The other night, a Facebook friend by the name of Rick Morris gave me a link to this Creation Ministries International article entitled Dinosaurs and dragons: stamping on the legends. Written by Russel Grigg, this article is stupid as usual. All it contains is what creationists think they expect and what they think evolution expects and empty, worthless hype over some very well known British postage stamps depicting Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Protoceratops, and Triceratops skeletons that have been around for a long time, and yet CMI never paid any attention to them until now it seems. There are two "expectations" in the article that are either creationist or evolutionist expectations. The difference between the two is that nothing out there has ever met up with the expectations of the creationists. But that doesn't stop them from pretending that all of their expectations have been met while the expectations of the evolutionists have never been met.
The article begins with this empty hype.
Dinosaurs are loose in Britain! They come in the form of five postage stamps depicting an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, a Protoceratops and a Triceratops. The stamps were released by the Royal Mail on August 20, 1991, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first use of the term ‘dinosauria’ (from the Greek δεινός deinos ‘terrible’ + σαύρος sauros ‘lizard’) by famous British anatomist and palaeontologist, Sir Richard Owen. He used the term at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Plymouth, in 1841.
Wrong! It was in 1842 when he coined the term "Dinosauria" meaning "terrible or fearfully great lizards" only in his writings, not at the meeting. These stamps have been made just before it was discovered that the term was coined in 1842 rather than 1841. Owen coined the term to describe 3 fossil dinosaurs, Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus, which he recognized as "a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles." Although he described the fossils at the meeting, it was only sometime later after the meeting when he coined the term "Dinosauria" and wrote it in his Part 2 of his essay Report on British Fossil Reptiles.
Sir Richard Owen was Britain’s foremost expert in comparative anatomy and was the first person to realize that these creatures were a distinctive group of previously unknown reptiles. While everyone now accepts this conclusion, it is less well known today that Owen opposed Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution on scientific grounds.
That doesn't make Owen a creationist. He does accept evolution, but not Darwin's theory of it.
Since their discovery, dinosaurs have been depicted on at least 280 stamps, representing 70 sets from some 50 countries, including such diverse places as Russia, Morocco, Yemen, Nicaragua, China, Mongolia, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and British Antarctic Territory. Surprisingly, the non-existent Brontosaurus is depicted and named on two stamps—a USA 25¢, showing a pair of the animals, and a Central African Republic SOF, showing a herd. There have been more stamp issues depicting Tyrannosaurus than the total number of fossils of this dinosaur found—only three complete skeletons to date.
Actually there are more numerous specimens, including nearly complete specimens, of Tyrannosaurus rex ever found thus far. As for the stamps, I think there are a lot more than just 280 stamps out there. Here's a site that's chock full of stamps depicting dinosaurs and other prehistoric life.
Evolutionists believe that the dinosaurs evolved, while creationists believe that they were some of the ‘beasts of the earth’ created by God, along with the other land-dwelling animals on Day Six of Creation Week (Genesis 1:24–31). Who is right?
I'd say neither. This is something creationists made up to cast doubt on any unsuspecting reader reading this tripe. The next part are the two lists of expectations that only amount to nothing. First it's the evolutionist's expectations. Only two are there. Made up and quite stupid if you know what I mean.
If evolution is true, we should expect that:
There would be fossil evidence indicating the ancestor of all the dinosaurs.
There would be fossil evidence of intermediate forms showing many stages in the formation of such diverse characteristics as the plates and spikes of the armoured dinosaurs (stegosaurs), the one-to-seven horns of the horned dinosaurs (ceratopian), the distinctive beaks of the duckbilled dinosaurs (hadrosaurs), the thick skulls of the boneheaded dinosaurs (pachycephalosaurs), and also the wings of the flying reptiles (pterosaurs), the distinctive features of the various marine reptiles, and so on.
We have fossil evidence of such intermediate forms (i.e. Protohadros, Yinlong, Huayangosaurus, etc.) yet creationists are too dull minded to notice. They only assume that every time paleontologists unearth fossil remains of prehistoric life, they only unearthed animals that are fully formed. But that doesn't stop them from evolving into different forms to help survive in environments they choose to adapt to. Even the so-called fully formed animals can change over time.
Now we get to the creationist expectations in which they claim to have all been met while there is not one claim found on the list that have not been met at all; what creationists expect is all in their heads!
On the other hand, if creation is true, and the dinosaurs were created on Day Six of Creation Week, we should expect that:
Dinosaur fossils would appear suddenly in the fossil record, that is, without ancestors and intermediate forms. In fact, this is what is observed (NOT!).If dinosaurs were created by God on Day Six of creation Week, it follows that two of every kind still living at the time of the Flood must have gone aboard Noah’s Ark. Could such large animals have been accommodated?
