The word "ark" comes from the ancient word "aron" which means "a chest," "a box," and especially "a coffin," which is what Noah's ark is to be regarded as if what ham claims to be the case in the "Why Don't We See Dinosaurs Today?" segment. In the first part of the segment he claims,
"At the end of the Flood, Noah, his family, and the animals came out of the Ark. The dinosaurs thus began a new life in a new world. Along with the other animals, the dinosaurs came out to breed and repopulate the earth. They would have left the landing place of the Ark and spread over the earth's surface. The descendants of these dinosaurs gave rise to the dragon legends."
Yeah sure. With only 2 or no limbs, bat and or bird wings, serpentine bodies, women's genitals, fire or poisonous breath, etc. Never mind the real descendants of dinosaurs that are cloaked in feathers and go tweet tweet. Here Ham claims, without proof, that after they left the ark, the dinosaurs begin to breed again and populate the world which to him explain all the dragon legends told throughout the world— dragon legends Ham and his cronies fabricated to make dragons and monsters in the tale to be what the creationists want them to be while maintaining their utmost ignorance and denial of what they really were. The way the creationists puts it, the ark definitely should be considered a coffin. Especially since after the Flood, according to he creationists most animals became extinct, including dinosaurs. To them it's because of the flood's aftermath that rendered the earth into a place much more hostile than it was before the Flood came. This is what Ham is trying to explain in this section where He claims that after the Flood, the world because so hostile that God told Noah that the animals would fear him and his family and that all the animals will be given to him as food as an additive to his diet alongside plants— if there's any left after what the Flood did to it.
If what creationists say it's true, then the world was indeed a hostile place with it being entirely all desert with no plant life, no soil for planting, and all drinking and salt water being highly contaminated and the land still hot from mountains, volcanoes, crags, canyons, and deltas forming and no Ice Age! It would not be an inhabitable place for everyone, man and beast, to live in. This is the reason why it is no good to use the ark as a metaphor for Jesus' redemption on the cross. It is God's intention for all living things inside the ark to survive the flood and repopulate the world. If all beings were saved from the Flood only to die a short time afterwards, then comparing the ark with the cross Jesus died on would have been worthless.
The next section shows just how pathetically, absent-mindful Ham is when it comes to explaining the extinction of dinosaurs. His idea of how the dinosaurs went into extinction is worth a billion laughs. Especially when it comes to the encouragement of going to a zoo manager and asking him questions about endangered species programs, why do some animals become extinct, and why did the dinosaurs became extinct and get answers like,
"We've lost lots of animals from this earth. Animals are becoming extinct all the time. Look at all the animals that are gone forever. We need to act to save the animals";"It's obvious! People killing them, lack of food, man destroying the environment, diseases, genetic problems, catastrophes like floods-there are lots of reasons."; and "We don't know! Scientists have suggested dozens of possible reasons, but it's a mystery.", which leads up to,
"Maybe one of the reasons dinosaurs are extinct is that we did not start our endangered species programs early enough. The factors that cause extinction today, which came about because of man's sin-the Curse, the aftermath of the Flood (a judgment), etc.-are the same factors that caused the dinosaurs to become extinct."
And he wonders why people laugh at him and mock his silly, stupid lies. The joke's on Ham. He's only kidding himself with such idiocy that it's no wonder why everyone, except those who are just as absent-mindful as he is, rejects his nonsense, easily call him a stupid idiot and other similar names, and laugh at his stupidity.
The next section, entitled "Are Dinosaurs Really Extinct?" clings to a false hope that perhaps someday soon, a live dinosaur would turn up that will destroy the so-called mythical concept of dinosaurs living on earth millions of years ago and becoming extinct before humans came along. Here Ham claims,
"One cannot prove an organism is extinct without having knowledge of every part of the earth's surface simultaneously."
Pretty ironic, isn't it? We have the knowledge to prove that the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian wolf died out and yet we have no proof whatsoever of the any existence of every cryptozoological creature known such as Big Foot for instance. But that doesn't stop wishful thinkers like Ham from looking for these elusive, mythical animals.
