Over the years of surfing the internet, I come across sites I wish they don't exist at all. Genesis Park is one of them. This site, which tagline reads, "Dinosaurs: living evidence of a powerful Creator" is created by Dave Woetzel, a crank who advocates alleged "live" pterosaur sightings and is one of Prisoner #06452-017's cronies who advocates the die-hard myth about dinosaurs living with humans while being engrossed in ignorance of the exact opposite which reveals the scenario, including the live pterosaur sightings, to be entirely fictional. Much of the claims presented on this site I've already debunked, but there are others on Woetzel's site that has to be dealt with including how creationist webmasters like Woetzel distort ancient art under a false pretense that if an animal in the art looks like a dinosaur, then it must be a dinosaur people must have saw alive, doesn't matter if the animal resembles a modern animal with dog ears, only 2 limbs on its body, and other features dinosaurs never in fact had.
The park's "exhibit hall" section contains the usual bunch of loony claims about dinosaurs allegedly being found in the bible as well as dinosaurs allegedly being dragons and monsters people saw alive, fought, and killed in legends. Let's take a look at the first dinosaur link, shall we?
The first link features a list of links leading to pages where we see much about bible bigotry and dinosaur idiocy starting with Dinos Vs. Flying and Swimming Reptiles where we see a small article that tells about the differences between dinosaurs and their contemporaries that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs such as Pteranodon and Mosasaurus. This article lyingly claims that the word "dinosaur" was invented by Richard Owen to debunk evolution. That is false. Owen invented the word "Dinosaur" or Dinosauria in 1842, not 41 to identify 3 fragmentary remains of "reptiles," Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus whose body structure is not like any other reptile in the world.
Then the article goes on to blatantly ignore the latest studies on bone structure when it claims,
"Unlike most reptiles, dinosaurs walked with their legs directly below their hips. This is different from most modern lizards or crocodiles where the top section of the limb is splayed out horizontally from the body and the lower section goes from the "knee" joint straight down to the ground. However a few dinosaur species, like Triceratops, exhibit a similar 'sprawl.'"
Although many illustrations of ceratopsians did show them to have a hind fully erect posture while the forelimbs show a sprawling posture, making them run and walk in a very slow, clumsy fashion, this concept of a sprawling Triceratops is now considered incorrect thanks to the latest studies on the dinosaurs' bone structure in the legs which shows the ceratopsins to have all four of their legs in a fully erect stance running and galloping at about 40 MPH like giant-size rhinos.
The article also mentions another reptile that predates the dinosaurs which is Dimetrodon. This is a pelycosaur, a mammal-like reptile grossly mistaken as a dinosaur and often erroneously placed in a dinosaur scenario with a sail on its back supported by a row a really thin bony rods jutting from its back. The sail is claimed to resemble Spinosaurus, but the article neglects to say that the spines on Spinosaurus is much thicker than the spines of Dimetrodon and may have resemble tall spines of a bison which gives one paleontologist the idea the Spinosaurus had a hump like a camel instead of a sail.
This article claims that all these "reptiles" co-exist and "the early earth conditions contributed to varieties of these terrible lizards growing so big" which is reference to the Vapor Canopy Myth which claims there was a dome covering the world that made everything to resemble a greenhouse inside with every environment uniformed, the climate stable, many organisms grow big, and people and animals live long lives. That idea was first invented by Issac Newton, the man who discovered gravity, but was proven to be a very flawed idea. If there ever was such a dome, then no one will survive. It will only give the planet a much literal meaning to the term "Hell on earth."
Dinosaurs and their contemporaries did co-exist although not all of them lived at the same time. Dimetrodon didn't. In fact, Dimetrodon live 280 million years ago during the Permian Period, before the real "Time of The Great Dying" happened that occurred 30 million years later.
This article contains only one link and that takes us to a page entitled <em>Dinosaurs Vs Lizards</em> where it contains a simplistic, yet outdated-by-decades family tree chart and some more idiocy including this crank,
"It is a fact that many reptiles continue to grow throughout their life, so one may be tempted to simplistically postulate that a dinosaur ("terrible lizard") is merely the result of having a lizard live much longer than today in the favorable environment of the early earth. After all, if a man lived to be 960 years old, what would a lizard that lived for centuries look like? The answer is that it would still be a lizard, not a dinosaur."
