Make Room on the Ark — Another New Dinosaur!

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Enter Aardonyx celestae! A new dinosaur announced yesterday in South Africa is being hailed as a missing link in the sauropod chain of development, much to the chagrin of Creationists. I have to admit that I never outgrew my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, and when we purchased the life-like models for my daughter as she was growing up I secretly coveted them for myself. The rate of discovery among new genera of dinosaurs is between 10 and 20 per year, meaning that the maybe 20 different dinosaur types I knew as a kid has ballooned into well over 500 different species and 1,800 genera. Late at night I still hear the call of paleontology and I slip Jurassic Park into the DVD player and weep.

With each new dinosaur discovered Noah’s ark must evolve into a larger boat for some among the Creationist camp. After all Genesis says “two of every kind” lumbered aboard. The newbie this time is a proto-sauropod, a missing link between bi-pedal herbivores and their earth-shaking descendants who required four tree-like legs to support their immense weight. It seems that Noah must have been quite the engineer to handle all this displacement. And it is a good thing too — scientists predict that the new genera to be discovered represent only about 30 percent of the total, and the number will likely continue to climb for a century and a half yet.

Dinos

Wikipedia proto-sauropods race for the top deck

So it seems that the God-of-the-gaps grows smaller while the ark grows larger. Of course, the dinosaurs might have evolved into all these different genera over time, but then, Creationists can’t allow for that, since it would admit room for evolution. And that seems about as likely as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints backing anti-discrimination laws against homosexuals!

6 thoughts on “Make Room on the Ark — Another New Dinosaur!”

    • Steve Wiggins

      Yes, and perhaps dinosaur egg omelets contributed to the extinction! As Japheth reputedly said “I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat!”

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  2. Smoore

    You have probably already heard this, and probably don’t care (after all, it would be one less thing for you to ridicule Christians about), but creation scientists don’t actually have a problem with this. In fact, you cite the very verse in the Bible that they rely on to show that it was entirely possible to fit all the land animals and birds onto the ark.

    As you correctly state, Noah took two of every kind of animal. The English word “kind” doesn’t describe a taxonomical group such as a species or genera. The Hebrew word from which it is translated, “min,” is much broader than that.

    It has long been established that various species of animals share a common ancestor, e.g. dogs, wolves, and other canids descended from some original dog “kind.” The same can be said for all cats, all elephants (including extinct species such as the mammoth), all horses, etc. Evolutionists and creationists have no disagreements in this matter. The terminology is different–evolutionists don’t use the word “kind” to describe these larger groups–but the concept is the same.

    When God created the animals on Days 5 and 6, He made them to breed within their kinds. That is why a whale and dolphin can produce a “wholfin,” but a human and a chimpanzee can’t make a “manpanzee.” There are countless examples of hybrids within a kind, but none extending outside of this genetic barrier.

    So with this in mind, when we read in Genesis that God told Noah to take two of every kind, this means two canids, two equids, two sauropods, and so forth. Any animals living today are the result of some four thousand years of speciation and natural- and artificial selection to create the huge variety of species we see today. Conservative estimates (using the largest number of kinds estimated) don’t reach capacity on the ark, even after considering that God later added for Noah to include seven members of every clean animal.

    Remembering that the average size of land animals is roughly that of a sheep, and (as one of the previous commenters pointed out above) Noah likely took adolescent animals due to their smaller size, longer remaining lifespan, and especially linger reproduction time, it is possible that Noah only filled about one third of the ark with animals. Even if he had to take full-grown sauropods, there were only two, and most animals don’t come close to that size.

    I hope that the next time you find something that supposedly refutes creation science, you will take the time to consider what the scientists have already said on the issue, as they have dealt with variations of this accusation numerous times over the years–you are by no means that first clever person to find the great condradicton that destroys the Bible’s account.

    Abigail Adams once said, “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

    Likewise, F Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

    Keep their words in mind in the future, especially when considering ideas that you think are ridiculous.

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