In next page in our tour of "Genesis Park" is Bone Collectors where Woetzel gives a very brief history of the discovery of dinosaurs. In this article he erroneously claims,
"In their hurry to name what appeared to be a large new dinosaur, Marsh's team placed the wrong head on a specimen and gave it the name 'Brontosaurus.' When it became clear that the head belonged to Diplodocus and that the body was the same as the Apatosaurus skeleton that had been found earlier, the name Brontosaurus was dropped."
The wrong head actually belongs to a Camarasaurus and the true head of Apatosaurus was similar to that of Diplodocus. When scientists realized that the box-like head on Apatosaurus was proven incorrect, the box-like Camarasaurus-type head was replaced with the true Diplodocus-type head at once. And because the name Apatosaurus was given first, the name Brontosaurus was discarded and replaced with Apatosaurus, even though in my most honest opinion, Brontosaurus is such a beloved name, an excellent appropriate name for any sauropod dinosaur such as Apatosaurus that it should not be discarded at all. After all, the word "Brontosaurus" means "Thunder Lizard" and it's used appropriately to describe any sauropod dinosaur that shook the earth like thunder when they walked across the Jurassic and Cretaceous worlds. It should never ever be put into some nomen nudim or nomen dubium categories. Rather it should be given to a brand new valid species of Sauropod dinosaur and be named Brontosaurus Rex, "King of the Thunder Lizards." Seriously, I just don't want that name "Brontosaurus" to die and be regarded as a hoax whatsoever.
In the Big and Small Dinosaurs section, Woetzel discusses the various sizes of the dinosaurs, how many dinosaur species are known, and how long the dinosaurs must have lived when they were alive long ago. But despite Woetzel's claims, there are more than "only a relatively small number of dinosaur kinds that flourished into many genetic variations" known. Then Woetzel mentions of a 2002 display at the British Museum of Natural History that claims,
"Dinosaurs may have had no maximum size and carried on growing slowly throughout their lives. Some fossil bones have growth rings, like trees, but not clearly enough to show how long the dinosaurs lived."
Note how Woetzel is not giving any specific name of the display where the quote is said to have come from. I doubt that's exactly what the 2002 display, as part of the Dinosaurs: Past and Present Exhibit at the British Museum of Natural History (or "The Natural History Museum") in London, have meant when it was discussing dinosaur growth spans. The quote is likely been taken out of context and may likely be discussing something else rather than what Woetzel assumes it discussed concerning dinosaur growth spans. Otherwise the quote doesn't exist at all. In recent years, scientists have discovered that dinosaurs grew real fast and can reach from hatchling to adult in matter of either a few months or less than 20 years depending upon species. There's no way can dinosaurs grow and survive long if "the ideal conditions of the early earth" relating to the Vapor Canopy Myth occurred.
Next we came to the Dinosaur Controversies section where it briefly discuses various types of issues concerning whether T.rex is a predator or a scavenger, whether sauropods can raise their heads, and dinosaurs being either cold-blooded or warm-blooded. Here Woetzel thinks that some of these issues are solved,
"..by understanding how the conditions were different on the early earth."
If there was such a thing as a Vapor Canopy, conditions would have been a lot like Venus, with conditions as described in the immortal words of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam:
"It's hot, damn hot, real hot; hottest thing is my shorts, I could cook things in 'em - a little crotch-pot cookin!"
Dinosaurs Worldwide just simply gives out a list of dinosaurs and the locations of where their remains were found. We then get to the The Origins of Dinosaurs section where Woetzel claims,
"Some evolutionists speculate that reptiles, including dinosaurs, evolved from the amphibians; while the amphibians developed from the fish. It is believed that the Age of the Reptiles began during the Triassic period, approximately 225 million years. Certain reptilians that are thought to have lived in the late Permian/early Triassic (like gorgonopsians, the shovel Lizard Lystrosaurus, and Massetognathus) are supposed to have branched into both small rodent-like mammals and dinosaurs. The group of animals believed to be predecessors of the dinosaurs are called thecodontians. Most of the better known species of dinosaurs are said to have appeared in the Jurassic period, approximately 200 million years ago. According to evolutionary theorists, the dinosaurs flourished through the Cretaceous period, becoming extinct over 60 million years ago. Could random mutations and natural selection actually turn a fish into an Apatosaur, even in millions of years?"
First things first. No dinosaur evolve from amphibians. They evolved from archosaurian ancestors about 230 million years ago, about 20 million years after the P/T Extinction event, the real "Time of the Great Dying." so huge that it makes the K/T extinction look like a real lesser known event. Mammals evolved from synapsids that are in fact tetrapods, not true reptiles. Thecodontians (or Thecodont) is a wastebasket taxon no longer used to describe the Early Triassic archosaurs. What Woetzel asks here is a pure strawman question that's not worth answering.
Here Woetzel thinks there are problems associated with all those "theories." They are as long as these so-called "naturalistic Darwinian scenarios and the accompanying probability arguments" and the notion of dinosaurs "challenging to evolutionists because the diverse kinds of dinosaurs elude all attempts to construct a clear lineage back to a common ancestor and [their] transitional candidates are rare." are just lying, strawman statements creationists like Woetzel made up from their heads and use for target practice for a bombardment of creationist attacks while ignoring the real facts and existence of common ancestry and transitional forms based on valid evidence that clearly shows young earth creationism to be entirely false and destructive.
The next paragraph shows an example of creationists relying only on the Bible for "answers" on the origins of dinosaurs, fish, mammals, and man, saying that all air and sea organisms were created on the 5th day of creation while all land organisms including dinosaurs and man were created on the 6th day of creation, overcrowding the entire world many times over, and on the 7th day of creation God rested.
"The scriptures are clear that everything was made in six days and therefore dinosaurs and man came into existence at the same time. 'For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day (Exodus 20:11 KJV)."
As long as the other clear scriptures that contradict the clear scriptures parroted by creationists are ignored, including the passage that tells the Israelites to observe the Sabbath every seven years (Exodus 23:10-11) and the passage that says the animals were created awhile after Adam was created (Genesis 2:19).
At the conclusion of the article, Woetzel claims,
"Naturalists would exclude the consideration of such a view of origins, regardless of the evidence for intelligent design. They wrongly claim that science cannot consider supernatural explanations."
That's because science has no way of observing, measuring, repeating, or testing supernatural events except for one event— the naturalistic event, the only supernatural explanation science can observe, measure, repeat, and test because this is the way we find out just how God created everything in pure detail and how God spoke them all into existence without engaging in hocus pocus magic.
In the next post, I'll deal with sections of The Origin of Birds, What kill them?, and Dragons in History.
