The Dinosaur Delusion: Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed the reality of the many dragon legends worldwide and their similarity to dinosaurs (admitted even by evolutionary sources), looked at some startling depictions that people groups left behind, and examined some rather unsatisfying attempts evolutionists have made to explain away detailed accounts.

We ended by discussing the rather copious amounts of soft, not-fossilized tissue that has now been discovered inside dinosaurs (and other “millions-of-years-old” creatures) and finished with a startling admission from evolution-believing paleontologists Dr. Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner regarding the dinosaur fossils found in Hell Creek Montana they’ve both worked on, taken from an article from Discover Magazine.

Once, when she was working with a T. rex skeleton harvested from Hell Creek, she noticed that the fossil exuded a distinctly organic odor. “It smelled just like one of the cadavers we had in the lab who had been treated with chemotherapy before he died,” she says. Given the conventional wisdom that such fossils were made up entirely of minerals, Schweitzer was anxious when mentioning this to Horner. “But he said, ‘Oh, yeah, all Hell Creek bones smell,’” she says. To most old-line paleontologists, the smell of death didn't even register.1

The Smell of Death

As mentioned in Part 1, “The cadaverous ‘smell of death’ both of these PhD paleontologists are referring to is very unique and typically occurs when organic materials decay and exude molecules such as putrescine and cadaverine (among others produced when bodies decompose).”2 The ramification of this admission is significant indeed.

You see, as disturbing as it may be to realize, all odors are the result of particulates and/or gas molecules that enter your nose. As in, if you are smelling it, it’s because you’ve inhaled some of that bad-smelling thing. The Discover Magazine article strongly suggests that it was this “cadaverous” smell that Schweitzer recognized while examining the remains of a T. rex (which were supposed to have completed permineralization) that triggered her into thinking there might be organic remains inside it.

According to the article, this natural chain of thinking (1. I smell death; 2. that smell only comes from dead organics; 3. there might be organics here to account for the smell) is likely what led to her discovery of soft, not-fossilized soft tissue inside a “70-million-year-old” dinosaur. Since that admission—and the soft-tissue-fossil-find floodgates burst wide open—reports have confirmed over 150 such finds in dinosaurs and the remains of other creatures, one of which was a type of marine worm that supposedly lived over a half billion years ago!3

The Relentless Reality of Chemical Decomposition

Again, this unique death smell can’t last indefinitely. Why? Because of the relentless reality of chemical decomposition. Just ask a forensics expert whether they believe gas molecules such as putrescine or cadaverine could last for 65 million years, even if perfectly sealed. Even sealed metal caskets that have been dug up after several decades do not always have the unique cadaverous smell we associate with death, as those gases have often broken down into simpler compounds that don’t smell that way any longer.

Any chemist will tell you that the second law of thermodynamics confirms that molecular vibration is occurring in organic tissue regardless of its surroundings even if the material were in a vacuum-sealed, frozen state. To get the gist, go check that forgotten old steak that’s been sitting in the bottom of your freezer for the last two years. It’s not looking so good, right?

So if what Schweitzer and Horner are describing is true, then there are rotting remains within the dinosaur bones they are breaking open. And rotting flesh doesn’t last for millions of years because even inside a frozen body, atoms are never truly still. They possess thermal energy, which causes them to vibrate, eventually breaking down over time.

Dinosaur DNA?

A supporting example of this concept comes from a 2012 article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society attempting to determine the maximum length of time DNA could possibly last in a fossil.4 The article concludes that even at a consistent minus five degrees Celsius, its upper limit was 6.8 million years (very generous in many scientist’s opinion), which is a far cry from the supposed 65 million years ago dinosaur era and certainly not as old as our supposed half-a-billion-year-old worm friend I mentioned earlier.

And notice that they were responding to an earlier article from Science magazine, which claimed it had discovered fragments of 80-million-year-old dinosaur DNA inside fossils.5

The results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr). However, even under the best preservation conditions at −5°C, our model predicts that no intact bonds (average length = 1 bp) will remain in the DNA “strand” after 6.8 Myr. This displays the extreme improbability of being able to amplify a 174 bp DNA fragment from an 80–85 Myr old Cretaceous bone. . . .

