The excellent cartoonist Gary Larson pictured several dinosaurs standing around smoking, with the caption, “The real reason dinosaurs became extinct”. Not wishing to upstage Gary the Great, I have another explanation to offer for the demise of the dinosaurs…
Whatever the reason given by evolutionists for their ultimate extinction, it’s fascinating to note that before becoming extinct the dinosaurs were in the habit of “falling into” swamps, bogs, lakes or tar pits…sometimes entire herds of them.
Well alright, I’m not the first to notice this, and evolutionists have been hard at work trying to explain away the problem.
What were dinosaurs thinking, having lived long enough to get perhaps twenty or sixty feet tall, and therefore probably having enough sense to look where they were going: “Hey guys, let’s all go this way and get stuck in a deep, miry bog! Look, Harry’s already fallen in-come on!”
Maybe they were all depressed and committed suicide:
“Oh no! Now grandma’s fallen into a pit where half of my family and friends fell in-maybe I should just join them…”
WHERE THEY LIVED…AND DIED
Dinosaurs are often described as having “wandered around in swampy land”. In other words we “know” they lived in such places, because not only are many tracks found in ancient sediment (as are the tracks of many other animals), but dinosaur remains and their fossils are also found in ancient sediment. Think about tracks-if you make tracks in mud they will soon disappear: for tracks to be preserved they would have to be buried in more sediment. An animal has to be buried quickly to fossilize and not to rot on the surface or be eaten before it disappears. So for the evolutionist, it’s vital to conclude that they at least lived in the vicinity of a swamp or near a river, lake or sea where they might get buried quickly. Just imagine how deeply some of them had to be buried, considering how big they were, and sometimes there were several of them.
I casually searched “dinosaurs wandered into a swamp”, and found 26,334 relevant results. Here’s an example:
“Fossils of palms and conifers are found in the Aguja Formation, and these plants tell us that the dinosaurs were wandering around in a humid swampy environment. The overall global climate at this time was warm and the tropical swamp was most likely very close to the coast”… “The Javelina Formation was deposited as the sea retreated further, and this area started to dry out, 70-66 million years ago”…” The area was a floodplain inhabited by many different types of conifers, and some flowering trees (angiosperms). But not only plants lived there. There are 11 species of dinosaurs that have been found in the Javelina Formation too”
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/nationalfossilday/mesozoic_bibe.cfm
Here’s another example:
“Fossils of dinosaurs are not common in Pennsylvania and are found only in Mesozoic-age rocks in the southeastern part of the state. Here, dinosaurs wandered near lakes and swamps, leaving tracks in the mud that later hardened to rock”.
http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_014599.pdf
Again:
“In 1994, cement workers at the factory that bankrolls much of Sucre dynamited a hillside and revealed what is the world’s biggest collection of dinosaur tracks, bearing 5,000 prints of more than 250 individuals”…” Cal Orck’o is an awesome sight: a criss-crossing testimony to extinct herbivores and carnivores on their way to somewhere long disappeared; a flat, even newer America, from before the Andes formed. The Bolivia of the Cretaceous was a swampy landmass, home apparently to several species of dinosaur and a few primitive mammals. At least 8 different species of dinosaur have left their footprints in the clay bed of what was a dried out lake, including T-rex, Triceratops and Brontosaurus”.
