DYING A SLOW DEATH

Climate degradation since the Flood has not gone simply toward harsher weather and uneven water supplies. As we all know, large parts of the earth have become desert. Major deserts, such as Death Valley in California, have formed in only the last few thousand years (see Note 8). And the violence of storms elsewhere shows that the water distribution cycle is out of kilter. Before the Flood with predictable supplies of vegetation, even large dinosaurs could find the tons of food they needed each day. On the post-Flood earth with deserts forming, food is often hard to find, and large animals, large dinosaurs in particular, are very vulnerable to food shortages.

In fact biological studies show that it is large creatures which are most affected by food shortages, because they need large predictable supplies of food. Small creatures, on the other hand, can scurry from place to place looking for small morsels. Before the Flood the plentiful vegetation supported even the biggest life forms. After the Flood with the coming of unpredictable weather patterns, desert formation, and the diminishing growth of vegetation, big dinosaurs simply could not find the tons of food they needed every day to survive.

In fact, God did not intend to destroy all life during the Flood (life on the Ark was spared, Genesis 8:1), but rather the evil of mankind (Genesis 6:11-13). Unfortunately other life was destroyed as a byproduct -- sin always has consequences reaching beyond the sinner. Dinosaurs in fact lived for some time after the Flood, and there is intriguing evidence that dinosaurs actually co-existed with man in the post-Flood world . . . .

On the walls of the Grand Canyon, for example, are pictographs and drawings made by people living long ago. One such sample of rock art is at Hava Supai. It is a sketch of a two-legged dinosaur, similar to tyrannosaurus or edmontosaurus (see Note 9). Artifacts like this one show that dinosaurs were not extinct when men lived on earth. Of course this is exactly what the Bible teaches, that human life has co-existed with other life forms since the beginning when God made all life in one week. If dinosaurs lived into fairly recent times, we might expect that there would be other evidences of this.

One such evidence is a skull of the dinosaur monoclonius. Monoclonius means "one horn." Could this animal be perhaps the basis of the ancient unicorn legends? It is certain that now-extinct animals are sometimes the core of truth out of which legends are made. Perhaps monoclonius is the original unicorn, and unicorn stories are imperfect memories of this real dinosaur which lived within the memory of man.

There are other evidences that dinosaurs not only lived into fairly recent times, but are still surviving in certain remote, protected parts of the world today. In 1977 a Japanese fishing trawler netted a strange beast off the coast of New Zealand. Body shape studies and tissue specimens taken by the Japanese from the dead animal showed it was not a shark but a plesiosaurus, a reptilian swimmer similar to the dinosaurs. This is extremely troubling to evolutionary philosophy, with its claim that such reptiles became extinct 65 million years ago, but it is totally consistent with the Scriptural record which says that all life has co-existed since the Creation Week.

There are still other clues that dinosaurs are living in today's world. On the island of Komodo, Indonesia, are large "dragon lizards" reaching lengths as long as twelve feet and weighing as much as 350 pounds. These beasts fulfill all of our common conceptions about dinosaurs -- they are mean-tempered, fierce, and eat dead animals or rotting meat. They are literally "terrible lizards" -- which is the meaning of the word "dinosaur." Anatomically they are similar to dinosaurs. If it were not for evolutionary philosophy which teaches that all dinosaurs should be dead now, perhaps these dragon-lizards would be acknowledged as dinosaur-like creatures.

Evolutionary philosophy has led to many misconceptions besides the idea that man has never seen dinosaurs alive. One of the most notorious misconceptions was the Piltdown hoax. Piltdown Man was supposedly an ape-man who developed early in human evolution. It was based on bone fragments publicized around 1910, and was believed for forty years to be a true intermediate between apes and man. But the bone fragments used to "reconstruct" the Piltdown specimen were frauds -- planted on purpose near Piltdown, England, and then "found" later by the same people. The only reason Piltdown Man was believed to be genuine for forty years was the evolutionary misconception that ape-men existed and should be found somewhere.

If evolutionary expectations could cause people to believe in the Piltdown hoax for four decades, we ought to reconsider evolutionary presuppositions about other areas of life, such as the claim that dinosaurs have been long extinct. In fact as we have seen, dinosaurs are not evolutionary. They are a part of God's creation in the same way that other living things are part of God's creation. They suffered with other life forms on the post-Flood earth because of climate changes brought about by the Flood. Most have gone extinct, as have other creatures, because of degradation following the Flood, and ultimately because of man's sin.