First Chapter
The first chapter of DBD is entitled The World of the Dinosaurs. Actually it's more of an Atlas to where the fossils of dinosaurs have been found. DBD's map has a much higher quality than DTTL. But it's pretty outdated and inaccurate in many spots. For example, Psittacosaurus is claimed to be found in Russia, but the map neglects to show that Psittacosaurus remains are also found in Mongolia, China, and perhaps Thailand. Allosaurus is claimed to have been found in Australia, but the map neglects to show that Allosaurus' remains are also found mostly in North America along with Portugal and Tanzania. What is believed to be a Dwarf Allosaur is now shown to be Australovenator, an allosauroid that lived during the Early Cretaceous Period 98 million years ago. Remains of Parasaurolophus is claimed to have been found in Alaska. Wrong. Remains of Parasaurolophus are found in New Mexico, Utah, and Alberta, Canada. Struthiomimus is claimed to have been found in New York. Wrong again. Struthiomimus is found in Alberta, Canada. Ultrasaurus is now known to be the same as Supersaurus and Ankylosaurids are actually found in many places worldwide, not just in Mongolia and Antarctica.
DTTL in the first chapter entitled Those Terrible Lizards on pages 10-11 has a text, telling the reader about where the dinosaur fossils have been found. DBD doesn't.
Gish Garbage about Fossils
The first chapter of DBD on page 8 is How Fossils are Formed. See! What I tell you. It has no intro. Instead it proceeds to slanderously demonize the notion of fossils being the remains of plants and animals being buried in the ground for millions of years and boldly claim that the formation of the fossils were all the result of the alleged Great Flood of Noah, to which there is no evidence for. Gish explains how a fossil is formed in a distorted matter and wrongly states that it does not necessary take millions of years for fossils to form and tries to prove it by bringing up a so-called “fossilized" hat that isn't really a fossil at all. Fabric doesn't fossilize and Gish knows it. In order for an object to be a fossil it must have the entire original materials 100% be gone and replaced by minerals that came from the ground. If it doesn't, then it's not a fossil. The so-called hat is a concretion that was carved into a hat by a hoaxer. I got this idea from Michael Suttkus who did a critique on one of Ken Ham's claims about the miners hat. You can read about his hat critique right here.
Gish claims there are mammoth fossils that have been frozen quickly and stays frozen for thousands of years with their flesh still good enough to eat. That's false, too.
There's no evidence of Noah's Flood being responsible for the fossils being made in the La Brea tar pits, either. The animals that died in the La Brea where the result of this: A Mastodon ventures into the lake to drink only to find that it walked right into a tar trap and it began to sink. As it struggles, its trumpeting cries was picked up by a Smilodon that followed the sounds to the tap pits and jumped right in to attack the Mastodon. However, it too was doomed and both of these animals sank down into the tar and perished. Here's 3 web pages that tell about how the tar pits came about and how did the Cenozoic animals like the Smilodon and the Mastodon really died in the tar pits.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/quaternary/labrea.html
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/glossary/Labrea.shtml
Gish claims the bones came from areas where there was a drastic change of climate that have occurred when the animals died and asserts that it was Noah's Flood that changed the climate. It didn't. Neither the Bible, nor the physical evidence mentions anything about climatic and environmental changes of any kind being the result of Noah's Flood. This is the direct result of creationists shoehorning such things into literature despite the fact that it speaks nothing at all about them.
His claims about mass graveyards of bones being found with bones all jumbled up as the result of the flood is debunked, too. He's ignorant of the fact that there are lots fossils of dinosaurs found completely intact, like the Iguanodon fossils found in a Belgium coal mine in 1877 for instance, indicating that the dinosaurs died in much calmer conditions instead of a violent flood.
Reference,
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC362.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC363.html
If those so-called fossils have the original materials inside of them, then they are not fossils. REAL fossils, with original materials all 100% replaced with minerals from the ground, does take millions of years to form like coal, oil, and amber. Page 8 shows Gish's own distorted diagram version of how the fossils are formed. Note how the sedimentary layers are all in slanted rows and not in horizontal rows like we normally see in real life. A wrongful way to describe how the fossil is formed, don't you think?
To view rebuttals of out of place artifacts and pseudo-fossils click the link below.
http://kjmatthews.users.btopenworld.com/cult_archaeology/out_of_place_artefacts.html
Improper clothing
The next chapter entitled Digging up dinosaur Fossils on page 10, shows an illustration on how dinosaur fossils were dug up. On page 11, there is a woman wearing a casual dress and not wearing a hard hat while taking notes in the field. This kind of clothing is very much inappropriate to wear at a digging site, especially, with all that dirt, snakes, scorpions, and bugs flying, slithering, and scurrying about. Always wear old long pants, long sleeve shirts, and especially wear a hat to protect yourself from the sun, dust, bugs, and falling debris when you go out to dig for fossils.
Demonizing scientists
On the next chapter Restoring Dinosaur Fossils on pages 12-13, much is told about how very little Gish knows about the history of dinosaur reconstruction and restoration, how they are put together to form a skeleton, and how the skeletal structure has change over the years due to new discoveries being made in the fields as well as in the labs– not at all. This scene shown on the 2 pages demonizes a team of scientists reconstructing a wrongfully built dinosaur skeleton. Hence, creating a false impression that scientists are being nothing but a bunch of know nothing simpletons, who never got their skeletons right no matter what. That skeleton, in the picture shown on page 13 (below), is the very first mounted dinosaur skeleton ever to be built by man.
