Dinosaur Ancestors Alive Earlier than Originally Thought

The dinosaur, Asilisaurus kongwe, was identified from at least twelve separate partial fossils found in Tanzania in 2007. By piecing together fragments, scientists arrived at a more complete skeleton that was “nothing like what paleontologists had imagined,” National Geographic News reports.

Based on the reconstruction, Asilisaurus was a small, dog-sized silesaur (a dinosaur-like reptile) that had a long tail and walked on all fours. A beak indicates that it could have dined on plants or on flesh—making it quite distinct from the two-legged carnivores that evolutionists consider the earliest dinosaurs. “It was a weird little creature. We always thought the earliest [dinosaur] relatives were small, bipedal, carnivorous animals,” explained team member Randall Irmis from the Utah Museum of Natural History.1

Team member Christian Sidor, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, added, “It’s making the picture a little bit murkier, because we have a possible herbivore and quadruped very close to the dinosaur lineage.”

The picture is only murky, however, when one attempts to superimpose an evolutionary explanation onto the fossils. In the evolutionists’ book, dinosaurs need an ancestry that shows how dinosaur features appeared in stepwise fashion—similar to attempts to show a series of ape-men evolving progressively into mankind. But the difference between Asilisaurus and “early” dinosaurs is easy to understand within the creation worldview: they were not from the same created kinds and therefore need not have been particularly similar to one another. Furthermore, the fossils’ location within the fossil record is not proof of when they lived (e.g., ten million years earlier than was thought), but rather only an indication of where they were buried within the fossil record! We believe Asilisaurus walked the earth at the same time as dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and, yes, even at the same time as humans.