DINOSAUR DISCUSSION 9
Game 1: Place the dinosaur!
Where did the dinosaurs come from?
Were they part of the creation?
Were they bred by the antediluvians?
Audience: Young Earth Christians, maybe
Now before we get into this game, a little bit of background.
There has been a lot of discussion about the dinosaurs probably since … well since they have been digging them up. When did they live and so on.
The general view of evolutionists is over 66 million years ago.
And Christians say well if you are digging up all these creatures that supposedly lived a long time ago in the past our view is that God made all these creatures on the first week, we call Creation week.
* Not all Christians hold this view.
Then the evolutionists ask well how do you explain all of these rock layers where we have found them. Layers and layers of sedimentary rocks.
That’s easy, they must have been laid down at the Flood. Or before during the antediluvian period.
We looked at this in earlier discussions and determined that the antediluvian period was not possible. For a few reasons.
So let’s get back to the Flood proposal and see how our dinosaurs would have gone.
And just how well do you think you would go at placing our dinosaurs? We try this here as a game.
Now let’s introduce our contestants.
Our first contestant is
COMPSOGNATHUS sometimes known as “Compy”
At approximately 1.25 m long and weighing about 2.5 kg
Well we will need another dinosaur so now let’s introduce our second contestant:
TYRANNOSAURUS REX and sometimes known as “T-rex”
At approximately 12.4 m long and weighing approx 9 tonnes!
So now we have our two contestants. And let’s view them together:
“T-rex” and “Compy”
So now let’s move on to the game!
And here are our two contestants just placed on the pic for us to look at.
But where should they really be?
Now imagine you are on the ark and Noah is dragging this big weight to the side to throw it overboard [was there a side—just ignore that]
And Shem says “Dad, won’t we need that?”
Noah replies “No we’re definitely not going to need this and it is too heavy so let’s toss it over.”
And they do. With the Flood waters below them and sediment forming, just where do you think this real heavy weight will end up? In the very top silty layers? Or somewhere much further down?
It’s pretty simple. Any really heavy weight is going to go straight to the bottom layers.
So with that thought let’s have a guess at where our two dinosaurs are going to end up.
One weighing 9 tonnes and the other 2.5 kg. ...
OK it’s a bit of a simplification, but this would be pretty close.
“Compy” at approx 2.5 kg we would expect to be somewhere in the top layers.
“T-rex” at approx 9 tonnes we would expect to be somewhere in the bottom layers.
The problem is, of course, is that this is not where their fossils have been found.
If you look closely at the background pic you can see the dinosaurs are in the Mesozoic layers, roughly more closer to the middle than the very top and bottom layers.
So just what sort of conclusion can we make from this?
It is clear from the diagram that these layers were not laid down at the time of the Flood.
And from a 6,000 year Christian perspective it doesn’t leave too many choices.
And Deep Time doesn’t solve the problem either, since the demise of the dinosaurs supposedly 66 million years ago.
Most scientists these days have accepted the Alvarez Hypothesis, that a large meteor slammed into our planet causing a massive conflagration that led to the extinction of 75% of all species at that time, including the non-avian dinosaurs.
But there is a small number of evolutionists who have rejected this claiming that the cataclysm would have led to the extinction of many susceptible species which we still have alive today.
Like birds, turtles, crocodiles, frogs, salamanders, and so on.
Talking about the destructive scenarios we have comments like:
Yet an impact scenario, according to its enthusiasts, includes "a nightmare of environmental disasters, including storms, tsunamis, cold and darkness, greenhouse warming, acid rains and global fires." There must be some explanation for the survival of birds, turtles, and crocodiles through any catastrophe of this scale, or else the catastrophe models are wrong.
History of Life, Richard Cowen, 2000, p.295.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen3b.html
However, the survival of amphibians shows that this is simply a fantasy … If the entire earth had been subjected to a huge acid bath, there simply would not be a frog or salamander alive on the earth today. p.38.
After the Dinosaurs, Donald R. Prothero, 2006.
But here’s the problem. If the Alvarez Hypothesis is a fantasy, then so is all of the evidence supporting it. And that includes, fossils, the rock layers, and even the smoking gun itself, the 170 km wide 20 km deep crater in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, centered near the town of Chicxulub.
And if all this stuff is simply a fantasy that just means that none of this stuff can be considered to be a reliable record anymore, of past events of this planet.
That’s pretty climactic, but that is where you end up if you follow the data from the rocks and fossils and so on.
Well, that’s pretty much where I ended up.
And this messes the dinosaurs right up. If the fossils can no longer be believed to be a reliable record of the past life of this planet, where does that put the dinosaurs? They may not even be real or ever existed as living breathing creatures at any time in the past!