"Experts have been embarrassed when, after having declared animals extinct, they were discovered alive and well."
More like excited than embarrassed. The problem with this claim is that what they discovered are animals that are in fact living species much different than extinct animals they are related to.
"For example, in the 1990s explorers found elephants in Nepal that have many features of mammoths."
Try Stegodon, Ham! The stegodon is an extinct elephant, much different than mammoths, that is believed to be the ancestors of elephants and mammoths, but nowadays it is thought to have no modern descendants. What Ham claims here is a direct fabrication of modern sightings of mutant versions of modern elephants that have interbred to look more like Stegodons than normal modern elephants. The next claim involves a sighting made in Australia of trees that are once thought to be extinct. What they really saw is Wollemia nobilis, the last, sole surviving member of the Wollemia Family with features much different than its extinct relatives.
Next, Ham parades the claim involving alleged dinosaur sightings in Africa.
"Explorers and natives in Africa have reported sighting dinosaur-like creatures, even in the twentieth century. These have usually been confined to out-of-the-way places such as lakes deep in the Congo jungles. Descriptions certainly fit those of dinosaurs."
Except the fact that the monsters such as Mokele Mbembe are said to have a frill on the back of its head, a horn on its snout, and 3 toes on each foot, while Sauropods have in fact none of it, and Emela-ntouka is said to have no frill, one ivory horn, crocodile tail, smooth skin, and long, sharp teeth, while ceratopsians have in fact none of it; the horns are made of bone, they have bony frills and scales, a bony beak, and one type of ceratopsians have spiny bristles growing from their tails. It's obvious Ham would rather ignore the fact that the sightings of these so-called dinosaur-like animals are in fact based on rhinoceros sightings. The natives living in the Congo region must have seen rhinos roaming in areas not normally seen in this part of Africa and invented stories based on those sightings to make the stories more entertaining and to keep rival tribes away from their territory.
Then, Ham mentions about a cave found where it is said to have alleged Native American carvings of dinosaurs together alongside mammoths.
"Cave paintings by native Americans seem to depict a dinosaur. Scientists accept the mammoth drawings in the cave, so why not the dinosaur drawings? Evolutionary indoctrination that man did not live at the same time as dinosaurs stops most scientists from even considering that the drawings are of dinosaurs."
Wrong! The real reason why this "stops most scientists from even considering that the drawings are of dinosaurs" is that they're either all modern drawings created as a publicity stunt, including the so-called carving that's really a pareidolia resembling a dinosaur puppet facing a trunkless mammoth stuff toy, or an attempt made to illustrate Paleozoic invertebrates on rock walls after seeing fossil remains of them nearby (Citations: Adrienne Mayor's Fossil legends and The First Americans pg. 337, 403).
This is one of the many examples of creationists misidentifying ancient artist conceptions of modern and mythical animals as dinosaurs only because of they're shaped like them, never mind the details clearly saying hey're not. The best example of this is a Native American drawing shown in various creationist literature, which was made better sense of by Dr. Stephen Meyer of Institute for Biblical & Scientific Studies (IBSS) who concluded in the February 2008 article that the infamous petroglyph, in which creationists long use as evidence of live dinosaurs living alongside humans and modern animals, actually depicts an eagle, a modern dinosaur we call a bird.
"Evolutionary indoctrination" had nothing to do with it, but creationist hoaxes and indoctrination does. These creationist hoaxes is what creationists like Ham use to prove their fallacy with the assumption that these things should not surprise and embarrass the creationists, but should embarrass the evolutionists instead. It won't. In reality these alleged sightings are not an embarrassment to the creationists, but rather a total disgrace to them. It is an absolute disgrace for any creationist to use alleged cryptic sightings, forgeries, fabricated legends, myths, fairy tales, and folklore, and hoaxes to prove a young earth. For all they do is render young earth creationism and its supporters into a major laughing stock of both the whole Christian church and the scientific community. Even if they are what creationists claimed they are, this still doesn't explain why is there no traces of dinosaur remains alongside human remains in all forms of records from archaeological to the fossil record.
