Dinosaurs in Creation

DINOSAURS ARE IN THE BIBLE

Dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible, in the sense that the word appears in the Bible, because that name wasn't invented until 1841, and the Bible was translated into English in about 1600-over 200 years earlier-but I do believe that dinosaur are described in the Bible! The oldest book of the Bible, the Book of Job, records the existence of several large unusual creatures.  In a passage describing a dozen representative animals, we find more space, 44 verses in fact, devoted to two animals that apparently are now extinct. One of these was a huge land animal called a "behemoth” , that was also extremely powerful, the largest of all the land animals, and impossible to capture.  Fanciful attempts to identify him with existing animals are ludicrous. {be-hay-mohth'} AV - behemoth 1; 1  perhaps an extinct dinosaur, a Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, exact meaning unknown. Some translate as elephant or hippopotamus but from the description in Job 40:15-24, this is patently absurd.

In Job 40:15-24, we read: Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.  Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.  He moveth his tail like a cedar. The sinews of his stones are wrapped together.  His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.  He is the chief of the ways of God: He that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.  Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.  He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.  The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.  Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: He trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.  He taketh it with his eyes: His nose pierceth through snares.

What is the Biblical view of dinosaurs?  And whatever really happened to these remarkable creatures? 

The Bible records the fact that Dinosaurs did not become extinct "millions" of years ago.  They are mentioned in the Bible.  Some of them were alive after the Flood of Noah. In Genesis 1:21    And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind.- and God saw that it was good. The Hebrew tanniyn is translated "whales," but in 20 other places it is translated "dragons," “sea monster”, or "serpent”.

God also describes a type of sea dragon which is translated "leviathan”.  He apparently was a fire-breathing monster with a hide that could not be pierced with sword, spears, or hooks. 03882 livyathan {liv-yaw-thawn'} - leviathan 6; 6 leviathan, sea monster, dragon, large aquatic animal [ perhaps the extinct dinosaur, plesiosaurus]. Some think this to be a crocodile but from the description in Job 41 this is patently absurd. It appears to be a large fire-breathing animal of some sort. Just as the bombardier beetle has an explosion producing mechanism, so the great sea dragon may have an explosive producing mechanism to enable it to be a real fire breathing dragon.

It is interesting that some dinosaur fossils have been excavated that show a strange protuberance with an internal cavity on the top of the head. It has been suggested that this might have served as a mixing chamber for combustible gases that would ignite when exhaled into the outside oxygen. It is interesting that the many dragon legends also allude to this "fire-breathing" characteristic.

What Happened to the Dinosaurs?

Dinosaur beds have, of course, been found on every continent, as far north as Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean, and as far south as Antartica. Hundreds of dinosaur tracks and trails have been found all over the world. Most researchers believe that the age of the dinosaurs came to a sudden end as a result of a global catastrophe of some kind. There are numerous theories and conjectures, with no general agreement among scientists.

The Formation of Fossil Beds Not only do sedimentary deposits demand the dynamics of a gigantic flood for adequate explanation, but so also do the fossils of billions of plants and animals that are found within them. This is indeed a serious problem for evolutionary uniformitarianism, for large-scale fossilization is simply not occurring anywhere in the world today. When fishes die in the oceans they do not sink to the bottom and become fossils. Instead, they either decompose or are picked to pieces by scavengers.  Likewise, as one prominent geologist has pointed out, "The buffalo carcasses strewn over the plains in uncounted millions two generations ago have left hardly a present trace. The flesh was devoured by wolves or vultures within hours or days after death, and even the skeletons have now largely disappeared, the bones dissolving and crumbling into dust under the attack of weather."  The Old Testament indicates that Palestine was infested with lions for centuries (Job 38:39, Prov. 22:13, 11 Kings 17:25), but no fossil of a lion has yet been found there.

In contrast to this lack of fossilization going on in the world today, consider the almost unbelievable amount of fossilization that has occurred in the past. "It has been estimated that more than 100,000 different species of fossils have already been found. Some rocks are composed almost entirely of the remains of marine animals. " Nothing could be more obvious than the fact that billions of fossils of crustaceans, fishes, land animals, and plants, many of them almost perfectly preserved in huge sedimentary deposits, could not have been buried by processes observable in the world today.

