7. Fiction

Dinosaurs are fascinating animals, beloved by kids and adults alike. However, not everything we read about them is true. We often hear two main things about dinosaurs that don’t match up with God’s Word. But what are they?

Have you ever heard this before? “Millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth,” or “millions of years before humans ever walked the planet, ancient reptiles called dinosaurs ruled the earth”? Aside from a few exceptions, I don’t recall ever opening a dinosaur book where the first sentence wasn’t something similar to one of the examples above. This idea of millions of years became notably popular in the scientific community after Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

Photo taken at the Creation Museum
Dinosaurs and Humans

This book claimed that there was no need for a divine power (God), but rather that everything could be explained by natural processes over long periods of time. This gave rise to the idea that dinosaurs and other extinct animals never lived with man but went extinct long before human beings ever existed. The majority of scientists and most of the earth’s population has now bought into this idea of naturalistic evolution.

Charles Darwin
Image from Answers magazine

However, this is a theory based on man’s imperfect ideas and fallible ways of thinking. God’s Word is quite clear that the earth is only about 6,000 years old, based on the genealogies found throughout scripture that give us the history from Adam to Christ. Therefore, dinosaurs couldn’t have died out millions of years before mankind. Rather, they were created on day six of the creation week alongside all other land-based animals and alongside Adam and Eve. Not to mention the multiple discoveries in recent decades of soft tissue like blood vessels and red blood cells found in some dinosaur fossils. These tissues simply could not last for millions of years.

The other main idea people have about dinosaurs that does not align with the Bible is the theory that theropod dinosaurs evolved into birds. According to many evolutionists, dinosaurs never went away but have evolved into the fluffy little birds you see in your backyard or at the local park.

But if we start with God’s Word, we know that he created everything “according to their kinds” Genesis 1:24-25. This means dogs stay dogs, beavers stay beavers, and ceratopsians stay ceratopsians. Dinosaurs and birds are very different animals. Birds have feathers, whereas dinosaurs had scaley skin. Some will argue that there were feathered dinosaurs, but this has never been proven. Most often, the “feathers” on some dinosaurs are likely broken-down tissue fibers (called collagen) from the animal’s skin and muscle that give a slight feathery appearance. Many of the other supposedly feathered “dinosaurs” are actually birds that have been misidentified as dinosaurs. There are many other differences between dinosaurs and birds, such as the way they breathe, how their bones are designed, and even the way they walk.

To sum everything up, we can be confident that God’s Word is true, and science confirms this! Animals, including dinosaurs and birds, were uniquely created as distinct groups of animals. And this world we live in was only created about 6,000 years ago.