Where Did the Dinosaurs Go After Leaving Noah’s Ark?

In Part 6, we began dealing with several questions regarding how creatures could have survived after the flood was over, and we will now end by answering three big questions pertaining to where dinosaurs went after Noah’s flood.

Did Dinosaurs Survive Noah’s Flood?

The fossil record bears tribute to the fact that many dinosaurs perished alongside billions of other creatures during the Genesis flood. But many people ask, “Where is the evidence that dinosaurs survived and coexisted with people after the deluge?”

One of the most obvious facts that can be offered is the sheer number of dragon legends that people groups from around the world have. These are so common and obviously problematic that evolutionists cannot easily dismiss them. In fact, none other than renowned atheistic evolutionist Carl Sagan wrote a book, The Dragons of Eden, that attempted to explain them away.

Sagan recognized the descriptions in dragon legends are remarkably similar to dinosaurs, and he admitted that the similarities were probably no accident, saying,

The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures is probably no accident....It is a worldwide phenomenon.1

And what was his explanation of why humans worldwide have claimed to have seen huge reptilian beasts in the past?

The R-complex is functioning in the dreams of humans; the dragons can be heard, hissing and rasping, and the dinosaurs thunder still.2

Notice Sagan’s quote connects dragons to dinosaurs in the same sentence, using the terms interchangeably, intimating that whatever these creatures were, they were the same thing.

However, Sagan’s (“R-complex”) explanation was scientifically absurd, concluding that humans inherited memories of seeing dinosaurs from our supposed far earlier, more primitive ancestors!

According to Sagan’s theory, these non-human ancestors of ours were so impressed with seeing dinosaurs that the memory of them was somehow imprinted into their DNA and passed on to us. Basically, those inherited memories are where dragon legends come from.

Try convincing your local biology professor that the idea of inheriting memories seen by supposed millions-of-years-old creatures is scientifically viable. You are likely to be taken about as seriously as a local fortune teller.

Dragons = Dinosaurs

To this day, evolutionists still don’t have a good answer as to why people groups all over the world claimed to have seen creatures resembling dinosaurs throughout history. Even the 1973 World Book Encyclopedia contained this entry under “dragons.”

The Dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles [dinosaurs], which inhabited the Earth long before man is supposed to have appeared on Earth.3

For someone wondering why critics tend to mock the idea that references to dragons were, in fact, what we call dinosaurs today, no one could have explained it better than Bible-skeptic Louis Jacobs, former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. In his book Quest for the African Dinosaurs, he said,

Such an association would dispel an Earth with vast antiquity. The entire history of creation, including the day of rest, could be accommodated in the seven biblical days of the Genesis myth. Evolution would be vanquished.4

Eye-Opening Artifacts

Indeed, Jacob’s comment is the perfect summation—if humans saw dinosaurs (and they did), evolution is a dead duck. And the plethora of dinosaur depictions found on tapestries, carvings, and engravings around the world prove it.

Indeed, as an example, three unique finds depicting sauropods clearly demonstrate humans witnessed live dinosaurs. How so?

Well, one of the oldest Mesopotamian cylinder seals5 (cylinder-shaped seals rolled on clay to embed images), an engraving on Richard Bell’s tomb (Bishop of Carlisle, buried in Carlisle Cathedral, UK), and the Narmer Palette (a vase from the First Dynasty of Egypt and estimated to be from 3100–2890 BC) all have creatures that the average child would readily recognize as looking similar to sauropods (all having long necks and tails). Most fascinatingly, all three show them with their long necks entwined, which is indeed strong evidence that people observed these creatures through time. Why?

Well, consider that these artifacts are separated in time by hundreds of years and geographically by hundreds of miles from where each was created by three separate and distinct people groups living at different times in history. And yet, all three groups depicted these long-necked, long-tailed creatures (unlike any living animal today) in the same pose, as if performing the same activity (like giraffes “necking”)!

What other explanation is there other than these diverse groups of people observed these creatures in action in various locations at different times in history?

How Did They Get There?

The fact that dragon legends are worldwide leads to another question, “How did the dinosaurs and all of the other creatures get from the ark to the far-flung reaches of the earth after the flood, which would be practically impossible today?” Are we really saying that kangaroos on the mountains of Ararat somehow hopped all the way to Australia or that long necks somehow strolled down to South Africa?

The truth is, there aren’t many details in the Bible on how those animals migrated. However, scientific research points to two main mechanisms for animal dispersion after the ark landed: post-flood environmental conditions and multi-generational travel.

Connecting the Dots

First of all, while it’s true that major bodies of water separate continents from one another today, even secular scientists agree that the oceans were much lower during the height of the ice age due to the massive amounts of water removed from earth’s oceans and distributed on land as rain, snow, and ice.

A simple Google image search with a mix of keywords like “extent of the ice age,” “world map,” and “ocean levels” will reveal several depictions of the continents of the world as it is now, with an additional extended outline (beyond where those continents are today) that depict how far they believe the continents would extend above water due to the lowered sea level at the time of the ice age.

So for the most part, the animals that populated the earth far away from the mountainous region of Ararat where Noah’s ark landed would have eventually been able to travel across land or land bridges.

Faster Than a Speeding Toad?

Although skeptics often mock the idea of creatures traveling such vast distances, we are talking hundreds of years and many generations of creatures—representing millions of offspring—doing the trek incrementally, not all at once during a brief sprint.