In the last part of the segment, Ham talks about cloning in which he says,
"And no, we cannot clone a dinosaur, as in the movie Jurassic Park, even if we had dinosaur DNA. We would also need a living female dinosaur [emphasis in bold]."
But no living female, let alone a fully intact body of a female non-avian dinosaur, has ever been found, nor will she ever be found. All non-avian dinosaurs have died out leaving behind birds as their descendants which Ham tries to debunk in the next segment entitled "Birdosaurs?" Here, Ham admits that most scientists are convinced that birds are indeed direct descendants of dinosaurs, but not all of them are convinced. In an effort to prove their idiocy, Ham and his cronies would often cite dino-bird critics such as Alan Feduccia to discredit the dino-bird connection while purposely misrepresent and misquote their sayings in hopes to convinced their lay audience that the dino-bird claims are not to be trusted.
Alan Feduccia is among a very tad few evolutionists out there who do mean well, but they object the notion of birds being descendants of dinosaurs and would rather stick with the orthodox view of birds being descendants of a certain common ancestral reptile, thinking the idea of dinosaurs evolving into birds as "just a fantasy of theirs," which he's referring to those who advocate the dinosaur-descending-into-birds reality. Unfortunately for Ham and Feduccia, this so-called ‘just a fantasy of theirs' is all too real due to multi-scores of real, valid fossil evidence being discovered in China. However, young earth creationists, like Ham, takes advantage of Feduccia's writings and began to misrepresent him and his writings by making up quotes Feduccia never really said to begin with and using argument-from-authority and Red Herring arguments to promote a unmerited case against the fact that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, Thankfully these paleontologists are all among a very small minority, but the YECs are making them as if they are of the leading authority, while if fact they're not.
In the first dino-bird claim, Ham attempts to refute the notion of birds being dinosaurs by making appeals to authority and outdated claims, such as for example Ham claiming that it was John Ostrom, who begin to popularized the idea of dinosaurs evolving into birds while actually, it was really Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog," who has brought on the idea of birds being dinosaurs first. But, it was rejected for decades at least until the 1960's when Ostrom brought up the idea of birds being dinosaurs while he was studying fossil remains of Deinonychus, an early Cretaceous dromaeosaurid that was first discovered in 1964 and found features on him that bears a striking resemblance to modern birds including a Saurischian hip that looks more Ornithschian than Saurischian. Note how Ham is taking seriously this quote made by Feduccia taken from an issue of Audubon Magazine where he reached some wrongful conclusions on feathered dinosaurs,
"It's just a fantasy of theirs, They just want to see living dinosaurs that now they think they can study them vicariously at the backyard bird feeder."
The quote is out of context. Feduccia actually says in full context with the correct words in bold,
"It's just a fantasy of theirs," says Alan Feduccia, an ornithologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading critic of the paleontologists. "They so much want to see living dinosaurs that now they think they can them vicariously at the backyard bird feeder."
When the quote is put in full complete context, we find that Feduccia is actually scoffing openly at those who, through the discovery of Sinosauropteryx, is highly convinced that birds are indeed living dinosaurs.
Feduccia is mistaken and yet, Ham took advantage of this and misrepresent it by ripping the quote, found on page 38, out-of-context from the article coming from an outdated Audubon Magazine entitled The Origins of Birds: The Dinosaur Debate and used it to throw people off of the real truth behind the quote which is part of a debate between evolutionists over how the evolution of birds is processed. Ham here feebly uses fabrications, quote minings, and other forms of red herring arguments against the feathered dinosaur fact, while showing disregard for the other side who favors the dinosaur-bird concept to be fact due to strong evidence pointing to that fact. While doing this, Ham deceives the reader into thinking that the feathered dinosaurs mentioned here are all fakes while in fact they are all real and valid.
