Why Have No Human and Dinosaur Fossils Been Found Together?

The fact is that fossils of ducks, beavers, badgers, platypuses, pine trees, squirrels, and many other common creatures have been found in rock layers that evolution-believing scientists consider to be “dinosaur age”—all of which was unheard of when I was growing up, because it means they all lived at the same time.

As helpful as this is in favor of believing dinosaurs were onboard the ark, it has also spurred on one of the most common questions against the Genesis account of Noah’s ark, which is: “If humans and dinosaurs coexisted, why have no human and dinosaur fossils been found together?” To answer that, let’s pose a similar question that will help frame what the actual issues involved in the question really are.

“Why don’t we find whales and coelacanth fossils buried together?”

Has any Bible skeptic ever posed that question? Certainly not one that I know of. And it’s likely the average person has no idea what a coelacanth is.

However, I’ve certainly had many people ask me if human and dinosaur bones have ever been found together over the years. Why is that?

Biblical History

Well, as explained previously (in Parts 1 and 2), Biblical creationists believe that the great flood recorded in Genesis 6–9 is the cause of the majority of the sedimentary rock layers containing billions of fossilized remains found worldwide. And we also believe that dinosaurs (which were air-breathing land animals) were part of the biological payload sent aboard Noah’s ark.

The obvious conclusion is that both humans and dinosaurs coexisted before and after the flood. But after the flood, dinosaurs (like many other creatures) gradually went extinct.

So, what the “human with dinosaur fossils” question is getting at is the simply logical—yet somewhat naive—assumption that if two different creatures lived together at the same time and coexisted in similar environments, then surely, we should find their fossils buried together.

The Devil Is in the Details

This isn’t as much of a slam dunk as it sounds once you dig into the details involved.

In fact, it’s actually quite a powerful argument against the story of evolution when you factor in evolution’s required “millions of years” timeframe and unpack it fully.

So, for the sake of argument, we’ll use the two creatures I mentioned earlier—whales and coelacanths—already living in an aquatic environment (where evolutionary stories primarily depict fossilization taking place) vs. dinosaurs and humans (which are both specifically land-dwelling creatures).

Now let’s look at these first two candidates in relation to the evolution timeline.

Meet the Contestants

Coelacanths, living fish once presumed extinct and formerly used as index fossils for the Cretaceous period, are said to date as far back as 410 million years ago.1 (I specifically chose it for our comparison because it’s so well known in the creation/evolution debate that it’s casually referred to as “the dinosaur fish” by some.)

Whales are said to have evolved about 50 million years ago.2 So that means that whales and coelacanths have supposedly coexisted for approximately 50 million years in the same general aquatic environment.

However, even though they live together now and presumably did so throughout this supposed 50-million-year-old evolutionary timeline, no fossils with whales and coelacanths together have ever been found. Why is that?

Living “Together”?

Now, before we proceed, let’s deal with an objection that can be raised here. Some might say that although both these creatures live in the same wide-ranging environment (i.e., the ocean), both don’t live in the same habitats, so the argument isn’t valid.

However, although today we observe coelacanths living deeper in the oceans (between 90–700 meters [295–2,300 feet] deep) and most whales spending more time near the surface, there is actually a tremendous variety of behavior among the 40 different whale types living today, whose activities regularly cause them to traverse all but the most extreme depths of the oceans.

Some whales have been documented (using satellite-linked tags) diving over 2,900 meters (9,800 feet) deep, and some can stay submerged for over three hours, which means they regularly pass through coelacanth territory and overlap their habitats constantly.

Today, coelacanths are largely found near the Comoros Islands in the Western Indian Ocean, and some also live along the east African coast into Indonesian waters.3 Accordingly, a wide variety of whales also frequent these locations, so there’s no known reason to believe these creatures ever had any significant separation over time. But still no fossils of them together.

Pterodactyls and Coelacanths Together?

Skeptics might try to say that all of what we’ve discussed doesn’t provide sufficient opportunity to expect fossils of them to have been found together, as whales generally stayed closer to the surface and coelacanths mostly lived in deeper waters over the last 50 million years (even though there’s no way to definitively verify that).

But how then would they explain (in probabilistic terms) how the remains of a coelacanth has been found jumbled up with several pterosaur (a group of extinct flying reptiles) fossils as reported in a 2021 LiveScience article? The article stated, “The fossilized lung was part of a large slab, uncovered in phosphate beds in Oued Zem in Morocco, which contained several other bones belonging to pterosaurs.”4

Now, even though pterosaurs are thought to have hunted overtop water, what are the chances of a land-dwelling flying reptile and a deep-sea-living coelacanth being buried together vs. the remains of a coelacanth and a whale being so?

Evolutionary Storytelling in Action

Well, the evolutionary researchers who found them cautiously postulated that because they found only the lung of the coelacanth mixed with some pterodactyls, there may have been a rather intriguing chain of events that resulted in this fantastic fish and flyer find.

They proposed that perhaps a completely different creature (such as a giant mosasaur or plesiosaur) ate the rather massive (estimated 17-feet-long) coelacanth, then after traveling quite a distance, threw up the coelacanth’s lung.5

Now their reasoning on this was that because plesiosaurs and mosasaurs are thought to have been marine reptiles, and because modern-day lizards sometimes regurgitate their food (typically when stressed or ill), perhaps these creatures did that too.

