drill into a hardy tree trunk. They are even well-known to children because their endearing, unique appearance and habits make them good material for picture books and comics. Woodpeckers are so uniquely designed for their specific tasks that their amazing features defy evolutionary thinking! One prominent evolutionist on the staff of a prestigious scientific magazine confided after examining it 'There are certain anatomical features which just cannot be explained by gradual mutations over millions of years. A wood pecker will drill into a tree, then snake out its long, sticky tongue, waiting until the ants, believing it … This would, of course requited two completely different types of mutations which were more or less perfectly coordinated: The mutations which moved the root around the head, would have to have been coordinated with those which increased the length of the tongue. The long tongue of some woodpeckers is an adaptive function that increases with the growth of the bird. In insisting that God did nothing, and that accidental mutations have produced everything, evolutionists have painted themselves into a corner, with no decent way to account for the origin of any complex organ. The tongue of woodpeckers is even longer than its body, which is actually the longest one that can be found in the bird world. If a man were trying to catch grubs like a woodpecker, no matter how sharp he kept his chisel, he would not know which direction to go to connect with the tunnels which have grubs in them. Its tongue could not help it catch any food at all for the millions of years that it would take to complete the circle around the back of the head, by changing one amino acid in one protein at a time. with tiny joints.1 What made them exit through the right nostril Just between you and me, I have to get God into the act too sometimes. 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