65-million-year-old Dinosaurs on 4,500-year-old Noah’s Ark?

In Part 1 we showed the logically derived biblical reasons for believing that dinosaurs were on board Noah’s ark. We’ll now move on to tackle the main reason this sounds too fantastic to believe for most people: the commonly taught idea that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.

Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?

Most depictions of Noah’s ark show animals they readily recognize, such as lions, elephants, monkeys, giraffes, etc. And in most people’s minds, these are considered “modern kinds” of animals, whereas we often hear the term “pre-historic” assigned to creatures like dinosaurs.

Most have a hard time believing that dinosaurs lived alongside the other animals that would have been on board Noah’s ark. So, in this article, we’ll demonstrate to you how the fossil record shows that the idea that dinosaurs and other creatures we’d assume were on Noah’s ark living at the same time isn’t hard to believe at all.

Petrified Proof of Pre-history?

For many today, the mental image of a supposed “land before time” or “age of dinosaurs” when dinosaurs ruled the earth—with no modern animals or humans around—has been so drilled into people’s heads that it’s hardly ever questioned.

And when asked why specifically they believe this is true, a typical answer would have to do with fossils. For example, because of what has been commonly taught regarding the fossil record, most people think that the remains of dinosaurian creatures always appear in the older or deeper parts of the fossil record, while more recently evolved mammalian types appear in younger rocks.

This was the scenario almost always illustrated in the dinosaur books I read when growing up, with supposed millions of years of time separating the various animal groups shown on charts within them.

And because of it, “many [like myself back then] still think that mammals and dinosaurs, for example, never coexisted, or if they did, it was only for a short period when only small shrew-like mammals were present.”1

As famous atheist Richard Dawkins put it,

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.2

This neat and tidy idea that the fossil lineage contains nothing “out of place” is strong evidence for evolution in many people’s minds. But is this really a valid argument?

Mammals in the Mix

Well, no! The facts show otherwise. For example, “Dr. Carl Werner [in his 2012 book Living Fossils] pointed out that already over 432 mammal species have been identified in ‘dinosaur rock,’ including nearly 100 complete mammal skeletons.”3

By the way, understand that when I refer to dinosaur-era rock, I am simply referring to what those who hold to the story of evolution believe: that these rock layers are at least 65 million years old or older. So if these mammals are found in similar layers, they have to concede these mammals lived alongside them as well.

He also points out that despite this, “in his extensive travels to [over] 60 museums across the world . . . only a few dozen of these species were featured in displays, with not one complete skeleton.”4

However, as the evidence continues to pile up, even popular-level science articles have begun showing the often disharmonious (according to evolution) nature of the fossil record. For example, most people have heard that dinosaurs eventually evolved into birds, leading most people to believe that modern bird types and dinosaurs never coexisted.

However, a BBC article, “Cretaceous duck ruffles feathers,” featured a picture of a duck-billed type dinosaur on a beach with two birds that looked like modern geese and had a subtitle that said,

Ducks may have been paddling about in primeval swamps when T. rex was king of the dinosaurs, scientists have announced in the journal Nature.5

Now, let’s face it, when is the last time you saw a depiction of dinosaurs stomping around as a bunch of geese or ducks flew by quacking overhead? It would seem extremely strange to most people because we’ve been conditioned to view dinosaurs as living quite separately from modern animal kinds. And this reinforces the whole “Land Before Time” paradigm in people’s minds.

But what’s now been found in the fossil record would make our age-of-dinosaurs mental portrait seem even stranger to most if it were all put together in one place for them.

For example, what if you turned on your TV to watch an evolutionary program that showed dinosaurs wandering around a pine forest along with bees buzzing, squirrels running around, and frogs, turtles, platypuses, and beavers swimming around in a nearby pond, while a badger grabbed a baby dinosaur (a Psittacosaurus) for lunch?

Does the idea that mammals ate dinosaurs and that beavers and T-rexes hung out together in pine forests fit with how you’ve seen the age of dinosaurs depicted? For most, based on how dinosaurs have been marketed, the answer would be a resounding no!

Most people I’ve talked to are surprised to hear that scientists have reported all of these mammals having been found in rock layers they perceive as being “dinosaur-era,” wondering why they’ve never heard it before.6 Here is one explanation from a modern evolutionist:

We find mammals in almost all of our [dinosaur dig] sites. These were not noticed years ago . . . We have about 20,000 pounds of bentonite clay that has mammal fossils that we are trying to give away to some researcher. It’s not that they are not important, it’s just that you only live once and I specialized in something other than mammals. I specialize in reptiles and dinosaurs.7

That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it? It makes you wonder “how many more fossil mammals in ‘dinosaur rock’ are likely being similarly ignored,”8 not noticed, or considered less important than their dinosaur counterparts.

