I know I should leave this alone, but I've been interested in creationism longer than I've been interested in birds, so this stuff is catnip for me.
Regarding
Sinosauropteryx, there was a lot of debate about the precise nature of its filamentous structures in the years following their discovery, with some claiming they were proto-feathers, others claiming collagen fibres. This is standard science at work. Since the initial report (in 1997) the weight of evidence has come down on the proto-feather side, and the collagen hypothesis has been discounted. Wikipedia has a good summary -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosauro ... _filamentsAs for the theropod respiratory system, I was aware of Carl Wieland's article already via this response -
http://www.evolutionpages.com/bird_lung.htm. Wieland's claim that intermediate stages between a bellows and a flow-through system are impossible doesn't make sense (see above link), and again, more recent work has only strengthened the case for bird-like flow-through ventilation, and weakened the alternative notion of the crocodile-style "liver-pump" system mentioned by Wieland. For really detailed coverage of this topic, see
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... 2/ar.20989I once attended one of Wieland's presentations BTW, and had an interesting discussion with him about creationist epistemology. He's obviously a highly intelligent, thoughtful guy, but like all creationists he measures the truth of everything by how well it accords with Genesis - see article D(6) of Creation Ministries International's Doctrines and Beliefs (Wieland was Managing Director of CMI):
Facts are always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information. By definition, therefore, no interpretation of facts in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record
The trouble is, creationists are also "fallible people who do not possess all information". They believe Genesis is infallible, but
they could be wrong about that. So you can't take the literal truth of Genesis as a given; it has to be tested against the evidence. And when you do that, it fails the test.