Dinosaurs have long been the “poster children of evolution”…
So where do they fit into Evolutionary Creationism?
Do you believe that dinosaurs were on Noah’s ark? Do you think dinosaurs and humans ever coexisted? What do we really know about these mysterious “terrible lizards?”
(You may also have noticed my affinity to dinosaurs [which I might know something about from my profile picture 
)
The question of where dinosaus fit in evolutionary creationism, is interesting. My first reaction is to think they were just a stepping stone in a long process that got us to now, but cannot help but wonder about the " what if" questions. What if the asteroid that led to their extinction had not hit the earth? Would they have eventually been supplanted by mammals? Would intelligent mammals have evolved in the same way? Would dinosaurs have contined to rule and evolve higher cognitive status?
Ultimately, I think we have just trust that things worked out as God had intended, though it is sort of disconcerting to think that Adam might have been an evolved T Rex instead of a mammal if that asteroid had just grazed us rather than smacked Earth a good one.
A high majority of what we think of as dinosaurs were wiped out in the fifth mass extinction. You can read more about mass extinctions here. Scientists believe about 3/4 of life forms on earth became extinct following the upheaval caused by the asteroid collision @jpm mentioned. Notice, the fossil record indicated 4 other mass extinction events further into the past. Scientific evidence supports that this 5th mass extinction occurred about 65 million years ago, so I would say there were no dinosaurs on Noah’s ark. And no, T. rex and Homo sapiens did not live together on the same planet, thank goodness!
@cwhenderson
@jpm
I thought I’d heard that scientists were moving away from the asteroid collision theory? Had you guys heard of this, or is it just me?
I think the 5th mass extinction is still pretty solidly attached to an asteroid collision. Maybe you read something regarding earlier mass extinctions? Do you have any links you could share that would suggest something different?
There’s no doubt that there was an asteroid impact, but there are some scientists who believe that it wasn’t solely responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that there may have been other factors at play.
@cwhenderson
I’d heard that some scientists hypothesized that a type of plant evolved that the dinosaurs ate, and were poisoned by, and I’d (heard more) that some types of plant went extinct, and the herbivorous dinosaurs that the carnivorous ones depended on died, thus killing the carnivorous ones.
Anyhow…what do you think of AIG putting dinosaurs on their life-sized ark replica?
@gbrooks9
The field of Paleontology is actually a very dynamic one. Such things are often subject to change. In fact, I was reading an article from Scientific American which says that, over years of research, it has been concluded that a brontosaurus of sorts did, in fact, exist. I’ll look for the link.
Here is an article from Scientific American in 2015 suggesting that Brontosaurus may be a separate genus, after all (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brontosaurus-is-back1/). Sometimes there are indeed surprises, like soft tissue in fossil bones (check out the BioLogos article here), but one thing that has remained consistent is a tremendous majority of scientific experts agree that dinosaurs became largely extinct tens of millions of years ago.
Possibly overly clever, but I had the crocodilians in the back of my mind, which are sometimes considered “living dinosaurs”.
I was thinking birds.
Ooooh! That’s a good one, too!
@Bill_II
@cwhenderson
@gbrooks9
@jpm
Anyhow…I seem to see that you see dinosaurs (as we YEC’s are wont to think of them) as going extinct, or evolving into something else before man came on the scene?
Certainly.
Question, if dinosaurs didn’t go extinct a long time ago why has no dinosaur DNA been found? It would be cool to clone them and have Jurassic Park for real.
One particular implication of this point is, of course, that dinosaur soft tissue remnants are not the smoking gun evidence for a young earth that they’re sometimes portrayed as being.
@jammycakes
@Bill_II
@jpm
@cwhenderson
@gbrooks9
This is about to get very interesting…What do you think of the dragon legends etc., and their alleged connection to living dinosaurs?
Some historians have written about depictions of monsters on Greek pottery. Some have suggested, convincingly in my view, that at least one depiction seems derived from the inexplicable appearance of a decomposing beached whale.
Most evolutionists doubt that larger mammals could have ever evolved as long as Earth’s largest meat-eaters continued to roam. The meteor that wiped out all the larger animals made the Rise of Man possible.
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