http://wanderinggaia.com/2010/07/09/walking-with-dinosaurs/
In the case of a baby, we may expect the odd one here and there to “wander into a swamp”, as in the case of a baby woolly mammoth:
“Scientists think she got stuck in a swamp and died over 39,000 years ago”
(It’s okay-I know mammoths are not dinosaurs, and I know this isn’t a woolly mammoth…)
DINOSAURS-TRAPPED-IN-MUD STORIES
However, adult dinosaurs also “fell into” lakes, pits and swamps along with the babies, and you just can’t get away from those dinosaurs-trapped-in-the-mud stories:
“These traps or bonebeds are unusual in that they consist of vertically stacked skeletons of numerous non-avian theropods in 1–2 m deep pits. The pits are filled with a mix of alluvial and volcanic mudstone and sandstone and appear to have been created by the trampling and wallowing of large dinosaurs. Small theropods and vertebrates then became mired in these pits, dying and being forced deeper by the activities of the large dinosaurs and the struggles of later victims. The high quality of preservation suggests a rapid burying of the carcasses”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishugou_Formation_dinosaur_traps
You can research the evolutionist’s view of the habitats dinosaurs lived in: almost all involved water in the form of swamps, marshes, lakes and so forth. Even sand can form a new sedimentary rock when the grains are cemented together, and fossils can be found in sand and sandstone.
http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/tp/Dinosaur-Habitats.htm
NOT JUST DINOSAURS…
Of course, the fossil record does not just reveal dinosaur remains. In fact, the majority of fossils are marine creatures. I mentioned in a previous post some examples of entire schools of whales being found buried inland, where, if we believe the evolutionist, there were “seas” or freak climatological disasters:
“The creation of Africa had a surprising impact on evolution. Scrambling up the sides of the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, Iain finds small marine creatures that reveal that this part of Africa was once a shallow sea that formed when Africa was created. And within the arid Western Desert, he reveals 17m long skeletons of early whales buried in the sand. These skeletons reveal how land-dwelling mammals were lured back into the shallow seas created by the birth of the African continent, leading to the evolution of whales” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019bctl
Whale fossils have been found in the deserts of Chile and Peru:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26356383
There are also places in the world where “mass fossil graveyards” are found, where sometimes billions of different creatures are found buried together. Not only animals, but plants and trees are said to have been buried en masse by a sea moving inland, or by other local flooding, or by freak weather conditions (hardly “uniformitarian” conditions, eh?).
The following is from an article (and as with all the other above examples, is not written by a creationist), titled “World’s Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death”:
“Scientists have revealed what may be the world’s largest dinosaur graveyard. The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, comparable to today’s hurricanes, which struck what was then a coastal area. The findings could help solve a mystery concerning why the badlands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur fossils.“ (You should take a look at the artist’s impression of this event).
http://www.livescience.com/8340-world-largest-dinosaur-graveyard-linked-mass-death.html
THE POINT…
So here’s my point. The evolutionist, by definition, intentionally ignores any Biblical or supernatural explanation not only for the origin of life but also for Earth’s history. He’s not going to discuss the Biblical Flood, except perhaps to ridicule it and to make sure you don’t consider it to be a possibility. However, to me and to many others, including some scientists, the Biblical Flood beautifully explains the fossil record, the rock layers around the earth, and the subsequent ice age and runoff from the land causing world-wide erosional features.
The Flood was not just a spell of rain gently falling from the sky until it was so deep everyone was swimming with nowhere to go: it was, as the Bible account describes, an event where even the earth’s crust would have been moving around, with associated tsunamis and turbidites, storms and volcanic activity on a huge scale.
Flood legends survive from ancient cultures around the world, including the Gilgamesh Epic from the world’s first area of known civilization-Mesopotamia.
But what about the ark? If specimens of every kind of animal went onto the ark to escape the cataclysm, there would also have been dinosaurs, right? This is often a subject of ridicule for the evolutionist-how could a huge dinosaur possibly have fitted onto the ark?
Yes, dinosaurs may well have been on the ark, since babies and eggs could have been fitted on it no problem (see note 1). The surviving dinosaurs after the Flood would then have been targets of hungry humans, or people wishing to be rid of dangerous animals (as in the case of the wolf being driven to extinction in Britain in the middle-ages), or troubled by a changed climate now unfriendly to their habitat requirements. Hey-maybe they even sank into a swamp!
And perhaps some of them smoked too much…
NOTE
1: http://store.icr.org/Noahs-Ark-A-Feasibility-Study/productinfo/BNOAR2/
For great articles on the Flood and the ark try these sites:
Fuel for Faith 