A startling illustration of the fact that a great catastrophe once struck this planet may be found in the four or five million mammoths and other large animals which were destroyed in the north polar regions, many of them frozen instantly and preserved whole and undamaged, and in some cases either standing or kneeling upright!

Ivan T. Sanderson, a prominent field zoologist who spent many years studying these phenomena, had attempted at first to explain the mass destruction of Arctic mammoths in non-catastrophic terms.  But a special study of the Beresovka mammoth, which Russian scientists had transported from Siberia to the Leningrad Museum, caused his position to be "almost completely reversed."

First, the mammoth was upright, but it had a broken hip. Second, its exterior was whole and perfect, with none of its two-foot long shaggy fur rubbed or torn off. Third, it was fresh; its parts, although they started to rot when the heat of fire got at them, were just as they had been in life; the stomach contents had not begun to decompose.  Finally, there were buttercups on its tongue.

Animals as large as mammoths would require several hundred pounds of food daily just to survive; and there were many millions of them in this region where very little vegetation grows today. In order to freeze animals of this size in such a way that large crystals would not form within their body cells, temperatures of 150 degrees below zero would have to descend upon them instantly. 

MAMMOTHS  An estimated 5,000,000 mammoths, whose remains are buried all along the coastline of northern Siberia and Alaska, were frozen and buried not many thousands of years ago. "The Siberian deposits have been worked now for nearly two centuries. The store appears to be as inexhaustible as a coalfield. Some think that a day may come when the spread of civilization may cause the utter disappearance of the elephant in Africa, and that it will be to these deposits that we may have to turn as the only source of animal ivory"

"One mine in Siberia reportedly yielded twenty thousand tusks. When Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer of the Arctic, visited Bear Island, north of Siberia in the Artic Ocean, he reported it was composed of two ingredients, mammoth remains and sand. But the predominant ingredient was mammoth bones. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reports occasionally came in of mammoths found in frozen state.  Some of these reports were investigated by the Tsarist governments, and a few mammoths were exhumed and brought to St. Petersburg. They were rather sensational evidences of the time when Siberia had had a much more temperate or subtropical climate. When Baron Toll explored Bennet Island, some three hundred miles north of the Siberian mainland, he reported finding a quick-frozen mammoth, in a land where today, during the height of the Arctic summer, willows will grow perhaps two inches high. And yet here, Baron Toll found evidence of former life under conditions which today could not possibly exist.  Concerning mammoth bones in Russia, Pallas claimed that there was not a river bed in all Russia, from the Don to the Bering Strait, which did not contain mammoth bones. Other writers have observed that, strangely enough, the farther one goes north, the more numerous are mammoth remains"

The fact that only a catastrophe of the proportions described in Genesis 6-9 could have suddenly destroyed these vast numbers of large animals is becoming more and more obvious to unprejudiced investigators.

The Flood of Noah would easily fit the requirements. There are many scientists who have become creationists and are convinced that the Biblical flood provides a more plausible explanation than the traditional geological-age conjectures. Remember that all animals known can fit on Noah’s ark. How? 60% of all known creatures are aquatic so wouldn’t have been on board. Of the 40 % of animals that are land bases, 70 % are insects. So only 12% of animals had to ride and they fit including all dinosaurs! In fact that totals only 20,000 present land animals and if 20,000 are now extinct that means 40,000 animals x 2 = 80 thousand with an average size being a sheep. That would take only 1/2 the ark!

Certainly the antediluvian population would have been well acquainted with their existence. Noah and his descendants would certainly have continued the numerous tales of their exploits.

Survival in the post-flood world would also account for the many dragon stories embellished throughout the centuries[23]. There are some scientists that believe that some dinosaurs may have survived into the Middle Ages. As recent in history as 1500 AD a textbook of animals known as Historiua Animalium, published in Europe, listed five animals as alive in Europe that we know as dinosaurs today.