The Baryonyx That Wasn't
Page 80 reveals Dinosaurs, Dragons, and Beetles, where fabrications and make-believe are paraded in every part of the chapter. Here, Gish, like all creationists, claims there are many thousands of [sic] "reports" made from around the world in the past thousands of years of people meeting up with live dinosaurs that were back then refer to as "dragons." This is the result of creationist distorting dragon legends by fabricating and twisting dragon descriptions to make it look as if the stories were describing dinosaurs seen alive while throwing out everything that clearly confirms the dragons to be not what creationists claim they were. Thus, making it say what they themselves want the stories to say regardless of what the stories really say about them. The passage from The Genesis Record by the late, not-so-great Henry Morris (1916-2006) shown on page 80 gives us the likely impression that Morris is the first creationist to fabricate and distort dragon legends to bring up the dragon/dinosaur falsehood as well as the myth about Behemoth and Leviathan being dinosaurs. Yet he, just like all YECs, are at a loss for words to explain how come there are no remains of humans beings found mixed with dinosaur remains in the fossil record even if the dragon tales are what creationists claim they were.
Here on pages 80-81, Gish brings on a direct distorted version of the famous tale of St. George and The Dragon. Here, Gish, possibly the first person to make this up, stupidly asserts that what St. George actually slew was a dinosaur called Baryonyx, a dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago in what is now England. Gish isn't the only one making the claim. Ham also makes this similar claim in his Dinosaurs and the Bible booklet and in 2 of his propaganda books The Great dinosaur Mystery Solved! (NOT!) and Dinosaurs of Eden.
The claim is, hands down, clearly false, made-up, and unfounded. First told in Speculum historale (Mirror of History) and then in Golden Legends, the dragon in the real version of the tale is said to have wings and a poisonous breath that can decimate the whole land around the lake near the town of Silene near Libya, where it's said to be its home. The wings, either bat-like or bird-like, and the poisoned breath is something Baryonyx never truly had. Also, in every authentic, medieval paintings and drawing depicting St. George and the dragon, the dragon is depicted to have either 2 or 4 limbs, a coiling tail, pointed ears, woman's breasts, and is real small in comparison to Baryonyx who stood as tall as a garbage truck. Creationists have deliberately replaced the Heraldic dragon, a winged dragon, which was the actual dragon St. George has killed, with some wingless, genderless caricature creationists created and falsely brand as Baryonyx to make it look as if Baryonyx was the medieval dragon St. George slew, while in fact it wasn't.
This obviously a direct example of creationists never getting their dinosaurs right no matter what they do. Case in point: The pseudo-dinosaur caricature shown at the bottom of page 81, which is so badly drawn that it looks more like a skinny dinosaur model stop-motion animators like Willis O'Brian would used in making early dinosaur films such as The Lost World, The Dinosaur and The Missing link, and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. It looks as if the 2 artists never actually saw accurate restorations of Baryonyx based on fossil evidence and just whipped up the image from thin air based on what they saw in ancient, medieval art and in early dinosaur movies. This skinny, genderless, wingless, 4 legged caricature is in fact nothing more than a creationist-made, fictional monster modeled after the medieval style dragons just as depicted in so many medieval art forms such as what is shown here.
What Baryonyx really looks like based on fossil evidence and bone structure is this:
(Painting by Luis Rey)
Not this:
The name "Baryonyx" is real. This caricature, however, is nothing more than a larger version of a small dragon modeled after a cat located within a large menagerie of cats that was drawn and sketched by the famous Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci. To add insult to injury, more additional features were added to the pseudo-dinosaur such as a row of spikes, a curvy neck, an arrow tail, 3 additional spikes on its face, 2 pointed ears, and a fleshy beard. This is completely done out of sheer ignorance of the actual Baryonyx being a bipedal dinosaur with only a straight neck, one spike on its head, and no more additional spikes on its head, no row of spikes on its back, no arrow tip on its tail, and no fleshy beard and perky ears on its head and throat.
The story of St. George and the Dragon could likely be a Christianized version of a Greek Mythology tale of how Perseus, a Greek hero, slew a dragon that came from the sea to save Andromeda from its clutches. See these links here for the real story of how St. George and the Dragon came out.
http://www.melkite.org/icon.htm
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/stgeorge2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George
The bombardier beetle and the make believe fire-breathing dinosaur comical myth have already been debunked in part 1 of my essay, so I'll get to the last chapter in the DBD book called "Mysterious Creatures" right now.
