Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. I think dinosaurs are certainly very popular among children. And I know my grandchildren are very proud of little t shirts and trousers that might have a little dinosaur motive on them of some kind or another. And at one of the playgroups I take the children to, they have lots of little sort of toy dinosaurs. But dinosaurs are actually powerful evidence for the global flood.
[00:00:54] And it's interesting the enormity of some of the graveyards, fossilized graveyards of dinosaurs are huge.
[00:01:07] There was a book written some years ago now called Digging Dinosaurs.
[00:01:15] It was by J. R. Horner and J. Gorman and it was published back in 1988. But he did a lot of early work in that area. But he talks about, for example, one bone bed about 100 km west of Great Falls in Montana, contains over 10,000 dinosaur remains, all of the same species.
[00:01:49] It's interesting that he points out this was no ordinary spring flood from one of the streams in the area, but a catastrophic inundation. And so these massive beds are huge pieces of evidence really for the global flood. The other thing is not only do we find the fossilized remains themselves of dinosaurs such as in the Morrison Formation, which stretches from New Mexico to Canada and so forth, but also we find, for example, in certain areas we can find hundreds of thousands of tracks.
[00:02:41] And there's another location in the northeast Bighorn basin of central north Wyoming where again, hundreds of thousands of tracks were made and they were made on it's. Interesting, marine limestone.
[00:03:04] Again, this was reported in the journal Paleos back in two, one by EP Cavel and others. The title. The article is Middle Jurassic Dinosaur megatrack Sites, big hall, basin, Wyoming, USA.
[00:03:29] And these tracks, again, one of the characteristics is that the tracks are in a straight line, whereas normally animals, if they're just wandering around the tracks will vary. But these tracks are in a straight line and so they're obvious that the animals are fleeing from a flood type situation.
[00:04:02] One of the things too, and an interesting article that I was reading about the flood that I hadn't actually thought of before is that while the water level was rising and according to the flooded account, it peaked about 150 days after the initial flood. So we often think rain 40 days and 40 nights, but obviously there were other groundwater rises.
[00:04:32] The Earth underwent a catastrophic event.
[00:04:36] We know subsequently, for example, because we find fossils of marine creatures, say up on the Himalaya mountain ranges, like on Mount Everest, these sort of places in the European Alps, we find the remains of marine fossils that have been buried there. Obviously those mountains have been pushed up after those events. So there was a lot of surface activity, movement of the plates and this sort of thing. But also there would have been the tidal influences as well. Of water levels going up and down. And of course, dinosaurs that could swim would survive for a while and then come into some shallow water and leave tracks. Of course, there's also cases where they find eggs that have been dinosaur eggs and that that have been laid on these boundaries. And sometimes the secularists can argue, well, how could it be a float condition? But it's interesting that where these eggs are found, from the reports I've read, it doesn't seem to be any evidence of nesting. In other words, the eggs were just laid. It was certainly in a fleeing type situation then buried rapidly to be preserved because like most eggs, diocese eggs would be porous and so forth and would deteriorate quickly. But often with these eggs they're found where they've been able to identify the little embryo. And I guess there were cases, of course, earlier on where just in the early stage, the flood, the nests were buried, but on these trackways, the eggs are laid on just flat surfaces.
[00:06:33] So there's a lot of evidence from the dinosaurs and these huge beds, as I said, with large trackways, the animals running in straight lines all in the same direction, buried rapidly to preserve them. And it's another interesting thing is that there are very few babies or young juveniles in the bone beds.
[00:07:06] Of course, these are the areas where we find a huge I'm talking about in this particular situation, not the random case where animals were caught in the early stage of the flood, but in the later stages of the flood where animals were fleeing the floodwaters.
[00:07:27] Then it's mainly older juveniles and adults, so they don't find many babies or young juveniles in these huge clusters of animals that they find.
[00:07:42] It's fascinating too, with the preponderance of one species, for example, in some of these areas. So it's sort of like the huge herd effect has run off to escape the waters. They've stayed together as a herd instinctively for some protection and so forth.
[00:08:07] And I think, again, one of the things that we can see from the way the dinosaurs have been buried in the large groups, the trackways that have been preserved, the evidence of eggs laid just on flat, open ground.
[00:08:27] In places gives evidence of the floodwaters rising and falling due to obviously levels rising up, maybe trap water suddenly breaking out of a damned sort of naturally dammed area and releasing over an area. So it's a huge catastrophic event with a lot of activity going on, be volcanic activity we understand as well. So it's amazing, in my view anyway, how when we look at the evidence that we find in the geological record, particularly for these animals and particularly for the large dinosaurs, there's powerful evidence of this catastrophic event.
[00:09:24] When the trackways are found, they're usually found on flat bedding plates.