First off Ham fabricates the discovery of Mononykus, the so-called "birdosaur" in 1993 that is really an Alverezsaurid, dinosaurs with 2 small stumpy arms with a small claw on each of them, claiming that scientists have reached the conclusion saying the dinosaur is really nothing more than a mole. Moles don't have such puny arms and very long legs like Mononykus has. The claim, also being made in an issue of the formally Creation Ex nihilio magazine, is nothing more than a direct fabrication of this article.
Secondly, Ham tries to discredit the notion of Sinosauropteryx having hair-like feathers on his back by fabricating a story about how 4 scientists ("the dream team.") traveled to China to see the fossils of Sinosauropteryx . Despite what Ham claimed out of context, scientists have found that the feathers of the dinosaur were not feathers of modern types. Instead, they are actually feathers of prototypes, feathers that looked very hair-like that are similar to that of the kiwi, a small flightless bird with hair like feathers covering all over its body. Although not part of the group, Alan Feduccia wrongfully concludes the hair like feathers on the dinosaur to be skin fibers a lot like the frill of an iguana. Thankfully, those who study the fossil never bought into the iguana skin claim because they found that the hair like feathers of the dinosaur covered all over its entire body, not just its back. The newspaper, where Ham got this distorted claim as shown on page 76 from, came from a very brief rash article, published in 1997 in The New Scientist, that have jumped to conclusions about what the scientists have found there in China when they observed the fossils of Sinosauropteryx for the first time. Jeff Poling, webmaster of the dinosauria.com website wrote an article that clarifies what the article has said about the fossils and the conclusions made by the scientists who observed the fossils and found hair-like protofeathers on them.
Thirdly, Ham then claims there was a report made of a discovery in South America of a dinosaur that's more bird-like than any other dinosaur, which of course is Unenlagia, a dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period 90 million years ago in what is now South America. This claim about the dinosaur is true. It is much more bird-like than before and has the capabilities to flap his arms the same way a bird, like an ostrich flaps its wings. However, Ham here is trying to discredit the findings by falsely branding the dinosaur as just "a reptile" that's known from "20 bone fragments," but it won't work despite Ham efforts to fabricate it. Read more about Unenlagia here.
Now, he gives out a Red Herring argument (an argument that attempt to throw people off the real factual trail.) and a blatant falsehood by claiming that since birds are warm blooded, evolutionists would like to see dinosaurs as warm-blooded to support their theory. They already have seen it, Ham! For instance, when they observed dinosaur bones through a microscope and found that dinosaurs have scores of hollow canals inside of them called haversian, which are similar to birds and mammals that indicates the dinosaurs must have been much more energetic and grew much more faster than previously thought. However, Ham, in his absolute denial, launches a red herring argument and quote mines an article made up by someone by the name Bill Stieg, who wrote a March, 1997 article from The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled "Did Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs?" (The article is actually entitled "Bones of Contention".) where in it, Larry Martin, another critic of the birds as dinosaurs idea, is claimed to have said,
"Recent studies of the bones structure, when viewed under a microscope, of the dinosaurs showing they were the characteristics of cold-blooded animals. So were back to cold-blooded dinosaurs."
This quote when put into full text actually reads,
"Martin didn't see anything to change his opinion that this was no warm-blooded bird relative [Sinosauropteryx]. 'Recent research has shown the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones was "characteristic of cold-blooded animals," Martin said. "So we're back to cold-blooded dinosaurs.'"
In real, full fledged context, He and others like him were expressing their disbelief that these hair like structures were actually bird feathers in contrast to others who greatly favored the fossil to have imprints of hair like feathers growing on its body. Instead, Martin and other like him thought that the structures on the back of Sinosauropteryx were that of skin fibers resembling the skin fibers of an iguana. (Just as mentioned above.) This article is written when the discovery of the fossil is all brand new just before the notice of the so-called 'skin fibers' that are actually hair-like feathers dotting all over the body of the fossil thus refuting the claims made up by critics like Martin here that the hair like fossil is of skin fibers. A prime example of a Red Herring Argument by entirely taking the quote above out of text and twist it all up to just to trick and deceive the gullible into believing this favors creationism, while it's not and throws them off the trail of the real truth behind the quote the same way he did with the Feduccia quote as mentioned before.
