Did man and dinosaurs roam the Earth at the same time? Let’s start answering the question by reading what God says about the topic in Genesis 1:25-27.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
If you believe God, then there’s your answer. God created both man and beast on Day 6 of creation. But a day is as a thousand years to God—and a thousand years is as a day to Him. We know that God created the Earth in six days because he says so in Exodus 20:11: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
Also, on Day 7, Adam didn’t rest for 1,000 years.
The word “dinosaur” means “terrible lizard.” You won’t find the word dinosaur in the Bible because the word wasn’t invented until 1841 by Sir Richard Owen. Before that time, they were known as dragons. In the Bible, dinosaurs are called dragons, serpents, cockatrice, leviathan and behemoth. There are many places in scripture that mention dinosaurs.
We read about Behemoth in Job 40. He moves his tail like a cedar. He drinks a whole river. A lot of folks will say that Job is talking about a rhinoceros, hippopotamus or elephant, but none of these guys have a tail like a cedar. I believe that Job is describing a titanosaur, the heaviest land animal ever known.
Pterodactyls, though not dinosaurs themselves, lived alongside of dinosaurs and belonged to the pterosaur family. Fossils have been found with wingspans of 36 feet. Isaiah 14:29 mentions a fiery flying serpent.
Job describes Leviathan as a massive sea serpent that breaths fire in chapter 41. Psalm 74 mentions Leviathan as having multiple heads. A hydra is a “mythological” multi-headed dragon. In Hesiod’s Theogony, written around 700 BC, one of Hercules’ 12 labors was to defeat the Lernean Hydra. Polycephaly is the condition of having more than one head. Can you guess which animal kind is most susceptible to being born with multiple heads? That would be reptiles and snakes. The hydra may not be just a creature from mythology.
The apocryphal book of Daniel records that King Darius ordered Daniel to worship a great dragon. Darius even says, “You cannot deny that this is a living god…” Daniel claims to be able to kill the dragon without using a sword. He cooks fat, hair and pitch which he feeds to the dragon. The dragon bursts after the meal and Daniel points out that God is more powerful than the dragon. The Babylonians made Darius throw Daniel into the lion’s den for killing their dragon.
One of the earliest creatures to appear in the legends of ancient China is the dragon. It was worn on the robes of emperors, depicted on precious metals and referenced in literature and the performing arts dating back millennia. Despite being portrayed as a monster in most cultures, in China, it’s usually regarded as a benevolent creature. In one myth, Yu the Great (2070 BC) was helped by a dragon to manage floodwaters which were devastating his kingdom. A Chinese law book dating to 1611 BC lists the duties of a “Royal Dragon Feeder” who was responsible for throwing food into sacred ponds. In the 13th century, Marco Polo in his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, describes dragons raised by a Chinese emperor in order to pull his chariots.
Alexander the Great, came across a 100-foot-tall dragon while invading India in 330 BC. The Roman author Claudius Aelianus in his work On the Nature of Animals records the encounter. The Indians implored Alexander not to attack the serpent because it was their god. The dragon watched the Macedonian soldiers from its cave as they passed by. They said its eyes were the size of large Macedonian shields.
In 1856, workmen were digging a railway tunnel near St. Dizier, France. When one large limestone boulder was split open, the workers were astonished to see a large winged creature tumble out. It fluttered its wings, let out a croaking noise and died. Their description matches that of a pterodactyl. Indeed, a paleontology student in Gray, Tenn., identified it as such. This story was reported in the Illustrated London News on Feb. 9, 1856, on page 166.
The fact that the pterodactyl lived inside of a limestone boulder for thousands of years may seem impossible, but it’s not the only story of a creature existing in stasis. There are dozens of stories of frogs being enclosed in rocks and coming to life after the rocks are broken open. There are so many stories that the phenomenon is called “toad-in-the-hole.”