[00:09:29] And one of the authors was saying if you look at it in normal habitat, there would have been slopes for them to go up and down. But it makes sense that if the tracks were made on freshly deposited flood sediment, it'd always be flat. And most of the trackways are in marine sediments.
[00:09:53] And there was also an interesting find in the case of the Wyoming Deposit in the Big Horn Basin there that tracks were found in the same spot and then there were layers in between and then there were other tracks of the same type of dinosaur found on top going the same way. And yet there were supposed to be millions of years, several million years in the gap in between.
[00:10:33] And so one of the arguments is, what are the odds that 3 million years later, the same dinosaur type will once more make tracks in the very same area?
[00:10:45] And it's pointed out this is a huge problem for secular deep time geology.
[00:10:53] Yet it makes sense in terms of the flood model, where you'd have briefly exposed flood sediments and then they'd be covered by water again, because there would have been numerous falls and rises in the level of floodwaters during the ongoing rise of the floodwaters in under tree stage.
[00:11:16] And so, again, we have these classic examples there.
[00:11:23] Well, that's a classic example of how this whole deep time geology just doesn't stand up to the evidence that we see around.
[00:11:36] So, again, as the animals find some raised area of land, they lay their eggs, but again, they're covered quite quickly. Again, as these eggs are rising and falling over a short period of time of days and perhaps a week or so. And so the flood model fits amazingly well, the global flood model, because we find these remains all over the world. We find fossils of dinosaurs, big creatures buried all over the world. And, yeah, it fits the flood model as well.
[00:12:23] One of the other aspects is why don't we find dinosaurs today? And this is quite an interesting challenge that perhaps there's, to my knowledge, no real known explanation for this.
[00:12:43] In my view. Of course, I think that dinosaurs or some of the low giant, perhaps particularly marine reptiles, non sea dinosaurs, certainly survived until recent times. I note that in many of the old sea maps that are recorded, they have not only pictures of whales and dolphins, but sea serpents, which are sort of like the heads of pleasuresaurs.
[00:13:13] And of course, we find quite a few of those, where a lot of those are being found now in Australia, where there was a vast inland sea for a while. And it seems quite shallow water. They're quite close to the surface there, the remains that are being dug up, and also accounts like the Loch Ness monster, the slaying of dragons like St. George and so forth. There are so many stories of these large creatures in the past, probably, obviously would have died out or been killed out in some way. But there seems evidence that some of these large creatures certainly did survive for quite some time after the flood. The Chinese dragon legends and so forth, and dragon depictions all seem to point that these creatures certainly survived, some of them quite a while after the flood. But why did the dinosaurs in particular become extinct? Why aren't there more? Why don't we find some around? Well, it certainly is a challenge, and it's fascinating because the dinosaurs as a group of animals was certainly an amazing shape and form.
[00:14:43] There are some, and that's, I think, why they attract the attention of children in particular. They seem such interesting animals.
[00:14:56] But it's amazing when we look at why we don't have dinosaurs. There are possibly over 100 theories for why dinosaurs went extinct.
[00:15:07] Some of these include the idea that dinosaurs died out due to carbon dioxide accumulation, volcanic eruptions, or global warming or global cooling, or epidemics, or from predation by egg eating mammals.
[00:15:28] There's even ideas about they ate narcotic type plants, according to one article recently that I read. There was a good article on this that's in a book called Titans of the Earth and Sea that was published that referred to some of these theories.
[00:15:55] And, of course, was it an asteroid?
[00:15:59] One of the popular theories, of course, is that an asteroid is supposed to have called the Chicksilub Crater in the Yatakan, in the Yakatan Peninsula in Mexico, and supposed to be, of course, either a stony asteroid or a comet. But it would have been a huge impact, some of the calculations put as equivalent to over 6 million of the largest hydrogen bombs that have been built, and it would have thrown in this theory. The idea is that through a huge mass of pulverized rock into the stratosphere, resulting in dust blocking out the sun, causing a global cooling effect that wiped out 50% of all life.
[00:17:01] So it's sort of like a nuclear winter type scenario.
[00:17:07] Of course, one of the main supports for this idea comes from the thin iridium layer that exhibit characteristics consistent with a meteorite strike. And probably see this sort of theory presented when you go to museums and pictures of photograph of rock layers with the thin iridium layer. And these thin layers are found in rocks, of course, all around the world, known as the KT boundary.
[00:17:45] And that's a supposed time of extinction of the dinosaurs, according to this long age evolutionary theory. But it's actually not well defined as it's made out the iridium layer.
[00:18:05] And there are a lot of the boundary, the KT boundary, anomalies, and it's got to the extreme will they say, well, any rock layer with dinosaur remains or tracks proves that it's below the boundary.
[00:18:24] Of course, there were possibly meteorites at the time of the flood. That's not a problem. But this theory faces a lot of problems, really.
