Can We Have an Honest Discussion About Dinosaurs?
1) Dinosaur bones are unique. It is one thing to find a fossilized fern while hiking in the mountains, or a fossilized sea creature while wandering the beach, but a dinosaur bone is something else. While it might be cool to discover a preserved relic from the past, relics that are small in scale often do not yield anything more than a passing glance. What makes dinosaurs so compelling is their gargantuan, unearthly size. It’s almost as if they were other-worldly. Looking at dinosaur bones reminds me of the complexity of all that came before, of all that I don’t understand. It is more than just the formation of land, water, bacteria, protein, and plants that lead to the viability of dinosaur life on this planet. It is also the velocity and diversity of their lives — Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, Ornithomemus, Plateosaurus, and all their cousins — and the sudden, violent extinction that brought their time to a close. Dinosaur bones tell the story of what could have been, but was potentially never fully realized.
2) It is hard to account for dinosaur evolution. Darwinian evolution claims that dinosaurs evolved from earlier reptiles and birds between 245 and 66 million years ago. On one hand it seems strange to me that scientists talk with such authority on anything that happened more than a million years ago. I have to wonder if the time table is based on meticulous and objective methodology or the arbitrary supposition that enough time had to elapse in order for all the distinct organisms to come into being. On the other hand, I am not a paleontologist.
Though I do have to wonder about the sticky issue of population genetics.
Population Genetics is the mathematical branch of Darwinian theory that allows us to calculate how much evolutionary change we should expect in a given amount of time if we know things like mutation rate and population sizes. In the evolutionary timeline, while there are several moments that might yield sufficient time to create the given species, there are also several moments that aren’t quite long enough. There are not enough years in the 70 million (or so) years of the Cambrian explosion, for example, to allow for the amazing emergence of new biological forms and biological information that came to fruition.
I don’t know if paleontologists have called the Mesozoic Era into similar question, but I would think that the sheer size of most dinosaurs presents a unique evolutionary question. Why would some reptiles and birds be able to evolve and grow into larger-than-life specimens in a given amount of time, but be unable to grow larger than regular size in the time since mass extinction? While Darwin might do an excellent job explaining intra-species evolution, his explanation of inter-species evolution lacks the necessary evidence. Darwin knew at the time he wrote Origin of Species that his theory had some gaps, but he hoped the gaps would be filled with the emergence of science as time passed. Science seemed to be trending in Darwin’s favor up until about 20 years ago as the study of genetics seems to widening the gaps in his theory even more. As scientists come to understand the complexity of how specific proteins combine into viable life, and how it is necessary for specific proteins to link in specific orders for life to be viable, any theory that is does not account for the intelligence required for this process to occur cannot sustain the weight of scrutiny.
3) Genesis doesn’t mention dinosaurs either. In a classical creation/evolution debate, the simple answer is one or the other. But this answer is not so simple. In the book of Genesis, just before God creates mankind, He explains that He wants to give them “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle…and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26 KJV). Some might read into the ambiguity in this verse to indicate that God might have given man dominion over dinosaurs, (i.e. the “creeping things”) but then there is the problem that man never lived with dinosaurs. Can you imagine dinosaurs playing in the garden with the lambs and the lions?
But, unless I am missing something here, this leaves us with at best two flawed theories: either we accept Darwinian evolution miraculously formed birds and reptiles into giant lizards in a short period of time only to be annihilated by an asteroid, but with still enough evolutionary magic to pull of the Cambrian explosion “shortly” thereafter, or we accept that God created dinosaurs somewhere in between plants and other animals and then killed them off long before Adam and Eve entered the Garden of Eden. There are obviously other plausible theories that intertwine and weave the creation/evolution matrix, but the point is that we don’t definitively know. There are too many questions. Dinosaurs are an anomaly. This fact doesn’t shake my faith in scriptures or in God because I don’t think God told Moses the whole story when he inspired him to write the first 5 books.
4) Dinosaurs and ancient plant life essentially gave us fossil fuels. It is a logical fallacy to offer up the simple either-or answer I gave in the previous point, but that might be all we have to go on at the moment. Unless we consider the fossil-fuel theory.The modern day miracle of coal, oil and natural gas are the result of many, many years of decomposing plant and animal life. On the one hand, the lengthy time tables of evolution make the most sense here because it probably takes eons for plant and animal life to decompose into useful fuel. But I find it interesting how useful these commodities have been in lifting the people out of poverty, cleaning the environment as we moved away from burning wood, dung, and whale blubber, and helping to modernize this wonderful world we live in. I can’t help but think that God had a hand in it — though the time line will forever baffle me.
5) If I had my choice, I’d want a pet Ankylosaurus. All seriousness discussions aside, if there was a way for man and dinosaur to live together, I would be the guy who would try to tame an Ankylosaurus from the wild. It is true that they are about 6 ft tall, 25 feet long head to tail, and armored with spikes, but who wouldn’t want a pet tank? Can you imagine taking it on walks or riding it to the store to pick up some milk? I know right, totally cool.