With countless millions of animal species compare with a 450x75x45 chest-like structure— not at all. Even when they are young babies, there's no way can Noah bring every living and extinct animal 2x2 inside the ark, and the creationists know it! Yet they made it all possible by pretending that God directed "children-sized dinosaurs" into the ark, while the bible clearly indicate that Noah took up only animals that are all sexually mature. God ordain Noah to take up only sexually mature animals so they can reproduce and repopulate the world after the Flood ended. Obviously creationists made up such baby concept in a direct response to the age old joke about why did dinosaurs become extinct— because they're too big to fit in the ark.
First of all, they were not all large; many dinosaurs were comparatively small, such as Compsognathus, which was about the size of a chicken, and Mussaurus, the smallest dinosaur ever found, the skull of which measured a mere 32 millimetres in length—about the length of an ordinary paper-clip.
Paleontologists have found smaller dinosaurs than that. There's Microraptor, Fruitadens, and Anchiornis, dinosaurs that are no bigger than crows and sparrows.
Second, the dinosaurs, like modern reptiles, usually laid eggs which had a leathery shell (compared to birds’ eggs which have a hard shell); reptiles today, after hatching, keep growing for most of their lives.
Face palm anyone? How can anyone listen to such creationist stupidity!? Anyone familiar with dinosaur eggs knows that dinosaur eggs are all hard-shelled and are mostly distinct than any other egg laying animal known while other types closely resemble that of birds. Besides what do they think they are? Crocodile eggs? Get Real! Dinosaurs are more of birds than reptiles. They grow up real fast. In some cases in a matter of a few months while others take only a decade.
The largest dinosaur egg found was discovered in France; it is 30 centimetres (one foot) long and is now on display at Redding University in England.
Actually that's one of the largest discovered. The most recent discovery of huge dinosaur eggs are made in China in the mid-1990s' that are more than 60 cm (2 ft.) long and about 20 cm (8 in.) in diameter— far bigger than the football-sized eggs discovered in France.
"…it is reasonable to suppose that God would have directed children-sized dinosaurs of the larger species to the Ark, or perhaps teenage-sized ones; it certainly was not necessary for Him to have sent grandfather-sized ones!"
Not reasonable, but stupid. Told out of ignorance of what the Bible really said about God commanding Noah taking up animals that are full grown and sexually mature.
The third thing that we might reasonably expect, if God created the dinosaurs on Day Six of Creation Week, is that there should be stories of dinosaurs in the folklore of many nations, since people after the Flood would have co-existed with them until they became extinct. Such stories would not use the term ‘dinosaur’, of course, because as we have already noted, this term was not invented until 1841. We should expect such stories to use other terms like ‘monster’ or ‘dragon’.
I'm not going to go through them all because they are all nothing but fabrications made up first by Paul Taylor, the author behind the ill made The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible, then by other creationists who throw out parts of the story that described dragons to be anything BUT dinosaurs and pretend that the dragon legends are really live dinosaur sightings that have been embellished over the years while ignoring the fact that all these stories are actually inspired mostly by sightings of fossilized remains of prehistoric animals, mostly coming from early mammals from the early Cenozoic Era, while others are inspired by sightings of moder reptiles like snakes and crocodiles. Plus all these stories feature either heroes that don't exist (i.e. King Arthur and Beowulf) or heroes that exist but their deeds and their actions as told in many of their accounts have been proven to be entirely fictional (i.e. St George and Gilgamesh) all made up to boost their image.
The next section deals with alleged claims of dinosaurs found in the Bible, which are the direct result of creationists distorting the Bible to make it look as if there are indeed dinosaurs other than birds found in the bible. This is not the result of translators of the King James 1611 Bible who "…were happy to use the term ‘dragon’, confident that its use would be meaningful and not mythical for the readers." In reality, these bible passages and verses only refer to mythical animals and Israelite enemies symbolically, not live dinosaurs. I'm not going to go through them all. Instead I'll give you links to my other essays that deal with these kind of creationist claims.
- The Truth About Behemoth
- The Truth About Leviathan
- The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible Part 3
- The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible Part 4
- The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible Part 5
- The Pseudo Dragons Of Genesis Park Part 11
- Dinosaur Activity Book Pure Kiddie Crap Part 4
A very short conclusion of denial of reality being void of evidence of the creationist world thousands of years ago is made to the article which claims in the end…
It is therefore reasonable to conclude that if evolutionists were not locked into their millions-of-years scenario, there would be no problems about the idea that dinosaurs and man have coexisted on the earth, from the time of Adam, until they, along with many other creatures, gradually became extinct.
Never mind the complete lack of evidence supporting such an idea that one can only be found in science fiction. Because of this, evolutionists will still continue to lock into their billions of years of reality based on physical evidence and not the creationists' make believe idea that "dinosaurs and man have coexisted on the earth, from the time of Adam, until they, along with many other creatures, gradually became extinct" due to the complete lack of evidence supporting it.