The fact is, if these simply “weren’t noticed” years ago, then there is a great “likelihood of finding even more representatives of the same kinds as modern-day animals”9 in the fossil layers all around the world—on top of the astounding amount we already have.

As one evolutionist, Dr. John Wible (former mammal curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History), admitted after finding the remains of what he considered a supposed 53-million-year-old rabbit,

I would not be surprised if I went out to the field tomorrow and I found a Cretaceous rabbit that was 80 million years old . . .10

You see, while the average person believes in an “Age of Dinosaurs,” modern evolutionary paleontologists have admitted the following:

In a sense, “The Age of Dinosaurs” . . . is a misnomer . . . Mammals are just one such important group that lived with the dinosaurs, coexisted with the dinosaurs, and survived the dinosaurs.11

They Weren’t What You Say!

Amusingly, I once had an evolutionist write to me to complain that I was misrepresenting what had been reported. His argument was that when I referenced a beaver, for example, that it wasn’t a true “modern” beaver. He also complained that what I’d simply called a badger was actually classified as a Repenomamus robustus (which is true: that was its assigned Latin name).

And as he believed the evolutionary explanation that all of these extinct orders are said to have died out tens of millions of years ago with no modern representatives, he declared it was dishonest to say that it has been proven that dinosaurs walked alongside modern-type mammals and birds.

However, when I asked him if he’d be contacting National Geographic, ABC News, Nature journals, the BBC, Science magazine, etc., to inform them that they were wrong for using titles like “Jurassic beaver swims into view,” “Fossil suggests platypus lived in dinosaur times,” or “Cretaceous duck ruffles feathers,” he never got back to me.

You see, I’m a big believer in what’s known as “farmer logic.” It’s the type of common sense that declares if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.12

But evolutionary storytelling sometimes betrays that type of obvious conclusion. Case in point, when a supposedly 110-million-year-old creature called Gansus was found years ago, one of the reporters commenting on it in a New York Times article titled “Duck Look-Alike Reveals Birds’ Evolution” said,

It looked like a duck. It swam like a duck. It is not known if it quacked like a duck. But it definitely was not a duck.13

Now, even though the article said it “looked remarkably like a small modern-day waterfowl,” why wasn’t it considered a duck? Well, likely it was largely because it didn’t fit the evolutionary timeline.

The logic is that ducks supposedly didn’t live back then, so even though it looked and apparently swam like a duck, it couldn’t possibly be one. However, according to the Duck’s Unlimited website14, there are over 167 species of ducks, geese, and swans on earth. So why not simply accept it was just a kind of duck?

Classification Confusion

You see, as most people aren’t involved in formal scientific study, one factor in helping dinosaurs seem exclusive to other animals is their name. When they hear terms like Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops, or Brachiosaurus, the names often sound strangely removed from our common way of speaking about animals like squirrels, bears, and bats.

However, if I used the terms Anatidae, Anseriformes, or Chordata, that might spark the same reaction from the average person. But Anatidae is simply the Latin scientific designation for the biological family of water birds that includes ducks, geese, and swans. Anseriformes refers to their order and Chordata to their designated scientific phylum in our classification system for waterfowl.

Conversely, if we refer to dinosaurs in a simpler vernacular, such as sharp tooth, long neck, or spike nose, they begin to have a more common-sounding feel. And if you were then to say that according to the fossil record, ducks, long necks, beavers, sharp tooths, badgers, and spike noses all lived together at the same time, it helps normalize the fact that according to the fossil record, these creatures simply all lived together.

And that moves the mental image away from that “age of dinosaurs” scenario so commonly depicted. The takeaway is this: the more we dig, the more we find that billions of dead things were living and then got buried together simultaneously, over a very short time, not millions of years ago.

There is more and more evidence constantly being found that is completely consistent with what we know from the Bible—namely that there was a gigantic catastrophe in the form of a watery deluge (Noah’s flood) that destroyed and likely buried representatives of many of the kinds of creatures that were living together, dinosaurs among them, all at the same time.

And this leads us to the topic we’ll be covering next time, which many people believe is a real “deal breaker” for belief in a literal Genesis and Noah’s flood and the ark. So, stay tuned for Part 3, where we’ll answer the ever-popular question: If humans and dinosaurs coexisted at the time of Noah’s flood, why have no human and dinosaur fossils been found together?