Modern Day Dinosaur Encounters

It is written:

“For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.” (Exodus 20:11).

The Word of God is clear that all creatures in our universe were made in the original week of Genesis 1-2. This would include, of course, the creatures that we refer to as dinosaurs.

However, the evolutionary doctrine of man’s origins affirms that dinosaurs died off some sixty million years before mankind “evolved.”

Do the facts of history and science confirm the Bible, or the evolutionary theory of man?

Consider these words from esteemed apologist Bill Cooper:

““So here I have set out as many examples of the mention of dinosaurs in the early records as I could immediately find, although there are doubtless many other instances to be noticed. Some of the examples mentioned here come from the very records that we have just been considering concerning the descent of the nations. The progression is only logical, for if the earth is as young as our forebears thought and as the creation model of origins predicts, then evidence will be found which tells us that, in the recent past, dinosaurs and man have co-existed. There is, in fact, good evidence to suggest that they still co-exist, and this is directly contrary to the evolutionary model which teaches that dinosaurs lived millions of years before man came along, and that no man therefore can ever have seen a living dinosaur. And to test that assertion, we will now examine the issue by considering the written evidence that has survived from the records of various ancient peoples that describe, sometimes in the most graphic detail, human encounters with living giant reptiles that we would call dinosaurs. And as we shall see, some of those records are not so ancient….“Moreover, ‘dinosaurs’, in the form of flying reptiles, were a feature of Welsh life until surprisingly recent times. As late as the beginning of the present century, elderly folk at Penllin in Glamorgan used to tell of a colony of winged serpents that lived in the woods around Penllin Castle…One could multiply such reports by the hundred. In England and Scotland, again until comparatively recent times, other reptilian monsters were sighted and spoken of in many places. The table at the end of this chapter lists eighty-one locations in the British Isles alone in which dinosaur activity has been reported (there are, in fact, nearly 200 such places in Britain), but perhaps the most relevant aspect of this as far as our present study is concerned is the fact that some of these sightings and subsequent encounters with living dinosaurs can be dated to the comparatively recent past….Happily, on this occasion the man made it back to the shore, but the important thing for us to notice is that these are only a few of a great many reports concerning the sightings in recent times of lake-dwelling monsters which, if only their fossils had been found, would have been called dinosaurs. But the British Isles are not the only place where one can find such reports. They occur, quite literally, all over the world….“These accounts are clearly factual and witnessed reports rather than fairy-tales, and are as close to journalistic reporting as we shall ever see in works from the Middle Ages. But for a more modern example of such journalistic reporting, let us consider the following article that appeared recently in that most sober of British journals, The Times: “Japanese fishermen caught a dead monster, weighing two tons and 30 feet in length, off the coast of New Zealand in April, it was reported today. Believed to be a survivor of a prehistoric species, the monster was caught at a depth of 1000 feet off the South Island coast, near Christchurch. Palaeontologists from the Natural Science Museum near Tokyo have concluded that the beast belonged to the pleisiosaurus family-huge, small-headed reptiles with a long neck and four fins … After a member of the crew had photographed and measured it, the trawler’s captain ordered the corpse to be thrown back into the sea for fear of contamination to his fish.” 17 It is thought provoking to consider that the Japanese have no problem with officially owning up to the present-day existence of dragons, sea-monsters or dinosaurs. Only we in the West seem to have a problem with the present-day existence of these creatures, for only nine days after the appearance of the Times article, it was somberly announced on the 30th July 1977 by the BBC that the monster only looked like a pleisiosaurus. It in fact was a shark that had decomposed in such a way as to convey the impression that it had a long neck, a small head and four large paddles. How they, or their informants at the Natural History Museum in Kensington, could tell this since the creature was no longer available for examination, we can only guess at, especially considering that the marine biologist on board the vessel, the Zuiyo-maru, had sketched the creature’s skeletal structure and it is nothing like that of a shark (see Figure 6 below). Marine biologists are highly trained scientists whose ability to detect disease and mutations in fish and marine mammals is crucial to the health of the consumer let alone the profits of the fishing vessel concerned, so their knowledge of marine life is necessarily very great. Yet the BBC would have us believe that Michihiko Yano, the government-trained and highly qualified marine biologist who examined, photographed and measured the monster, wouldn’t know a dead shark when he saw one! Shame on them.” (Bill Cooper, After the Flood: The Early Post-Flood History Of Europe Traced Back To Noah, 125-134 (Kindle Edition))

The evidences of the historical accuracy and inspiration of the Bible continue to mount in our world.

Why not today begin building your life on the solid foundation of God’s Word?

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

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