And then, we must presume that a group of pterodactyls swooped in and got that juicy lung, but then somehow, they were all suddenly killed in a sudden fossilization event that entombed them all at once.

And of course, all of this happened before the lung—ripped from its owner and then swallowed, surrounded by digestive juices and then later spit up—had fallen apart.

Respectfully, if you can’t hear the special pleading in this “just so” story (typical of evolutionary propaganda) perhaps you should call your ENT for a checkup. Because this isn’t science, it’s simply another “just-so” situation commonly heard from those who believe in the story of evolution.

Marine vs. Land Animal Fossil Distribution

Now, let’s remember that our original comparison is that of the chances of two land-dwelling creatures being buried together vs. two aquatic creatures being so.

We know from the fossil record (regardless of which world history and mechanisms of fossilization you accept) that marine creatures and plants make up the overwhelming majority of the fossil record. When looking at it, we find

• 95% of all fossils were shallow marine organisms.
• 95% of the remaining 5% were algae, plants/trees, and other invertebrates (including insects).
• The remaining 0.25% were vertebrates, mostly fish.6

So, the observable facts show that from a historical perspective, statistically, there’s been a far greater probability of marine animals being fossilized than land creatures by orders of magnitude.

Again, given the supposed 50 million years whales and coelacanths were supposed to have coexisted and how much opportunity they likely had for interaction and overlap in each other’s habitats and the fact that many dead marine animals, unless scavenged completely beforehand, fall to the bottom of whatever particular area of the ocean they were in—it is very reasonable to imagine many occasions for whale and coelacanth fossilization events to have happened in the imagined evolutionary timeline. (Far more reasonable than the flight of fancy just described with the pterosaurs.)

Theoretically, there would have been billions of each creature (whale and coelacanth) produced during that supposed vast amount of time, and yet, as mentioned, to date we have never found any fossils of them together.

The Argument Goes Both Ways

However, none of this proves that these creatures didn’t coexist. It obviously just means there simply never happened to be a situation in which the two creatures were preserved together.

Of course, the same statement can be logically applied to dinosaur and human remains as well, and, in fact, to an exponentially higher level of probability when you think through the two different historical accounts being held forth. How so?

Comparing Timelines

Well, contrast the imagined 50-million-year evolutionary scenario with the historical biblical account. According to the chronogenealogies in the Bible, the flood happened approximately 1,650 years after creation. So, that would determine the maximum population potential (with natural population control mechanisms recognized) for any creature being fossilized at the time of the flood.

And certainly, there would have been many dinosaurs and people produced during that time, but nowhere near the incredible number of whales and coelacanths that would have been during the supposed 50 million years of evolutionary history. We’re talking about 602,250 days of potential procreation vs. 18,250,000,000 days.

However, don’t misinterpret the argument. It’s not simply about the total cumulative numbers of potential creatures that could theoretically have existed throughout the two comparative histories but rather the enormous difference in the amount of time for potential fossilization to occur that is truly staggering.

What Are the Chances?

You see, the pool of potential candidates for the fossilization of any creatures together in the biblical timeline is limited primarily to the number of each immediately alive at the time of the flood event. However, the pool of creatures available for fossilization together in the evolutionary history is virtually every coexisting animal ever produced for the entire period of their coexistence!

The Bible records that the entire flood event itself was only a year long, with the majority of sedimentation events occurring during the early phase of the flood. But even granting a full year for fossilization to occur—when comparing the probability of a human and a dinosaur skeleton just happening to be deposited together during a mere 365 days vs. the chances of a whale and a coelacanth being fossilized together over 50 million years, the difference is enormous.

Not to belabor the exact theoretical circumstances under which any of these creatures might have died together, but in a pure time comparison, we’re not talking even close to a one-in-a-million shot here. We’re talking about the difference between 365 days to produce a human with dinosaur fossil vs. 18,250,000,000 days of potential permineralization of a coelacanth and cetacean together—literally 500,000,000 to 1.

Other Examples

Understand, this isn’t the only case in which we could do the math and use it to make this point. A few more examples would be living trees such as the ginkgo and the Wollemi pine (supposedly alive at least 240 and 150 million years ago, respectively) that would also have coexisted with dinosaurs for some 95+ million years. And they would also have lived with humans for the past 2 million years. Yet, they also have never been found in rock layers with humans or dinosaurs.

So, once you apply the “if they aren’t found together in the rocks, they must not have lived at the same time” argument to the entire fossil record, no informed evolutionist would hold to it. It’s strategic that the particular “why no human and dinosaur fossils” question is always asked rather than almost all other creature comparisons.

Creation Is Always the Better Explanation

In conclusion, just because certain organisms aren’t buried together, it’s not a thands down argument that they didn’t live together. However, if skeptics insist biblical history is suspect because we haven’t found dinosaur and human fossils together yet, how much less viable is the evolutionary story in comparison?

By having to add millions of years to the equation, they’ve compounded by a thousandfold their difficulty in explaining the very same issue should any other two specific creatures/organisms that supposedly coexisted not be found together in the fossil record.

And this leads us to the topic we’ll be covering next time, which assumes the biblically derived conclusion that dinosaurs were on the ark alongside Noah’s family and all of the other dinosaur kinds. So, stay tuned for Part 4 where we’ll answer the ever-popular question: “How could Noah look after dinosaurs on the ark?”