Just Kidding! Dinosaurs are Birds!

LiveScience: “Do Dinosaurs Still Exist?” Creationists don’t claim that dinosaurs are still alive today. But because we believe at least two of each dinosaur kind survived Noah’s Flood (i.e., were on the Ark), we view the possibility as distinctly more likely than evolutionists.

Until recently, evolutionists insisted that dinosaurs disappeared from the earth entirely some 65 million years ago. But just last month we reported that some evolutionists are now questioning that idea. Nonetheless, no one who believes in millions of years can countenance the idea that dinosaurs might be living among us, today; if so, it would undermine the reliability of the fossil record in supporting millions of years.

Most of us see dinosaurs every day, and some people even have them in their homes.

So when LiveScience columnist Benjamin Radford asks “do dinosaurs still exist?” it’s no surprise that it’s a part of his Bad Science column. He writes, “[S]ome believe that giant dinosaurs still exist today, just beyond the reach of scientific proof.” Among the modern-day dinosaur candidates are the Loch Ness monster and its purported cousins in Lake Okanagan (Canada), Lake Champlain (the U.S.), and Lake Nahuel (Argentina), along with rumors of Africa’s Mokele-Mbembe.

The lake monsters, if they exist at all, are usually said to be plesiosaurs or ichthyosaurs, both large, dinosaur-like sea reptiles. Mokele-Mbembe is based on African rumors of a “dinosaur-like creature said to be up to 35 feet long, with brownish-gray skin and a long, flexible neck,” said to prey on elephants, hippos, and crocodiles. However, no solid evidence for its existence has been discovered.

Radford concludes:

[T]he fatal flaw in the idea that giant dinosaurs still lurk in remote jungles or cold, deep lakes is that all the evidence suggests they died out about 65 million years ago. . . . Yet scientifically speaking, not all dinosaurs died out. Most of us see dinosaurs every day, and some people even have them in their homes. Birds are the modern version of dinosaurs[.]

Apparently Radford needs to read last month’s news on the dinosaur extinction date as well as this week’s news item ! As for us, we emphasize that there’s no definite reason creationists should believe dinosaurs are still among us. Granted, it’s obviously more likely than in the evolutionary worldview, since we believe dinosaurs were alive at least after the Flood, and much anthropological evidence (such as dragon legends) suggests more “recent” encounters (within the past 2,000 years).

Even so, it may be hard for us to ever know. Not only are there dense jungles that have yet to be exhaustively explored, but the vast depths of the oceans—home to such elusive, previously legendary creatures as the giant squid—could potentially hide living plesiosaurs. Furthermore, we would not expect to find recent fossils except in the context of catastrophic events.

That said, if any ancient reptile is discovered alive, creationists will be able to accommodate the news without issue, while evolutionists will have some major backtracking to do. But perhaps it wouldn’t “undermine the reliability of the fossil record in supporting millions of years,” as we speculated above. After all, evolutionists also said coelacanths had been extinct for millions of years—until they turned up alive in 1938!

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