[00:18:40] For example, if the an asteroid did hit the Earth and led to a nuclear winter, how did all the plants that rely on sunlight, photosynthesis dependent plants survive?
[00:18:56] And an author of one article published in Creation magazine in 2023, volume 45, number four, pages 46, 47, 48, he argues, why did delicate beads and moths and sensitive amphibians such as frogs and salamanders survive under these conditions?
[00:19:27] If toxic gases filled the Earth after the extinction event, such as with the volcanic or carbon dioxide theories of extinction, then why did the birds survive? Because birds have a particularly sensitive breathing system and far more sensitive to toxic gases, and hence the use of canaries in coal mines as warning of the air quality dropping. And, of course, if the impact produced all this dust cloud and so forth that blocked out the sun, how did the creatures that require daily sunlight survive?
[00:20:13] We've seen other massive volcanic eruptions, such as Krakatoa that actually caused global cooling but didn't cause mass extinctions.
[00:20:26] And also the evolutionary dates don't match up.
[00:20:32] One of the authors points out that the whole suborder of stegosaurus was said to be extinct long before this other extinction event.
[00:20:48] It's interesting, of course, too, that in 2023 there were some studies done looking at trying to estimate the air temperature, the temperature of the Earth, the mean annual air temperature around the Cretaceous period. That's when all the limestone was formed. The evidence there shows that any cooling was quite mild and gradual. But it's interesting that the mean average air temperature then during the Cretaceous was about 25 degrees, whereas, and it cooled to about 20.
[00:21:32] When we look at all these scenarios again, the ones that the nuclear night type scenarios, that would they would have killed lots of other creatures other than just the dinosaurs and creatures that are alive today and surviving quite well.
[00:21:56] Of course, one of the reasons that the dinosaurs died out after died out after the flood, rather than being wiped out by these extinction events, is human hunting.
[00:22:09] And I think this is the most recent, when you think about it. Now, humans have the ability to eliminate big animals that are a threat very well due to the intelligence, the ability to develop weapons, spears, use fire and so forth. And, of course, we know lots of animals around the world have become extinct.
[00:22:39] One of the examples mentioned by this author was that in Singapore, there were so many tigers on the island that just about every day someone was killed by a tiger. So early last century, rewards were offered for every tiger killed, and by 1930, every tiger on the island had been killed.
[00:23:12] And we think about we don't no longer have bears and lions and this sort of thing roaming around in England or the Middle East, these sort of places.
[00:23:26] And even the largest creatures, like whales, the giant whales, were just about hunted to extinction almost by humans. So another example, of course, is that there could have been competition for the dinosaurs. And remember, even the big dinosaurs have to start off as little dinosaurs.
[00:23:52] There was a paper published in the Smithsonian Mag in 2019.
[00:24:04] Did grape white shark strive the megalodon to extinction?
[00:24:10] And of course, this was the megalodon was a giant shark.
[00:24:17] Why are those extinct? And this particular paper published in the Smithsonian argues that the megalodon's usual prey were small whales and as these were dwindling, the adult great white sharks outcompeted the juvenile megalodons.
[00:24:41] And of course, another reason could be inbreeding. So after the flood, if the population doesn't spread out enough, if there's too much inbreeding, then it can lead to the demise of a species due to just genetic defects being passed on.
[00:25:08] Of course, the biblical flood model beautifully explains the extinction of the dinosaurs. They would have been wiped out during Noah's flood.
[00:25:18] Two of each of the major types of dinosaurs would have been brought onto the ark by God. Miraculously, he brought the animals there and they were probably juvenile so that they didn't eat too much.
[00:25:39] And after the flood, they would have been released and of course, bred and spread out. And this then of course, after the flood, as they bred up a bit and of course humans spread up, there would have been different competition. And I think also this explains probably now why we don't find the dinosaurs today. There would have been competitions from any of the bigger ones that evolved from human hunting and there would have been competition from other animals and mammals and so forth at that time. But obviously, it seems from the dragon legends, as I mentioned earlier, that some did survive into recent historic times. And so again, the whole scenario fits. Again, the recent global flood too, only thousands of years ago and not millions ago, years ago, as secular would have it. So overall, the big picture that we have from the fossil evidence and the historical evidence is that we have powerful, very strong, consistent evidence for the biblical flood described in the Bible.
[00:27:01] And of course, the Bible is the account of how the creator God once again to once again have a relationship with us.
[00:27:13] Remember, you've been listening to Faith and science. And if you want to relisten to this program or send a link to Friends, just google Three ABN, Australia Au, click on the radio button and then on the Listen button and you'll find these programs. And do remember to put the links up to the interesting programs on your social media pages so other people can learn about this important information.
[00:27:44] I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:04] You've been listening to a production of Three ABN Australia radio.