To read the full article in full context click here.
And in response to this out of context quote, Ham in his utmost bigotry concludes,
"Sadly, the secular media have become so blatant in their anti-Christian stand and pro-evolutionary propaganda that they are bold enough to make such [sic] ridiculous statements as, "Parrots and hummingbirds are also dinosaurs."
No more ridiculous than such statements as "Maybe one of the reasons dinosaurs are extinct is that we did not start our endangered species programs early enough." Clearly In Ham's eyes, "anti-Christian stand and pro-evolutionary propaganda" is define as any stand and/or propaganda that opposes Ham's pathetically stupid lies regardless of Christian and/or secular background. To Ham, in order to become a true Christian, one must comply with Ham's view Christianity and origins or else burn in Hell. Christianity does not work that way.
In a way, young earth creationists is anti-Christian. They never really observed God's Creation all the way down to the finest detail because of what God reveals through His creation greatly contradicts their dogma and says to them that they are totally wrong. They are afraid of the truth. They do not want to be told that they are wrong because of their selfish pride and arrogance. They just don't want to have anything to do with anything that contradicts their self-centered dogma, even if God was there to show them all of the valid evidence for evolution, old earth, and against their views and prove to them that Darwin was right all along, front and center.
Next, Ham fabricates the claim about embryonic origins of the fingers of dinosaurs and birds where he claims that the fourth and fifth digits of the dinosaur embryo's hand is lost while the first, second, and third digit fingers remain while the first and fifth digits of the bird embryo's fingers gets lost leaving the second, third, and fourth fingers behind. This claim, he thinks, is showing that birds could not evolved from dinosaurs. This claim is easily debunked here.
Then, Ham fabricates the study of the lung areas of the feathered dinosaurs made by Feduccia and other like him, who claim that the dinosaur must have been breathing in cold air and breathing out warm air with lungs that are very similar to a normal reptile's heart, which is absurd. This is all the result of an observation of a photograph taken of one of the fossil specimens and the fact that the fossils, especially the one shown in the photograph, were all crushed and badly damaged during fossilization to the point where it is difficult for scientists to interpret them correctly under the best circumstances just as explained here.
Here's an article on PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog that addresses about how dinosaur lungs and bird lungs are quite similar to each other.
Finally, there is a claim made about the protofeathers on the dinosaurs being assumed to be alleged fibered skin similar to a sea snake fin. This is made up by another dinobird-critic named John Ruben of the Oregon State University, who also made conclusions about the fossils based on the photographs along and tried to demonstrate the dino feathers = snake skin claim by dissecting a tail of a sea snake. Thankfully, a great majority of those, who are highly familiar with the feathered dinosaur fossils, is NOT buying into this far-fetched sea snake skin claim. There is a sci.bio.paleontology Google group that has a thread here that contains an article by Ralph W. Miller III about the time he went to see presentations of Ruben, who demonstrated the sea snake fallacy just by teasing the skin fibers a bit to make it look more hairy than scaly. Philip J. Currie was also there disproving the sea snake fallacy as well. When Ruben was dissecting the bodies of a sea snake and a monitor lizards, he teased the skin a bit to look more like the hair like feathers of the dinosaur than what it really is. Here is what he said about his visit.