It is tempting to suggest that we can now predict the temporal limits of DNA survival, and finally refute the claims of authentic DNA from Cretaceous and Miocene specimens.6

Some may point out that DNA is a more fragile biomolecule than, say, collagen or proteins, so perhaps DNA longevity isn’t a good compound to compare to some of the other soft tissues that have been found in fossils. But it’s certainly not as fragile as the intact blood vessels and blood cells also discovered inside the dinosaur bones in Hell Creek that Schweitzer discovered from the Hell Creek formation. By the way, Hell Creek is an environment that hasn’t exactly held to a consistent minus five degrees for the past several centuries or for the proposed millennia before that as well. The fact is, forensic teams can still find intact DNA inside hair on corpses over 100 years old, long after other soft tissues like blood vessels have vanished.

The problem for these evolutionary musings now is that unlike the first more contentious 1994 article claiming dino DNA had been found (which the 2012 article seemed relieved to refute), evolutionists have now admitted to discovering the very same thing over 30 years later:

It’s an exciting find that adds to the growing body of evidence that these tissues, cells and nuclear material [i.e., DNA] can persist for millions—even tens of millions—of years.7

Nothing New to Explain It

However, the new article does nothing new to show exactly how DNA could last a supposed 65+ million years longer that the incredibly detailed 2012 study did, which included 14 expert researchers input with dozens of samples and methodologies applied to reach their conclusions and described the predicted upper range survival of DNA at less than 7 million years at a sustained minus five degrees Celsius.

Compare this to the new find in Montana. Although Montana averages a low of minus 10 Celsius in the winter, it also rises to a high of over 25 Celsius during the summer. Also, evolutionists have determined it experienced a semiarid climate with a long dry season and warm temperatures during the time the dinosaurs were supposedly fossilized.8 So Montana was far from the ideal conditions required, and yet, the DNA supposedly lasted tens of millions of years times longer than the predicted upper range of seven million years? Basically, the new article simply states that they found DNA, the fossil is supposedly 75 million years old, so voilà, DNA can somehow last that long.

And yes, I’m fully aware of the incredibly weak proposals evolutionists have trotted out to explain how soft tissue might have been (rather mysteriously) preserved inside such finds for millions of years, and I have previously dealt with them in an article titled “The Soft Tissue Issue.” If after reading it (and the many other relevant articles from AiG, including some by PhD scientists) you still think “iron cross-linking” or “the toast model” could somehow preserve DNA and other soft tissues for over 65 millions of years, well, I respect your faith.

Dry Bones Do Tell Tales

Now, let’s look at a few more things that should cause us to rethink the “ancient age of dinosaurs” paradigm. Evolutionists who promote this paradigm often ignore the implications of what’s in front of their own eyes and right under their noses. Listen to how this evolution-believing paleontologist, Dr. Ralph Molnar, describes what he’s holding in his own hands.

Now this specimen actually looks like it had come from an animal that looks like it died two or three hundred years ago. All dry, chalky, this sort of thing. Doesn’t actually mean it died two or three hundred years ago. In Montana, I’ve seen dinosaur bones that look like they’ve come from animals that died two or three hundred years ago, I know very well that they died much longer than that. It gives the suggestion that Megalania may have been alive fairly recently.9

Here we can clearly see the evolutionary, long-age bias that’s been inculcated into the minds of millions of people through the secular education and media centers throughout the West. This is a man—an expert in his field—denying the most logical conclusion about what he sees with his eyes and holds in his own hands because of override system in his head demands long-age conclusions.

This extinct lizard he’s discussing supposedly existed up to 2.5 million years ago, yet he’s seen dinosaur bones supposedly at least 65 million years old that exhibit the same “young-looking” characteristics. If he had never gone through the academic treadmill, which constantly pops out naturalists with a millions-of-years mindset, would it not be far more logical to conclude that when the specimen “gives the suggestion” they may have lived recently, it’s because they did?

Explaining Away the Obvious

We can see a pattern of these types of statements throughout evolutionary literature. Take for example this quotation from evolution-believing geologist Dr. Derek Ager. When describing the obvious evidence for rapid deposition within sedimentary rocks (such as trees extending through what used to be interpreted as millions of years of deposition), he said,

We cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed and that at other times there were long breaks in sedimentation, though it looks both uniform and continuous.10

Do you see it? Just like Molnar, he describes what the phenomenon (in this case, sedimentary layers with no breaks in between) clearly looks like, but then, he is forced by his training to somehow add deep time (long breaks between sedimentation events without evidence of them) to the equation even though it violates his direct observations.