Cryptozoology
DTTL doesn't have such a chapter like this.
DBD's final chapter is called Mysterious Creatures, found on pages 84-87. It's all about cryptozoology and the discoveries of 3 animals, the okapi, the mega-mouth shark, and the coelacanth. They are being shown in this chapter to give the reader a false assumption that if these animals are discovered to exist in remote places throughout the world, then there's reason to believe that dinosaurs must be alive in certain remote areas of the world today, waiting to be discovered. This is highly unlikely and Gish knows it. Hearing claims about cryptids and the discoveries of these 3 animals don't prove anything of what creationists constantly assert about dinosaurs living today. In order to find a real live dinosaur (other than a bird) and a real live Mesozoic Marine Reptile and pterosaur, you must find a fully intact Dinosaur, Pterosaur, Plesiosaur, Mosasaur, and Pliosaur that's either living or dead as well as valid traces of bones, eggs, nesting grounds, sightings, post Mesozoic fossil remains, and photographs, but none are found!
People who are storytellers, hoaxers, and wishful thinkers have been known to made up claims of monster sightings and fabricate stories which they claim to be real just to get public attention and earn cold hard cash. YEEs, as gullible as they are ignorant, buy into those claims easily because they all fit into their dogma and tout them around, parroting them constantly, and showing off invalid photos and claims about them in an effort to "prove" that dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are not at all extinct and are still living in the remote areas in the world today, while NO valid evidence of their existence has ever been found.
Coelacanth
For along time, YECs have often tried to "prove" their point about evolution being false by showing to their followers the Coelacanth, a fish that's supposedly extinct 70 million years ago until its discovery in 1938. They made up a straw man statement that says the living Coelacanth disproves evolution because to them, it's discovery 'destroys' the notion of this lobe-fin fish, over millions of years, has descended into modern fishes of today. Can you say "species", Gish? If not, then to proves just how absent-minded you really are. This living Coelacanth, YEEs falsely claim to debunk evolution, is the species Latimeria chalumnae, a modern form of Coelacanth which is part of the Latimeriidae family. The extinct form of Coelacanth from 70 million years ago is from other species mostly Coelacanthidae and is known to be different than the modern Coelacanth in a lot of ways including internal structure and their smaller size.
Okapi
The okapi Okapia johnstoni is an animal closely related to the giraffe that was discovered by an explorer in the very beginning of the 1900's with legs that resembled a zebra and a body and a head that resembles a horse with big ears and 2 bumps on its forehead. It has a very long tongue that it uses to groom its ears and reach for leafy plants to eat. It lives mainly in the dense jungles of Northern Zaire in Africa and is mostly a very solitary animal.
MegaMouth Shark
Page 85 shows the megamouth shark Megachasma pelagios, which was first discovered in 1976. This is a filter-feeding shark that has a huge soft head and a big silvery jaw with bristles of small hook like teeth (Try eating plants with that!!), two unequal size dorsal fins, a strong heterocercal tail and lacks certain distinctive body mark on it. Its color arranged from gray to bluish black to pale gray and is sighted within the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. It filters in mainly shrimp and plankton through its mouth and filters out the water through its gills. The sperm whale is probably its natural enemy. Otherwise it has no known enemies. It is a very slow swimmer and is the only member of a family of sharks called Megachasmidae.
Alleged Sightings
There's a myth that's only shown in the older red covered version of DBD about the 1977 incident involving a Japanese fisherman's boat that caught a dead decaying body of basking shark which YECs for a long time wrongly regards it as a plesiosaur. But in the newer white cover version of DBD, the plesiosaur myth is eliminated from the book. Instead, the bottom section of page 87 is replaced with a complete blank space void of any writing on it. Most of the text is moved to page 86 while the rest is in the upper section of page 87.
Page 86 shows a claim also shown in the Paul Taylor's The Great Dinosaur Mystery book about the German sub that sank an enemy ship only to have an explosion made underneath and a 60 foot long creature with 4 limbs with webbed feet getting blown out of the water and plunged back in, which is most likely either a large squid, a large salt-water crocodile, a shark, or the elusive Zeuglodon that was blown out of the water, not a Mosasaur or a Pliosaur, for neither both of them had 4 limbs with webbed feet, but rather have sea turtle-like flippers instead.