If you try to follow the fossil record there are other problems for the dinosaurs: nests, eggs, year-old-young in the nests, and tracks. All of which could not have been laid at the time of the Flood. See Discussion 2 and 5 for more details.
So if the geologic column could not have been laid at the time of the Flood, then when? Not before if it hadn’t rained. This suggests these layers came into existence some other way. The simplest solution is that they were fabricated. Depending which model you want to follow. And this could have happened anytime from the Creation to the Flood.
But one of the Flood models suggests animals and people were buried to give a record to later generations that the original world came to an end by a flood. This included trees: large forests were buried which have since become coal beds which have since been found.
This last part is extremely interesting as these coal beds are found in the Carboniferous and Cretaceous layers. Mainly the Carboniferous is our focus here.
Coal formation
Coal is a solid, black, readily combustible fossil fuel that contains a large amount of carbon-based material - approximately 50% of its weight. The formation of coal takes a significant amount of time (on the order of a few million years), and the first coal-bearing rock units appeared about 290-360 million years ago, at a time known as the Carboniferous or "coal-bearing" Period. As well, there are extensive coal deposits from the Cretaceous age - about 65 to 144 million years ago.
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_formation
Note: I originally had quotes suggesting fossils may have taken millions of years to form, same for coal being formed.
But much shorter times have been found and coal simulating normal conditions has been formed in about 2 or 3 months.[1,2]
Now to the Carboniferous. Since the dinosaur layers with nests, eggs, and tracks are basically impossible for a Flood burial since various layers and depositions means these would have taken many years to form. The only conclusion is that these layers were clearly fabricated. This may as well be extended to the whole Mesozoic layers.
And here’s an interesting problem. If all the Mesozoic layers were fabricated then how in the world do we get the large forests deposited down to the Carboniferous layers which are WAY below the Mesozoic ones?? At the time of the Flood? That’s when they were deposited according to this model.
There is one way possible. Evolutionists talk of reworked fossils. So why not a whole forest? Works for me. As crazy as that sounds.
Anyway it is a fascinating model. See Discussions 6 and 8 for more info.
Nomatter, it doesn’t make any difference which model you want to follow. From a 6,000 year Christian world view. Either a complete fabrication, or a mixture of laid layers, fabricated layers, and just plain reworked animals, people[probably not needed for this?], and vegetation. The dinosaurs end up being in fabricated layers, whichever model.
So all the dinosaur fossils in the Mesozoic layers came into existence just as that. Fossils. Fabricated or whatever.
So none of the dinosaurs from the Mesozoic layers ever existed as living breathing creatures. At any time in the past.
There were no dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.
There were no dinosaurs taken on Noah’s Ark. Or left to perish in the rising Flood waters.
At no time did humans and non-avian dinosaurs coexist.
There are no non-avian dinosaurs hiding in the deepest darkest jungles somewhere just waiting to be found.
OK I think that just about covers it.
References:
1.
How Did We Get All This Coal?
by Dr. Andrew A. Snelling on April 1, 2013 ; last featured April 1, 2014
Featured in Answers Magazine
Subsequent experiments have more closely simulated natural geologic conditions, with temperatures of only 257°F (125°C) and lower pressures (equivalent to burial under 5,905 feet [1,800 meters] of wet sediments).10 After only 75 days, the original plant and wood materials still transformed into coal material, comparable chemically to coal from the same area of Indonesia.
Because these experiments simulated natural conditions, we can be confident that the coal-forming process is rapid and requires only months. So there is no reason to insist that coal formation requires millions of years.
It appears that lush vegetation might have covered up to 75 percent of the pre-Flood world, including the floating forests fringing the land. The Flood waters rose from the oceans and swept over the land, catastrophically destroying and burying all the vegetation in beds between other fossil-bearing sediments. The temperatures and pressures at these depths, aided by the presence of water and clay, converted these beds into coal within months.
Thus the huge coal deposits of today’s world can easily be explained.11 The coal formed quickly in the year-long Genesis Flood only about 4,300 years ago.
https://answersingenesis.org/biology/plants/how-did-we-get-all-this-coal/
10.
W. H. Orem, S. G. Neuzil, H. E. Lerch, and C. B. Cecil, “Experimental Early-stage Coalification of a Peat Sample and a Petrified Wood Sample from Indonesia,” Organic Geochemistry 24.2 (1996): 111–125.
2.
The most common way an animal such as a dinosaur fossilises is called petrification. These are the key steps:
1. The animal dies.
2. Soft parts of the animal's body, including skin and muscles, start to rot away. Scavengers may come and eat some of the remains.
3. Before the body disappears completely, it is buried by sediment - usually mud, sand or silt. Often at this point only the bones and teeth remain.