Or how about this one from dinosaur fossil expert Dr. Phil Currie’s book 101 Questions About Dinosaurs, where he says, “Fossilization is a process that can take anything from a few hours to millions of years.”11

Well again, if you’ve seen fossils form in a few hours, why would you imagine it might take millions of years in some other cases when you’ve never observed it? Figuratively, what we often see in evolutionary explanations is that millions of years becomes like the annoying sprig of greens that restaurants will put on your dinner plate as garnish that no one asked for. It’s just annoying and useless and gets in the way of the important stuff.

Evidence Just Lying Around

To help pull all of this together, here’s another find that should tweak your brain—especially if much of this information is new to you—from the same evolution-based book.

A more spectacular example was found on the North Slope of Alaska, where many thousands of bones lack any significant degree of permineralization. The bones look and feel like old cow bones, and the discoverers of the site did not report it for twenty years because they assumed they were bison, not dinosaur, bones.12

Did you catch that? Dinosaur bones. Not fossilized. Supposedly over 65 million years old (how did they manage that?). Bones that “look and feel like old cow bones,” likely all dry and chalky like Molnar’s extinct giant lizard bones. The same as some of the dinosaur bones he’s seen in Montana—at least some of which are ones that stink like death when you break them open because they apparently have rotting soft tissue inside them, including blood, blood vessels, collagen, proteins, and cartilage.

These bones come from creatures that look very similar to the depictions that dozens of people groups around the world said they saw: creatures with massive tails, some that stood on two legs, some that stood on all fours, and many that also had extremely long necks. Creatures they referred to generically as dragons, which is just a term for a large reptilian beast, much like the Latin word dinosaur means “terrible lizard.”

You see, without biblical history to rely on, evolutionists have had to create an extremely elaborate narrative regarding dinosaurs that is chock-full of holes once you put all the evidence together. And this extends into their explanations as to what they believe happened to the dinosaurs as well.

Rather than seeing them as another example of the majority of animal kinds that have gone extinct since Noah’s flood 4,400 years ago, they flounder in their ability to explain the reason for their absence, as this quotation from Dr. Alan Charig demonstrates.

Now comes the important question. What caused all these extinctions at one particular point in time, approximately 65 million years ago? Dozens of reasons have been suggested, some serious and sensible, others quite crazy, and yet others merely as a joke. Every year people come up with new theories on this thorny problem. The trouble is that if we are to find just one reason to account for them all, it would have to explain the deaths, all at the same time, of animals living on land and of animals living in the sea: but, in both cases, of only some of those animals, for many of the land-dwellers and many of the sea-dwellers went on living quite happily into the following period. Alas, no such one explanation exists.13

Putting It All Together into Biblical History

Well, Alan was completely wrong, just like his evolutionary compatriots. There is a logical explanation that makes perfect sense of the scientific evidence and explains his dilemma perfectly, yet it’s the only explanation for the massive global graveyard we see—which of course includes dinosaur fossils—that I have never had an evolutionist propose. Namely, they are the result of a global flood.

When you put all of this information together alongside biblical history, the logical conclusion is obvious for anyone to see. These creatures did not die out millions of years ago. Most of the fossil remains were creatures buried rapidly in Noah’s flood. Some fossils were likely created during the ice age, which was triggered by the flood, like the not-fossilized hadrosaur bones in Alaska.

The creatures on board the ark (including what we call dinosaurs today) departed, reproduced, and traveled around the world, likely via land bridges connecting the continents at the height of the ice age, which later disappeared after the glaciers melted and water rerouted back into the rising oceans.

People interacted with these creatures periodically and recorded those interactions, resulting in the depictions that remain around the world. Just like the other 55% of creatures that exited the ark that are no longer with us today, they went extinct and faded into the realm of legend, replaced in modern storytelling as creatures that supposedly died out 65 million years ago.

Although there are many questions I didn’t deal with here in these two “Dinosaur Delusion” articles (such as how do you explain an ice age in biblical history, when did God create dinosaurs, what caused them and so many other creatures to go extinct, etc.), we have several other resources such as articles, books, and videos that can answer them.

I trust that if you’ve only ever looked at dinosaurs through an evolutionary lens, this will cause you to rethink much of what you have learned and discover that when you have the correct interpretive lenses on, everything we see in God’s world matches what we see in his Word. This is what happens when you start with the authority of God’s Word from the very first verse: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).