One time, PZ Meyers have informed me that Jack Chick, a staunch creationist, published another tract worth scoffing over. This is one of Chick’s idiot tracts entitled There Go The Dinosaurs. Here are some excerpts from it.
Note: To see the rest of the tract, click here. As you can see, much of what Chick wrote in his newest tract is all crank. Every page he made in this crank comic contains lots of stupid lies, including the vapor canopy fallacy, Hispanic, caveman and school teacher stereotypes, and some cartoonish dinosaur caricatures in which one of then tries to hide from the human hunters in a thick cloud on a hilltop only to have her hind end exposed to the hunter’s spear.
Just like in all of his tracks, Chick would promote the message of Jesus Christ to those who read his tracts, while giving out one stupid lie after another about dinosaurs, including his “theory” about how the dinosaurs really died.
The tract claims stupidly that the dinosaurs died out after the Flood because there’s not enough oxygen in the air for them. The Flood destroyed most plants that gave out oxygen while taking in carbon dioxide and depleted much of the world of its oxygen. Thus, the dinosaurs couldn’t breathe and suffocated. Never mind the fact that if the young earth is true, plants life would all have been destroyed not just most of them, leaving behind no surviving remnants to repopulate the world whatsoever. Never mind the fact that all life on earth would have been wiped out completely despite God’s intentions to preserve them if what Chick claims in his tract was the case; all life on earth would have suffocated along with dinosaurs if there ever was too little and/or lack of oxygen in the world and no plants to replenish it. And finally, never mind the fossil record being completely void of modern animals, humans, and dinosaur remains mixed together. And quoting Genesis 1 will not make the notion of dinosaurs, modern animals, and man living side by side true, nor change the format of the fossil record, which shows the opposite of what Chick’s tract claims, to what creationists want the fossil record to reveal. Besides Genesis 1:24-27 contradicts Genesis 2:19 when they say that the animals were created either before or after man was made. So the animals and man were not created at the same time. Otherwise the world would have been greatly overcrowded from top to bottom with little or no room to move about. Even creationists themselves admit and even teach that all life change over time through the process of evolution. Saying "they did not evolve, but were created" is not going to make the evolutionary process stop nor the evidence that life change over time go away.
The tract first shows a caravan of hunters hunting down a female sauropod dinosaur who tried to escape the hunters by hiding in a large, thick cloud on top of a hill. But her hind end is exposed and a moment later, she is killed. What’s left of her is brought back to camp where a young boy asks his grandfather, “Why is it so hard to find dragons anymore?” The grandfather answers, “Who knows. You maybe eating the very last one.”
The tract then shows the school teacher stereotype “preaching” to his students things about dinosaurs Chick claims to be only believed by those who reject God, never mind the most devoted of all Christians who happily embrace what the stereotype is “preaching” due to scores of true hardcore evidence for such a time. The tract then jumps to the young earther’s view on the creation story where one panel portrays Satan as a dinosaurian crocodile on 2 legs (since when?) pushing Eve to give Adam the forbidden fruit to eat while a few other panels portrays Cain, Abel, and the other Bible Characters as cavemen stereotypes not like the cavemen of Geico and Fedex commercial fame.
The rest of the tract shows Noah and the ark, dinosaurs entering the ark, surviving the Flood, and leaving the ark to die from lack of air. The rest of the tract preaches the gospel message just like in all the tracts and claims, “All that talk about dinosaurs and comets is just a smokescreen to hide what really happened.” Only in Chick’s eyes no doubt while ignoring the real smokescreen put out by creationists to hide who they really are and what they really teach to the hapless crowd.
Chick is no different than other creationists who equates dinosaurs with dragons despite having anatomy completely different than dragons. Dragons and Dinosaurs are only 2 separate groups, one real, the other fictional. The reason why creationists equate dinosaurs with dragons is obvious. Dragons were inspired by discoveries of fossil remains of dinosaurs made by ancient people who couldn’t make heads or tails of what they really were. So to help explain the bones, which they are definitely monstrous and scary in many aspects, people begin to invent stories about ancient monsters, giants, and dragons with serpentine bodies, bat wings, and fiery poisonous breaths. These stories persist until the 17 and 1800s’ when people begin to finally realize what they really were instead of being remains of dragons and giants of ancient folklore.
This gave creationists the excuse to spread lies about them, saying that these Mesozoic monsters were once called dragons before they were given the name “dinosaurs” in the mid 1800s’. So, to fit them into their dogma, creationists went forth and change, fabricate, and rewrite the dragon stories to portray them as living dinosaurs that were called “dragons” before they were hunted to extinction by man by the 1700s’, only for man to unearth their remains, rename them “dinosaurs,” and display them in natural history museums all over the world. Thus, dinosaurs and dragons are one and the same monsters people saw, fought, and killed in folkloric accounts….or so they reason.
There’s one major flaw to this logic. Dinosaur bones were not the only bones that have inspired people to invent the legend of the dragon. Live sightings of crocodiles, python snakes, and especially fossil remains of Ice Age mammals such as cave bears found inside caves up in the Carpathian Mountains were also thought to be winged dragons that once lived in caves way up in the mountains (Citations here. NOTE: Scroll down to Dragons of Carpathian Caves) as well. Also, there is another dragon legend that tells about a fearsome dragon that once terrorized Klagenfurt, Austria until it was finally slain and beheaded. Its head was taken to a town hall where it was used as a trophy until it was discovered that the head of the dragon was in fact a skull of a woolly rhinoceros that was unearthed somewhere in the region long ago. That skull which inspired the legend was used as a role model for a dragon statue created to be a part of a fountain that stands in the city to this day.
Does this mean the bears and the rhinos of the Ice Age era should be called “dragons” before they were renamed as “cave bears” and “woolly rhinoceroses” in recent years and thus, dragons were really live cave bears and woolly rhinos people saw, fought, and killed long ago in mythology and folkloric legends? Of course not! That would be absurd. If there’s no sense in regarding bears and rhinos as dragons people saw, fought, and killed in legends, then there no sense in regarding dinosaurs the exact same way. Especially when dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, and cave bears never looked like this, this, and this.
