Creation

[Liz1995]

Why did God create water creatures and birds before land animals and people?

[brachiopod]

Who?

[Dick Cheese]

Simple, He didn't.......Evolution did!!!

[gen2]

Birds came AFTER land animls, not before.

[Richard Head]

God created water so farmers would have somewhere to wash their bullocks.

[Clanad]

gen2 sounds so... well... authentic.  However the scientific community isn't all that sure.  Here's a collage from a few respected scientific voices:

One group of evolutionists believes that birds evolved from small tree-dwelling reptiles (not dinosaurs), hence it�s called the arboreal theory. Its intellectual leader is probably Dr Alan Feduccia, University of North Carolina ornithologist and author of the encyclopedic book The Origin and Evolution of Birds.  The other, more vocal, group believes that that birds evolved from running dinosaurs, so it�s called the cursorial theory. The dinosaurs concerned are types of theropod (carnivorous dinosaur) called the Dromaeosaurs, the group to which Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame belongs.
Bird evolution is one of the most controversial areas in evolutionary paleontology, and leaders of both groups have made extremely powerful (and sometimes acrimonious) criticisms of the other.
One of the most scathing critiques was by Dr Storrs Olson, Curator of Birds at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in an open letter:
�The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age � the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.� Contd.

[Clanad]

Contd.

This was part of a criticism of the National Geographic article on �Archaeoraptor�, which turned out to be a fraud. 
In Science, Fucheng Zhang and Zhonghe Zhou reported on a fossil of what they claim is a true flying bird they named Protopteryx fengningensis. It was part of the groups of extinct birds known as the enantiornithines (from the Greek for �opposite birds�, and they date it at 120 million years.  The fossil had imprints of downy feathers as well as a structure of the pelvis called the procoracoid process that is an indicator of flight ability in modern birds. This has led to media headlines like �Scientists Say Fossil Shows Birds Came Before Dinosaurs.
Another article points out that feathers are far closer to mammalian hairs than reptilian scales, and illustrates this with pictures of scales and a feather under the same magnification.
Another important point is that the evolutionary �dates� are wrong. Archaeopteryx with �feathers almost identical to those of modern birds�, is �dated� at 25 million years older than Protopteryx with its allegedly primitive feathers, and Archaeopteryx is also dated 20 million years older than Microraptor. Some evolutionists are claiming that this is an �evolutionary reversal�, whatever that means, but this doesn�t change the fact that the evolutionary order does not support evolution of birds from non-birds.

Offered as an alternative... (puts on helmet and tightens buckle)