This is a skeleton of Hadrosaurus. It was first mounted dinosaur skeleton ever built and put on display in 1868 by a Paleontologist named Joseph Leidy who examined the fossils of the dinosaur that was dug up from a construction site 10 years earlier. Today we now know that the skeleton was highly inaccurate and never really look like what's portrayed in the picture above.
The actual mount, as we know of today, looks like this:
To really learn the true history of this first dinosaur mount, visit these sites.
Hadrosaurus (An article from Wikipedia)
Gish's Garbage About the Grand Canyon
In the next chapter How Long Ago Did Dinosaurs Live? we see 2 men observing the photo of the Grand Canyon on page 14. Gish implies that these 2 men, who are scientists, see the Grand Canyon differently than the other. One sees the Canyon forming millions of years ago. The other sees the canyon forming thousands of years ago as the result of Noah's Flood. However, the scientific evidence clearly states that the Grand Canyon formed 17 million years ago by the Colorado River. The Colorado River gradually eroded the sides of river thus forming The Grand Canyon, one of the most spectacular places to see in the United States. It still continues to erode the sides of the canyon up to this very day. However, Gish and other creationists, including Tom Vail, the author who made the book The Grand Canyon, A Different (Rather, Distorted) View (and insinuate it into the Grand Canyon gift shop!) who claims he'll give one million dollars to anyone who can prove to him that there's no God— An offer strikingly similar to Kent Hovind fraudulent $250,000 offer, continuously claim that the Canyon was formed when the imaginary natural dams that hold huge lakes of water burst apart just after the waters of Noah's flood resides cutting down the sedimentary rocks, thus forming the Canyon. There is no such thing as giant lakes existing in Colorado at one time, nor is the Grand Canyon formed by Noah's Flood. If the canyon was formed during the Flood then how do they explain evidence of Native American nomads using the canyon as a passageway they walked on at the same time the waters of the Flood are supposed to be rising? And why is there only one Grand Canyon in the world? There could have been more than one canyon if Noah's Flood was an actual event, but only one Grand Canyon exists.
Despite what has been depicted here on page 14, there really is no such scientist out there who has different views of the Grand Canyon than the other. The only ones who do have a rather distorted view of the Grand Canyon is the creationists. No one else.
Gish Garbage About the Paluxy Footprints
In the DTTL chapter entitled Where do Dinosaurs come from? on pages 14-15 there is a claim that is today abandoned by most YEEs. But back then, it was fiercely defended every YE extremist that's ever known. This claim says that there are footprints of humans allegedly found alongside of dinosaur prints found somewhere in the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Texas. Careful investigation, however, shows that the so-called human prints is really poorly preserve dinosaur prints with the heels of dinosaurs preserve on them and in some cases they were chiseled into human footprints by practical jokers who did it to attract gullible tourists to that area. However, Carl E. Baugh and a few other YEEs still defends this hoax to this day. Answers in Genesis, however, have wisely, for once, chose to abandon the claim and have it on their hypocritical list of arguments they think creationist should not use. Still, AiG are just as bad as Baugh is when it comes to making one stupid claim after another. One of the most stupidest, laughable claims ever churned out is The Evolution = Sun Worship claim. The claim that says evolutionists worships the sun, which they DON'T! Rather they observe the sun through special devices and equipments that prevent them from getting blinded by the sun and learn what they can about the sun and its affects that it has on earth. They think Baugh's claims are all wacko. So is AiG who are all pretty wacko themselves, thus proving their own hypocrisy time and time again.
Back in DBD, in the How Long Ago Did Dinosaurs Live? chapter, we see that the book doesn't have the Paluxy claim. Instead on page 15, there is a wrongful claim about the dating methods which scientists use to date fossils being highly inaccurate, which is totally false.
Here's link to a No Answers in Genesis article refuting the inaccurate dating claim.
Radiometric Dating - The Truth
Gish Gallop About Uniformitarianism
Then Gish goes on to explain a bit about Uniformitarianism, an idea that says the key to the past is really the present. That idea only says that the earth changes over a long gradual period of time which contradicts catastrophism, which is idea that says the earth change drastically in a short period of time due to earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions just to name a few. He states that scientists today are still believing the idea of uniformitarianism first proposed by James Hutton (1726-1797), who is known as the father of geology, in a 1785-1795 publishing in his book Theory of the Earth and was popularized by Sir Charles Lydell in the 19th century. Today, however, no scientist believes that outdated idea anymore. In fact, scientists today is embracing the modern version of Uniformitarianism called Actualism where both drastic and gradual events, that happened in the past, is still happening today.
References to all of this is right here..
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD200.html
Actualism vs. Dr. Plaisted's Inadequate Uniformitarianism
Next, we see Austin making this very false statement,
“It is reasonable to think that fossils and rocks could have formed rapidly only thousands of years ago."
No it's not, Austin, and you know it! The evidence clearly points out that rocks and fossils could never have formed rapidly only thousands of years ago. Here's a few links to web pages that tells us how fossils and rocks are really formed and how it takes millions of years for all of them to form.
http://www.rocksforkids.com/RFK/howrocks.html
An Egyptian Belief
Also, on page 15, there is an image promoting creationist propaganda by depicting old fashioned scale that weighs 2 blocks. One, a Creation block, the other an Evolution block. The evolution block seems to be crumbling, while the creation block is strong and solid, implying a false view of evolution being unstable and crumbling, while creation is standing solid and firm against all odds. This is a false image that reminds Suttkus of an Egyptian belief that says the heavier the man's soul, the more wicked and evil it was in life. And it looks like the creation block is that kind of a soul. Note: You can find Michael's remark about the scales in his rebuttal of Ken Ham's Dinosaurs and the Bible booklet right here.
Continued next post…