4. Many more layers of sediment build up on top. This puts a lot of weight and pressure onto the layers below, squashing them. Eventually, they turn into sedimentary rock.
5. While this is happening, water seeps into the bones and teeth, turning them to stone as it leaves behind minerals.
This process can take thousands or even millions of years.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-are-fossils-formed.html
[Natural History Museum, London]
Lab-made fossils cram 1000s of years into 24 hours
By Ben Coxworth
July 25, 2018
In an effort to better understand how the fossilization process affects various types of biological materials, scientists at Britain's University of Bristol developed a lab-based process in which fresh specimens such as bird feathers, lizard limbs, and leaves can be converted into "synthetic" fossils within approximately one day.
Using a hydraulic press, the items are first packed into clay tablets about the diameter of a dime. Each tablet is then placed in a sealed metal tube, which gets heated to over 410 ºF (210 ºC) while also being subjected to 3,500 psi (241 bar) of pressure. After around 24 hours of this treatment, the tablets are cracked open to reveal their now-fossilized contents.
https://newatlas.com/lab-made-fossils/55619/
General pics used:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denbora_geologikoa.jpg
Denbora_geologikoa.jpg
Description
Euskara: Denbora geologikoaren eskema
Date 19 September 2020
Source Own work
Author Koldo Biguri
English:
Description
Basque: Scheme of geological time
Date 19 September 2020
Source Own work
Author Koldo Biguri
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
My changes:
Removed people and truck and bird; changed text to English, and fixed up the dates in line with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
as at 21 Sep 2023.
Place the dinosaur game
Compsognathus
Temporal range: Late Jurassic, 150.8 Ma
Compsognathus (/kɒmpˈsɒɡnəθəs/; Greek kompsos/κομψός; "elegant", "refined" or "dainty", and gnathos/γνάθος; "jaw") is a genus of small, bipedal, carnivorous theropod dinosaur. Members of its single species Compsognathus longipes could grow to around the size of a chicken. They lived about 150 million years ago, during the Tithonian age of the late Jurassic period, in what is now Europe. Paleontologists have found two well-preserved fossils, one in Germany in the 1850s and the second in France more than a century later. Today, C. longipes is the only recognized species, although the larger specimen discovered in France in the 1970s was once thought to belong to a separate species and named C. corallestris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compsognathus
“Compy sizes 1”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Compysizes1.png
Two specimens of Compsognathus longipes compared in size with each other and to a human.
Attribution: No machine-readable author provided. Dinoguy2 assumed (based on copyright claims).
“Compsognathus“
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Compsognathus_BW.jpg
Compsognathus longipes, a coelurosaur from the Late Jurassic of Europe, pencil drawing
Attribution: Nobu Tamura
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
T-rex
Tyrannosaurus
Temporal range: Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian), 68–66 Ma
Tyrannosaurus[nb 1] is a genus of large theropod dinosaur. The species Tyrannosaurus rex (rex meaning "king" in Latin), often called T. rex or colloquially T-Rex, is one of the best represented theropods. It lived throughout what is now western North America, on what was then an island continent known as Laramidia. Tyrannosaurus had a much wider range than other tyrannosaurids. Fossils are found in a variety of rock formations dating to the Maastrichtian age of the Upper Cretaceous period, 68 to 66 million years ago. It was the last known member of the tyrannosaurids and among the last non-avian dinosaurs to exist before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
The most complete specimen measures up to 12.3–12.4 m (40–41 ft) in length, but according to most modern estimates, Tyrannosaurus could have exceeded sizes of 12.4 m (41 ft) in length, 3.7–4 m (12–13 ft) in hip height, and 10 tonnes (9.8 long tons; 11 short tons) in mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tyrannosaurus-rex-Profile-steveoc86.png
Attribution: Steveoc 86
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
So for comparison we have
Compy approx 1.25 m long and 2.5 kg.
T-rex 12.4 m and approx 9 tonnes.
My pics:
“Game-1”, “Contestant-1”, “Contestant-2”, “Contestants”, Placement-1”, and “Placement-2”
constructed using
"Denbora geologikoa" by Koldo Biguri, used under CC BY-SA 4.0;
“Compsognathus_BW” by Nobu Tamura, used under CC BY 2.5, and
“Tyrannosaurus-rex-Profile-steveoc86” by Steveoc 86, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Game-1”, “Contestant-1”, “Contestant-2”, “Contestants”, Placement-1”, and “Placement-2” are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Stephen Buckley.
Licenses
CC BY 2.5
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
CC BY-SA 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Stephen Buckley
E-mail: snoaktrua [at] duck.com
Last revised: 12 Jul 2025.
Construction started: Mar 2025.
Companion pages
Page design/construction Stephen Buckley 2025.
Snoaktrua