Fish can be frozen for months and “come back to life” after the ice thaws. Alligators in colder climates stick their noses out of the water before they are frozen in place for winter. Once the ice thaws, they’re back to normal. Can creatures, especially cold-blooded ones, live for long periods of time after being encased in rock?
In 1571, Spanish conquistadors discovered stones (the Ica Stones) in Peru. On over 500 of these stones are carved humans with dinosaurs, even some humans riding dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are depicted with skin texture. It wasn’t until 1997 that archaeologists found fossilized dinosaur skin in Bolivia. How did the creators of the Ica Stones know what dinosaur skin looked like?
In the 1940s, over 33,700 ceramic figurines were discovered in Mexico. They depict hundreds of different dinosaurs and extinct Ice Age animals. Some of the figures have humans riding on the dinosaurs. Scientists agree that these figurines are over 3,000 years old.
Trey Smith, in his God in a Nutshell Project YouTube page, produced a video about dinosaur rock drawings in New Mexico. He shows one petroglyph of a T. rex eating a human.
The Buru is a 15-foot-long reptile described as looking like a cross between a crocodile and a snake. They lived in the Himalayan valley known as Rilo as recently as 1947. Their existence was confirmed by British zoologist Charles Stonor who got the same very detailed description from two different villages many miles apart. His studies are recorded in The Hunt for the Buru.
Why don’t we see dinosaurs everywhere today?
First, the most dangerous ones were hunted to extinction. We have numerous stories from around the world of heroes setting out to slay dragons. Saint George slays the dragon around the ninth century in modern-day Libya. Beowulf sets out to slay the dragon around the sixth century in Scandinavia.
Second, lizards don’t grow as big as they did before the flood. Reptiles have an indeterminate growth pattern —meaning their size largely depends on environmental conditions. Conditions in the antediluvian world allowed for lizards to grow into the size of the giant dinosaur fossils we find today. We discuss the antediluvian atmosphere and environment in my book The Earth as it Was.
Scientists agree that alligators were on the Earth before dinosaurs. Why didn’t the comet that supposedly killed the dinosaurs also kill the alligators?
You have to have faith to believe in evolution because no one can see it happening or reproduce it. It’s a religion and your children are being indoctrinated on your taxpayer dollars in our public schools.
An often glossed-over question is: If God created all beasts to eat green herbs, how do we as Christians explain the shark and Tyrannosaurus rex? Creation goes through a series of corruptions. At the fall, some plants sprouted thorns— whether instantaneously or in the next generation is not clear. Beasts could have been corrupted at that point.
We find a powerful statement in Genesis 6:6-7. It grieved God at His heart that he had made beasts. In verse 12, He says that all flesh was corrupted on the Earth. Were the beasts corrupted by the Watchers and their offspring, the Nephilim? Apocryphal literature records that the Nephilim sinned against the animals.
God tells Noah to take both clean and unclean animals onto the ark. Levitical law told the Israelites which animals were clean and unclean, but that didn’t exist until 1,800 years later. Were the clean animals that Noah was to take onto the ark ones that had not been turned into chimeras by the Nephilim?
For anyone who believes that evolution was God’s tool for creation, ask yourself: What is your motivation for believing that? It can’t be because the theory is plausible. No one has ever observed Darwinian evolution (macro evolution) take place. Adaptation (micro evolution) is part of God’s creation.
Humans and animals adapt to their environments. That’s an amazing aspect of God’s design. But no one has been able to replicate or observe one animal kind changing into another animal kind. That, my friends, is not science. It’s a religion. At least I admit mine is by faith.
What then, is one’s motivation for believing in evolution? It seems to me that the only reason to believe in the religion of evolution is to not be laughed at by the world. As Christians, we are in the world, but not of the world.
Did dinosaurs and man coexist? Man has a natural desire to be free from authority. There will never be enough evidence for a militant evolutionist to admit that God is real.
These stories may help us understand what God says in His Word. Man and dinosaurs were created on the same day and therefore coexisted.
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