The lizard would be burnt to a crisp instead of becoming big and live for many centuries if it lived in the supposed "favorable environment of the early earth"— the Vapor Canopy that never existed in real life. After showing off an outdated chart, Woetzel begin discussing the differences between Archosaurs (ruling reptiles) and the Lepidosaurs (reptiles with overlapping scales, including lizards) while relying on a book outdated by decades to compare the hips, the skulls (diapsid and synapsid skulls), the teeth, and the bones of each group while ignoring the most other features found in dinosaurs similar to what is found in birds. Anyone who are real dinosaur experts like me knows all too well that dinosaurs are not lizards, nor are they related to them. Dinosaurs are more bird than lizard and have much more characteristics of a bird than a reptile. The only reptile closest to being related to the dinosaurs are the crocodiles. Turtles, snakes, and lizards aren't.
Next, Woetzel talked about how the dinosaurs' posture is different than the lizard's posture and how dinosaurs are likely warm-blooded in comparison with lizards that are cold-blooded. Then he gives out this little gem in the next paragraph (misspellings included),
"Jackson's chameleon is not a triceratops; bearded dragon aren't descendents of anklyosaurs; and iguanas are not the modern version of iguanadons."
Of course not! You have to be pathetically stupid to believe that such lizards are modern versions of dinosaurs. And apparently that's what a certain bankrupt creation "ministry" — A Creation Seminar — is preaching to the gullible about when it comes to such pseudo-dinosaurian descendants. Woetzel obviously made up such a statement in direct response to such teachings the bankrupt creation "ministry" is advocating because he knew the body structures of a lizard is far different than that of dinosaurs. He may get it right in a few places but that doesn't mean his own bankrupt ministry, the Creation Science Evangelism, is any better than any other bankrupt creation ministries out there including Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, A Creation Seminar, and so on.
Woetzel then claims that even though there were big and small dinosaurs as well as big and small lizards, all dinosaurs and lizards might have grown bigger in the past both because of Fictional Pre-Flood Environment and the [sic] "fewer degenerative genetic elements" or "mutations" Yeah, they might…but they didn't; they would've been "mutated" into a fried crisp in the hellish Pre-Flood environment if the young earth were true. This strawman claim is made up under a false pretense that all dinosaurs were huge size creatures as well as out of blatant ignorance of dinosaurs coming in all shapes and sizes. Lizards were all small sizes except for Monitor Lizards that only range from a half a foot long to the size of a Komoto Dragon, the the world's largest lizard which measures about 10 feet long and weigh more than 300 pounds.
He then adds,
"But lepidosaurs, like snakes and lizards, are closer to each other (except in the characteristics that all reptiles share) than lizards and dinosaurs. At the same time archosaurs, like dinosaurs and crocodilians, share more similar characteristics than either of them do with lizards."
The real descendants of dinosaurs are birds. They are direct descendants of maniraptorian dinosaurs such as Velociraptor, Troodon, Oviraptor, and Microraptor. Anyone familiar with dinosaurs should know that. But unfortunately some of them, like Woetzel, don't. Instead they throw out the facts that shatter their young earth fairy tale and make up lies like this one concerning what brought Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) to give animal species Latin names,
"As a Lutheran minister and avid gardener, Linnaeus was a creationist. 'Linnaeus opposed the pre-Darwin evolutionary ideas of his day, pointing out that life was not a continuum, or a ‘great chain of being', an ancient pagan Greek idea. He could classify things, usually into neat groups, because of the lack of transitional forms.'" or so what Don Batten claims in an issue of Creation Magazine."</em>
That's a blatant lie. According to TalkOrigins.org,
"Linnaeus predated the theory of evolution by about a century. His work showing a hierarchical arrangement of plant and animal traits is one of the major pieces of evidence for evolution. He was criticized by the creationists of his day for placing humans in the same order as monkeys."
Linnaeus, who actually was a botanist, a gardener, and a physician who show very little interest in church ministry, was well aware that life is continuum and does change over time. It's not because of the lack of transitional forms that leads him to classify living things into "neat groups," but because it helps scientists to identify organisms better and tell similar, yet different types of organisms apart. His way of organizing species of plants, animals, and people based on hierarchy turned out to be one of the best evidences for evolution ever known. Besides "the great chain of being" is a classic, western medieval philosophy, not some Pagan Greek idea, in which God is the highest being of all while angels is second in rank, man is ranked third, and so on.
In the next post, I'll review and debunk the claims that are found in the other links such as The Bone Collectors, Dinosaur Controversies, and Origins of Dinosaurs.