Even small animals are quite capable of covering incredible distances. For example, when cane toads (not the spriest of God’s creatures) were introduced into Australia with an initial population of 101 (1 of the original 102 died before arrival) brought for breeding before release, it only took 10 years for their population to spread over 1,500 km! These pesky toads now populate entire regions of the continent, and their population is estimated at over 200 million strong today!

Also, an 1859 introduction of European rabbits, not native to the Australian mainland, resulted in a population spread across the continent in far less than one person’s lifetime.

So, fantastic powers aren’t needed to explain animal dispersion. And animals often use much less sophisticated methods of travel, like getting stranded on debris after a storm. Floating vegetation mats made of trees and other plants ripped up during the global flood could also have served as rafts to transport animals around the world.

What About Specific Creatures like the Platypus?

Regardless of the travel opportunities afforded to the majority of creatures that disembarked from Noah’s great zoo, skeptics still try to marginalize the account by pointing to creatures like the platypus, which they’d say is far too small and fragile to have taken the trip of thousands of miles through the merciless deserts between northern Australia and Tasmania in the south.

However, even ignoring a more circuitous route on vegetation mats as mentioned, platypuses could have easily migrated through Australia when it was lush and green, as there is indisputable evidence that Australia’s inland once had thriving rainforests, which fits well with the history of a once-saturated world drying out after the flood.

Another criticism is that kangaroos couldn’t have hopped to Australia, because there are no fossils of kangaroos on the way. But that is predicated on the assumption that fossils inevitably form from animal populations, when in fact, fossilization requires sudden, rapid burial—otherwise the bones decompose before permineralization.

For example, despite the fact that millions of bison used to roam the prairies of North America, hardly any bison fossils are found there. Similarly, lion fossils are not found in Israel even though we know they once lived there.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

For most people, it should be obvious that no individual dog, dinosaur, porcupine, pterodactyl, or platypus would have had to make the entire trip to various locations around the world.

Overall, the key to understanding animal migration after the flood is simply the concept of “slowly but surely.” Each generation simply moved a little distance farther than its parents had. Given hundreds of years, connected land masses at that time, and millions of individual offspring, it is more than reasonable to understand how they arrived and why there are dragon legends all over the world.

Why Are Dinosaurs Extinct When the Other Creatures Survived?

This of course leads us to our last question, “Why did dinosaurs go extinct when all the other animals survived?” However, this is largely based on a misconception. Of the various animal kinds Noah took aboard the ark about 4,500 years ago, not all survived. In fact, most of them have gone extinct.

You see, when calculating the total number of these kinds that went aboard the ark, fossil families as well as living families are included so as to understand which kinds existed at the time of the flood. Among mammal families for example, the families alive today only represent approximately 30% of the mammal families that then existed, which means that around 70% of mammal families are now extinct.

In other words, 70% of the kinds of mammals that Noah brought aboard the ark have since perished, not extinction by virtue of burial in the flood, but rather via extinction after the flood. And, of course, in the case of dinosaurs, that appears to be 100% by this time, although we know the last of them died out fairly recently (as evidenced by the dragon legends referred to earlier).

What Caused Their Extinction?

Creatures continue to go extinct all the time, all over the planet. However, I would venture the average person asked would give the “giant asteroid theory” as an answer to what specifically caused dinosaur extinction as it’s still the most commonly depicted in popular culture.

However, if the dinosaurs, platypuses, ducks, squirrels, beavers, etc., were all living together as evidenced by their fossils (shown in Part 2 of this series), why would an asteroid impact only selectively kill the dinosaurs and not the other creatures, including their supposed evolutionary close cousins, the lizards and crocodiles?

The fact is, not one single event has ever been proposed by evolutionists that can completely explain dinosaur extinction, which is why there are several more extinction theories out there of which the average person is usually unaware.

A Biblical Explanation for Dinosaur Extinction

Obviously, the various kinds of animals that exited the ark faced serious challenges over the last 4,500 years. With their numbers greatly reduced following the flood, all animals would be subject to several factors making them vulnerable to extinction.

Some may have had a unique physiology that made them less able to adapt as rapidly to the many different environments after the flood. For example, evolutionists have suggested that dinosaurs may not have been warm-blooded or cold-blooded but something completely different from either.6 They may have had a unique type of metabolism, unlike any living animals today. People looking for a unique or specific reason for their extinction could conjecture that perhaps this contributed to them becoming extinct quicker than some of the other animals.

But ultimately, they likely perished for the very same general reasons all of the other animals that are extinct today have, such as environmental pressures, genetic load, varying climates, disease, hunting, food shortages, predation, etc.

Trusting God’s Word

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. (Exodus 20:11)

By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. (Hebrews 11:7)

As you can see, when you start from the truth of God’s Word and then put all of the evidence together, it’s actually very easy to answer the common skeptical questions raised against trusting the authority of Scripture regarding dinosaurs, Noah’s ark, and the flood.

God made dinosaurs, along with the rest of his creation, around 6,000 years ago. We find their fossilized bones alongside those of other animals because of Noah’s flood around 4,500 years ago. They continued to live after the flood but gradually died out (like so many other creatures have).

We hope you have enjoyed our Dealing with Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark series, and although we couldn’t possibly answer every question someone might have, we trust you’ve seen there are answers when you’re willing to look for them! Most importantly, we also hope you’ve come to see there’s absolutely no reason not to trust the Word of God from the very first verse.