Fossilized Footprints and History of Dinosaurs

The New York Times published a web article on October 6 about the discovery of fossilized footprints in three different rock quarries in Poland over the past ten years. Stephen Brusatte, lead author of the journal article detailing the discovery, says that, though no actual dinosaur bones have been found at the sites yet, “the possibilities are really exciting.” He says, “Anatomically, for all intents and purposes, [the creature that made these footprints] was a dinosaur. If you saw this thing, you would call it a dinosaur.”

The Times article references Dr. Sterling Nesbitt of the University of Washington: “Dr. Nesbitt said that it was often hard to draw convincing conclusions about animals just from their footprints, but that Mr. Brusatte and his colleagues ‘put the best argument that anyone has ever put forth about early dinosaur tracks.’ He added, ‘And I think they’re right.’”

Though Dr. Nesbitt admits that it is difficult to draw conclusions about animals from their footprints, the Times article does not neglect to give an artist’s reconstruction of this cat-sized creature that, it claims, was one of “the earliest known relatives of dinosaurs.”

According to the article, these fossilized footprints “push back the first appearance of this dinosaur lineage to about 250 million years ago.”

But if one accepts the biblical account of history, these footprints cannot be more than a few thousand years old, because the universe is around 6,000 years old, and the footprint would have been fossilized during the Flood, about 4,300 years ago.