My parents got me an interesting book when I was quite small. It was my favorite. I used to get my Dad to read to me from it. It was a big, beautiful, illustrated book about dinosaurs. I wish I still had that book.
Who doesn’t love dinosaurs? Great big reptilian style monsters that roamed the earth for millions of years, so the book said. On the bottom of every page was a timeline, and above it, the double-page spread featured one or two dinosaurs, munching plants, or the leaves of trees, or – in the most exciting pictures – eating other dinosaurs. My favorite picture, which still scared me a bit, was an allosaurus, striped like a tiger, with its teeth firmly affixed on the shoulder of a tasty herbivorous dinosaur, whose name I have forgotten. As we will see, it doesn’t matter that I forgot the name.
My favorite picture, which still scared me a bit, was an allosaurus, striped like a tiger, with its teeth firmly affixed on the shoulder of a tasty herbivorous dinosaur.
My school friends shared my love of these giants. We weren’t really scared, because we knew we would never meet one. They became extinct millions of years before people had even evolved. How did they become extinct? The book didn’t really know and, of course, that is never a satisfying answer for a ten-year-old boy. The last double-page spread had a few suggestions. One was that their diet did not have enough calcium in, due to the evolution of flowering plants – angiosperms. This led to dinosaur egg shells becoming thinner, and breaking prematurely. Or maybe the eggs could have been broken open by the book’s illustration of these weird, slightly furry, rat-like proto-mammals.
I wish I still had that book. I still had it when, at the age of 15, I became a Christian. Just over a year later, when I was working a Saturday job at a Christian bookstore, I found out that the store manager did not believe in the theory of evolution. He believed that the book of Genesis was literal history. The earth really was created in six 24-hour periods. There was a real man called Adam and a real woman called Eve, and a real worldwide Flood that caused the overwhelming majority of the fossils – including fossils of dinosaur bones. That evening, I went home with a book called “Evolution or Creation” by Professor H Enoch. The year must have been 1978. The book had been published just two years previously. It was up to date. Dinosaurs, it opined, were land animals. Therefore, they were created on the sixth day of creation. Don’t get me wrong – that is logically sound. Pteradactyls, being flying creatures, were created on the fifth day of creation.
Just like evolutionists, creationist dinosaur lovers assumed that the people of the past had misreported what these dragons were like. The poor simple people of less civilized times – you know, like the ones inspired by God to write the Bible – had got the whole idea of dragons or dinosaurs wrong.
Roll along the years. Dinosaurs, far from phasing creationists, actually became their emblems. Whole Christian ministries were built around the concept of dinosaurs. If they were created on the sixth day, then they must have lived around people. People must have known about dinosaurs, and had legends about them. In the legends they were called dragons. But here is the thing; just like evolutionists, creationist dinosaur lovers assumed that the people of the past had misreported what these dragons were like. The poor simple people of less civilized times – you know, like the ones inspired by God to write the Bible – had got the whole idea of dragons or dinosaurs wrong. Now, we clever creationists could put them right. Dinosaurs were exactly how scientists of the 70s and 80s said they were. All that the evolutionists had got wrong was the timescale. So creationist ministries started publishing their own dinosaur books, in which pictures, identical to those in the evolutionary books, were assumed to have been created that way by God.
Even in the 80s, we were hearing rumors that the evolutionist dinosaur was undergoing its own evolution. Evolutionists had been saying for a long time that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. Then it became more specific. Birds had evolved from therapod dinosaurs. Of course, we creationists laughed. We could easily show that feathers could not have evolved from reptilian scales. If only we had analyzed our own truth properly.
I wish I still had my childhood dinosaur book. Then I could show you the comparison between an evolutionary dinosaur book of the 70s and an evolutionary dinosaur book of the modern 20s. Evolutionists decided that bird feathers had not evolved from reptilian dinosaur scales. Dinosaurs are not reptilian. They are avian. Dinosaurs, they told us, had feathers.
Evolutionary dinosaurs and creationist dinosaurs are no longer the same.
So I bought a big picture book of dinosaurs, the other day, in the children’s section of Barnes and Noble in Spokane Valley. So we look up a picture of scary old tyrannosaurus, and find that it had feathers on its back. It looks almost cuddly. If we look at its smaller relative, the velociraptor, we find a completely feathered dinosaur. I do not want, at this point, to go down a bunny trail of showing that these feathers are make-believe; I will do that later in another article. The only point I am making here is that evolutionary dinosaurs and creationist dinosaurs are no longer the same. Evolutionary dinosaurs are now completely different to what they were in my 1970s book, which I wish I still had. Creationists stubbornly stick to the 1970s evolutionary pictures of dinosaurs, even though such images were created by guesswork from a very small number of fossil bones; more on that in another article as well. That means that creationist dinosaurs have very little evidence to back their pictures up, anymore. Most of their evidence has been nullified by the change in evolutionary dinosaurs.
So, I now believe it is time to think the unthinkable, and, as a creationist, state categorically that dinosaurs did not exist – at least not in the way you were told.
The elites of society, then as now, did not want any evidence that might support the Bible.
I am certainly not blaming Mary Anning (1799-1847) for the deception. She definitely found fossil skeletons of something; of large animals, that seemed to be extinct. But there was a conspiracy. The elites of society, then as now, did not want any evidence that might support the Bible. So the esteemed paleontologist and the inspiration behind London’s Natutal History Museum, Sir Richard Owen, created a new word – dinosaur – as a new umbrella term for all these inconvenient fossil finds. Subsequent history, that we will go into on another occasion (that’s at least three follow-up articles I have assigned myself now) shows how people’s images of dinosaurs has changed, as newer fossils have been found. For example, consider the changes in perception of iguanodon. This was first thought to be a quadroped, like an iguana lizard. Then it became a biped, like a kangaroo. Now it is a part-time quadroped, like a bear. With so many changes in the perception of the appearance of these creatures, very, very few of whom posess complete skeletons, it is time to recognize them for what they are. They are dragons. Or they are behemoths, leviathons, seraphim etc. Let us, as serious creationists, rid ourselves once and for all of the evolutionary term dinosaur. Let us reclassify them as dragons, and let us start to believe again the generations of people who have seen dragons all over the world. They reported what they saw, and they reported it correctly.
Dinosaurs did not exist.
Dragons did.