If Humans and Dinosaurs Lived Together, Why Don’t We Find Human Fossils with Dinosaur Fossils?

by Bodie Hodge on May 4, 2006 ; last featured February 13, 2007
Featured in Answers Magazine

Often, people believe that if human bones aren’t found with dinosaur bones, then they didn’t live together. This is a false assumption. If human bones aren’t found buried with dinosaur bones, it simply means they weren’t buried together.

Children in Museum Lobby

One of the first things visitors to the upcoming Creation Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, will see as they enter the main lobby will be children playing alongside dinosaurs.

As the floodwaters advanced during the global Flood, humans would have fled to higher ground, swam or held on to floating debris for as long as possible.

Also, human corpses bloat and therefore float on the water’s surface. Hence very few, if any, humans would be buried by sediment. Instead they would have rotted and decayed without fossilization.

It is expected that marine creatures and plants were the first things buried and fossilized, since they are at a lower elevation and couldn’t escape the sediment and water. When we look at the fossil record we find:

  • 95% of all fossils were marine organisms.
  • 95% of the remaining 5% were algae, plants/trees.
  • 95% of the remaining 0.25% were invertebrates, including insects.
  • The remaining 0.0125% were vertebrates, mostly fish.1,2

So, we shouldn’t expect to find many human fossils at all. There is still the possibility of finding human fossils in the lower levels of Flood sediments, but the creation/Flood model doesn’t require it.

Remember, we don’t find human bones buried with coelacanths either, but we live together today (coelacanths are a type of fish, which scientists claimed to have gone extinct millions of years ago but have recently been found alive). And some may even be enjoying them for dinner!

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Footnotes

  1. Morris, John, The Young Earth, Master Books, p. 70, 2002.
  2. Snelling, Andrew, Where are all the human fossils? Creation 14(1):28-33, December 1991.

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