There is also another story in the DBD book about a vacationing mechanical engineer's encounter with a very shy creature he describes as a monster with a whitish-tan throat, bumps like giraffe horns, large floppy ears, and a pointed black snout sighted off the Spanish Banks just five miles from the city of Vancouver, Washington in January of 1984. It was spotted from 200 feet away just before it swam away from the area. Honestly, no Mesozoic marine reptile has ever had such things as what the fisherman, who works as a mechanical engineer, have described about the creature. No Plesiosaur, Mosasaur, or Pliosaur ever had horny bumps, floppy ears, and pointed black snouts jutting from their heads.
Gish only made 2 sea monster claims. Alleged sea monster sightings are being made every year from all over the world, or so Gish assumed. All are in fact dead animals that have been found washed up on the shore. They are in a state of decay and at times hard to identify. Despite Gish's assertions about the so-called USOs (unidentified swimming objects) which is more like UFOs (unscrutinized fabricated objects) than what he thinks, all the descriptions of the alleged sea monsters never truly fit the descriptions of Mosasaur, Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaur, and Pliosaur.
As mentioned before, there's no evidence for Mesozoic marine reptiles bearing floppy ears, giraffe like horns, and 4 limbs with webbed feet like frogs. Plus Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Pliosaurs are NOT dinosaurs. They are marine reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic era alongside dinosaurs. These so-called sightings of dead decaying sea monsters have been identified as either shark, seal, or dolphin carcasses, not Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs. If what Gish claims is the case, then we should commonly see them coming up to the surface from time to time to breathe because they have lungs rather than gills. But none has ever been sighted! Most likely, these sightings are all really nothing more than made up stories, scores of misidentifications, and hoaxes made up by entertainers, wishful thinkers, and hoaxers who made it all up to entertain people, gain publicity, and to get rich.
These 3 animals and alleged sea monster sightings have often been invoked by YECs to justify the claims made of sightings of modern pterosaurs, dinosaurs, other than birds, plesiosaurs, mammoths, and others extinct animals by appealing their followers to ignorance and reason that if the discoveries of these 3 animals proves that these animals exist, then perhaps "dinosaurs" like "Mokele Mbembe" of Africa can easily be proven to exist. But as Carl Sagon would say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." In order to confirm the claims of "living dinosaurs, living pterosaurs, and living plesiosaurs and others, you have to have all sorts of valid evidence for them like bones, eggs, fully intact bodies living and dead, nesting grounds, real valid clear sightings and photographs and images. But NONE are found! So why should we believe them? And besides, if there ever is such case as shown in the books, then we should see fossils of them all embedded within the Cenozoic strata in the fossil record, but none are found as well.
So in conclusion, all that I can say is that the only dinosaurs to have ever lived alongside of man and are still living to this very day are birds and nothing more.
Conclusion
Gish has proven zero of what he claim about dinosaurs in his 2 books. Both DTTL and DBD will do children no good in furthering science education. Instead they will lead your children on the road to ignorance and illiteracy, never to keep up with the science in the 21 century and beyond. Those who think that these books will accurately teach dinosaurs to children is definitely mistaken.
If you really want your children to learn about dinosaurs the real way, instead of creationist propaganda, why not get for your children real, authentic dinosaur books like National Geographic Dinosaurs by Paul M. Barrett, Kevin Padian, Raul Martin, Dinosaurus, the Complete Guide to Dinosaurs by Steve Parker, and, one of the best of all, Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages by Dr. Thomas Holtz and Luis Rey, just to name a few of the most wonderful, most massive treasure troves of dinosaur literature ever known. When you do that, then your children will have some of the greatest dinosaur educational building blocks ever built to grow on.
Keynote: Gish claims to win every debate he made with an evolutionist he engaged in, but I don't think so. He will only debate with those who are not professionals in science and evolution and would rather do it in front of those who are his die-hard followers in an effort to gain support. He knows if he pits himself against the best of the best, he will lose big time. So he cheats on them and take on some naive minority that have some, little, or no experience at all on the subject of the creation and evolution controversy get an easy win through his smooth Christian-sounded talk, emotional pleadings, major strawman distortions, exploited arguments, and devilish charms. Just like all YECs, Gish is a coward.
