Why
doesn't the Bible mention the Dinosaurs?
(Note: The
answer to this question is taken directly from the book In
the Beginning:
Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood by
Walt Brown, PhD.
I consider this 325 page beautifully illustrated and well documented
book
to be the most scientific, well reasoned and comprehensive book
concerning
evidence for Creation and the Flood available. Excellent for home
and/or
Christian schools You can find more information on this book here.
This
frequent question, asked
in just this way, implies many questions related to
dinosaurs—a word meaning
“terrible lizards.” When did they live? What killed
the dinosaurs? What
were they like? What does
the Bible say about
them? Could so many large animals have fit on the Ark? There
were about
300 different types of dinosaurs. Most were large; some even gigantic.
One adult dinosaur was as tall as a five-story building. However, some
were small, about the size of a chicken.
Many other questions will
be answered if we focus on one question, “When did they
live?” There are
two common, but quite different, answers. Evolutionists say dinosaurs
lived,
died, and became extinct at least 60 million years before man evolved.
Others believe God created all living things during the creation week.
So man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. If we look at the
evidence,
sorting out these two very different answers should be easy.
Did dinosaurs become extinct
at least 60 million years before man evolved? Almost all
textbooks
that address the subject say so. Movies and television vividly portray
this. One even hears it at Disney World and other amusement parks. Some
will say that every educated person believes this. We frequently hear
stories
that begin with impressive-sounding phrases such as, “Two
hundred million
years ago, as dinosaurs ruled the earth, ...” But none of
this is evidence;
some of it is an appeal to authority. (Evidence must be
observable
and verifiable.)
Did man and dinosaurs
live at the same time? Scientists in the former Soviet Union
have reported
a layer of rock containing more than 2,000 dinosaur footprints
alongside
tracks “resembling human footprints.”1
Obviously, both types of footprints were made in mud or sand that has
since
hardened into rock. If they are human footprints, then man and
dinosaurs
lived at the same time. Similar discoveries have been made in Arizona.2
If it were not for the theory of evolution, few would doubt that these
were human footprints.
The
Book of Job is one of the oldest books ever written. In it,
God tells
Job of his greatness as Creator and describes an animal, called
Behemoth,
as follows:
Behold now, Behemoth, which
I made as well as you; He eats grass like an ox. Behold now,
his
strength in his loins, And his power in the muscles of his belly. He
bends
his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are knit together. His
bones are tubes of bronze; His limbs are like bars of
iron.
(Job 40:15–18)
Marginal notes in most Bibles
speculate that Behemoth was probably an elephant or a hippopotamus, but
those animals have tails like ropes. Behemoth had a “tail
like a cedar.”
Any animal with a tail as huge and strong as a cedar tree is probably a
dinosaur. Job 40:19–24 describes this giant,
difficult-to-capture animal
as not alarmed by a raging river. If the writer of Job knew of a
dinosaur,
then the evolution position is wrong, and man saw dinosaurs.
The next chapter of Job describes
another huge, fierce animal, a sea monster named Leviathan.3
It was not a whale or crocodile, because the Hebrew language had other
words to describe such animals. Leviathan may be a plesiosaur (PLEE see
uh sore), a large seagoing reptile that evolutionists say became
extinct
60 million years before man evolved.
Consider
the many dragon
legends. Most ancient cultures have stories or artwork of dragons that
strongly resemble dinosaurs.4
The World Book Encyclopedia states that:
The dragons of legend are
strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are
much
like the great reptiles [dinosaurs] which inhabited the earth long
before
man is supposed to have appeared on earth. Dragons were generally evil
and destructive. Every country had them in its mythology.5
The simplest and most obvious
explanation for so many common descriptions of dragons from around the
world is that man once knew the dinosaurs.
What caused the extinction
of dinosaurs? The flood. Because dinosaur bones are found among other
fossils,
dinosaurs must have been living when the flood began. There are dozens
of other dinosaur extinction theories, but they all have recognized
problems.
Most of the food chain was buried in the flood. Therefore, many large
dinosaurs
that survived the flood probably had difficulty feeding themselves and
became extinct.
Were dinosaurs on the
Ark? Yes. God told Noah to put representatives of every kind
of land
animal on the Ark. (Some dinosaurs were semiaquatic and could have
survived
outside the Ark.) But why put adult dinosaurs on the Ark? Young
dinosaurs
would take up less room, eat less, and be easier to manage. The purpose
for having animals on board was so they could reproduce after the flood
and repopulate the earth. Young dinosaurs would have more potential for
reproduction than old dinosaurs.
Most, if not all, dinosaurs
hatched from eggs. The largest dinosaur eggs ever found were a foot
long.
Hatchlings, even after a year of growth while on the Ark, would be
quite
easy to handle.
Possibly dinosaurs became
very large, because they lived to great ages. Preflood humans could
live
for more than 900 years. If whatever caused man to live so
long had
the same effect on dinosaurs, they could have grown very large.
Reptiles,
unlike other animals, continue to grow throughout their lives. Perhaps
large dinosaurs, which are similar to reptiles in many ways, were just
old.
1
. Alexander Romashko, “Tracking Dinosaurs,” Moscow
News, No. 24, 1983,
p. 10.
2
. Paul O. Rosnau et al., “Are Human and Mammal Tracks Found
Together with
the Tracks of Dinosaurs in the Kayenta of Arizona?” Parts I
and II, Creation
Research Society Quarterly ; Vol. 26, September 1989, pp.
41–48 and December
1989, pp. 77–98.
Before 1986, many thought
dinosaur tracks and human tracks were together along the banks of the
Paluxy
River in Texas. Some, but not necessarily all, of the humanlike tracks
were apparently made by part of a dinosaur’s foot. A film,
Footprints in
Stone, and John Morris’ book, Tracking Those Incredible
Dinosaurs, which
popularized the man-track idea, have been withdrawn. A few creationists
still claim that some of these manlike tracks were made by humans. I
believe
the Paluxy tracks should be studied more and many questions
satisfactorily
answered before claiming human tracks are along the Paluxy
River.
In Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive
horse hoofprints were found beside supposedly 90
–100-million-year-old
dinosaur tracks. Evolutionists have almost as much difficulty believing
that horses and dinosaurs lived together as they do man and dinosaurs.
Horses allegedly did not evolve until many millions of years after the
dinosaurs became extinct. [See Y. Kruzhilin and V. Ovcharov,
“A Horse from
the Dinosaur Epoch?” Moskovskaya Pravda (Moscow Truth), 5
February 1984.]
For a report of a quadruped that left hoof-shaped prints alongside
1,000
dinosaur prints, see Richard Monastersky, “A Walk along the
Lakeshore,
Dinosaur-Style,” Science News, Vol. 136, 8 July 1989, p.
21.
3
. Leviathan is also mentioned in Psalms 74:14 and 104:26 and in Isaiah
27:1. Both Leviathan and Behemoth are described in the apocryphal book
II Esdras. II Esdras 6:49–53 says these beasts were created
on the fifth
day and given separate territories because of their large size.
4.
Lorella Rouster, “The Footprints of Dragons,”
Creation Social Science and
Humanities Quarterly, Fall 1978, pp. 23–28.
5
. Knox Wilson, “Dragon,” The World Book
Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, 1973, p.
265.
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