"I attended presentations by Ruben et al. on the collagen fiber hypothesis for the structures associated in situ with the Sinosauropteryx prima specimens, as well as talks by Philip J. Currie which disproved the hypothesis at both the SVP meeting in Chicago, 1997, and the Scientific Symposium at Dinofest in Philadelphia in April of 1998. Ruben et al. dissected a sea snake and a monitor lizard, stripped the bulk of the rope-like collagen frill supports of the dissected bodies, and teased the few remaining strands up away from the spine. They did not demonstrate that this procedure compares to natural processes of bioactivity or erosion on the internal collagen fiber bundles of dead reptiles, nor did they show that any fossil animal which should have sported a fin-like frill for swimming ever has been shown to preserve features comparable to the Sinosauropteryx filaments. Furthermore, their assertion that Sinosauropteryx was adapted to a swimming lifestyle is not supported by the theropod's body plan. Most animals can swim, but this animal was not modified to optimize swimming, and it would not have benefited from a dorsal fin extending from its brow to the tip of its tail anyway, as much of the body would float above the water, and the body lacks the capability to produce full body sinuous serpentine movement as snakes, crocodilians, and lizards do. Not only that, but Currie pointed out that the fibers are not restricted to the midline of the body, but are ubiquitous, with fibers evident on the arms, legs, ribs, and back. One specimen held the remains of a lizard within, and the other has a mammal jaw inside its gut. There is no evidence that these animals ate fish or other marine creatures. The Bavarian specimen of the closely related Compsognathus longipes, which is anatomically quite similar to Sinosauropteryx, was preserved in the sediments of a lagoon, but the lagoon was an anoxic death trap which would not support marine life. Compsognathus was found with a lizard in its gut, too, by the name of Bavarisaurus. There is no reason to believe that compsognathids had aquatic lifestyles. I urge the curious among you to view the photograph of the teased collagen fibers in the _Science_ article, "Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur," by Ann Gibbons, from _Science_, Volume 278, Number 5341, 14 November 1997, pp. 1229-1230. Compare these fibers to the actual fossil filaments on _Sinosauropteryx_ in the July 1998 National Geographic, at the top of page 83. As Currie and his fellow paleontologists describe them, the preserved filaments appear to be hollow, relatively coarse, curving gently, piling up atop one another, and criss crossing over each other. They may also have a branching aspect to them, something like the down feather of a bird, but this cannot be verified at this time. I do not believe that the two images compare….. Also, bear in mind that Currie studied three specimens in person in some detail, whereas Ruben et al. were working from photographs alone."
Without doubt, the sea snake skin fallacy Ham and other YECs is promoting is nothing more another form of a red herring they are using to curtail their followers from reality concept of feathered dinosaurs. To know more about feathered dinosaurs especially Sinosauropteryx, click here.
In the end of the segment, Ham, in his absolute denial, blatantly lies to the reader and concludes that there's no evidence for dinosaurs evolving into birds. Dinosaurs have always been dinosaurs and birds have always been birds just as long as they're all clones, carbon copies of one another instead of what the valid evidence is telling us all along about dinosaurs having always been like no other. But here's a kicker, at the last paragraph of the segment, Ham wonders,
"What if a dinosaur fossil was found with feathers on it? Would that prove that birds evolved from dinosaurs? No, a duck has a duck bill and webbed feet, as does a platypus, but nobody believes that this proves that platypuses evolved from ducks."
It's entirely baffling to know that Ham was once a science teacher before becoming a creationist. Anyone familiar with the platypus knows that the platypus is a mammal, the only mammal that lay eggs other than the echidna. Plus, feathers are not the only things that can prove to everyone that birds evolve from dinosaurs. Like birds, dinosaurs have the following: hollow bones, beaks, ornithschian hips, saurischian hips in which some has the pubis tilts backwards to make it more ornithschian than saurischian, and so much more. This last segment claims that..
"The belief that reptiles or dinosaurs evolved into birds requires reptilian scales on the way to becoming feathers, that is, transitional scales, not fully formed feathers."
And guess what? Such belief has come true and has already been confirmed even before dinosaurs with feathered imprints have ever been discovered. Prior to 1996, scientists have theorized that some dinosaurs had feathers on their bodies while engaging the study of dinosaurs like Deinonychus, that bore so many characteristics of a bird, including the ornithschian-like saurischian bone and bird-like feet. Now, ever since 1996 and the discovery of Sinosauropteryx, scientists uncovered undeniable evidence of dinosaurs being cloaked in feathers such as Beipiaosaurus, Sinornithosaurus, Caudipteryx, and especially Velociraptor. So how did the creationists deal with all this? Simple. Don't treat them as curious mosaics, but just dismiss them as "just a bird" so they will continue in their denial of feathered dinosaurs being "non-existent" instead of what they really are.
