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Archaeopteryx lithographica is a very early species of avian dinosaur from Late Jurassic southern Germany.
I'd like to give you one more tip about teaching evolution to creationists—and this one is a slightly more compassionate one—and that is to try your best to make it matter. Try to remember that this person is coming from a point of view that the entire universe was custom-made by hand with them in mind, and it can be pretty scary to step out of that comfort zone out here into the void with the rest of us. A person who's used to the idea of creationism can easily equate the feelings of freedom that I get from my nihilistic and mechanistic view of life on Earth, with a feeling of hopelessness and despair. It's up to us to help them see that there is beauty and wonderful purpose to be found in the book of nature, if only you take the time to just go and look for it.
I love learning and thinking about the natural processes of this universe—I'm constantly in awe and in reverence of them! I feel connected to everything in the universe when I think about stellar nucleosynthesis creating the elements that make things like planets and water and dogs and cheese and people! I feel like I'm at a family reunion everywhere that I go, when I think about evolution, and ecology, and how all of life is related and interconnected.
And I feel like I'm so much bigger than I really am, when I think about the unbroken chain of matter, and life, going back millions and billions of years, and all leading up to me! and I feel like I'm so much smaller than I really am, when I think about the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos all around me.
And I feel like I'm the least important person in the universe when I think about how small and short and insignificant my existence on this planet really is, and yet I feel like I'm the most important person in the universe, when I think about the billions of microorganisms that live on and in my body that depend on me for survival.
And I feel motivated and energized when I think about how my life is draining away at every moment, and eventually I will die and there's nothing else, and there's so much more that I want to do! And yet I feel so at peace, when I think about the biogeochemical cycles that move the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, the phosphorus, the water, and every other bit of every single living thing through every ecosystem across the entire planet, and that the atoms in my body are just borrowed from them, and that those cycles will continue long after I'm gone and me, I will return to those things, to be used by other organisms for eons to come!
And I feel that I'm completely without purpose, when I think about the timeline of evolution: all those species, coming and going, in the blink of an eye, and my own species just 200,000 years old; and yet I feel so full of purpose, when I realize that by my very existence, I am a shaper of the story of humankind. My community relies on me exactly the way that I rely on them, and whether I want to be or not, I am a significant piece of the history of my species.
When I think about science, the smallest things feel huge and the biggest things feel tiny; I feel so incredibly happy, and sad, and powerful, and weak, and elated, and listless, and emotional, and overwhelmed, and everything, all at once, all the time! And the sum total of all of those feelings is just flipping radical, dude!
Every single child is born with the capacity for the kind of wonder that science provides, and a scientist is just a child that survived. And maybe if I can pass on just a little bit of that excitement to a creationist, maybe, it'll get through to them in a meaningful way.
For every person out there like the charlatans that I make videos about, there are a ton more people who are thinking the same things as them but they don't know why. They don't understand science, they've never been allowed to learn the science, they don't know what science is, or where it comes from—all they need is for someone to give them an out. To show them the truth in a way that isn't scary, and isn't judgmental, and doesn't leave them feeling abandoned.