How could dinosaurs have evolved into hundreds of species and then go extinct in the few thousand years since the flood?
Question:
So you believe that two "dinosaurs" were on Noah's ark for over a year, left the ark (where there must have been little to no vegetation), multiplied, evolved into hundreds of different kinds of "dinosaurs," lived for thousands of years, side by side with man, went extinct and became fossilized all in a few thousand years? And that our scientific research and methodology to date these fossils is completely wrong? Sorry, I just don't buy it!
Answer:
First, the Bible states, "And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, of animals after their kind, and of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive" (Genesis 6:19-20). A "kind" in the Bible is roughly equivalent to what we currently call a species. It generally refers to animals that can mate together to produce offspring.
When it comes to dinosaurs, the classification is broad and covers many different species. We are not certain if the divisions are absolutely correct since we are only going by fossilized bones. It is possible that we have designated a young and an older animal of the same kind as being two different species. But the Bible states that different kinds of animals were created. Only you are arguing that kinds develop through evolution. The rest of us accept that we started on day six with a variety of animals.
Next, the Scriptures say nothing about only full-grown adults being taken. The animals God supplied were male and female. Younger animals would take up less space and need less food—especially if they hibernated for most of the year-long trip.
Regarding fossils, the simplest explanation is that the flood itself buried animals and caused them to fossilize. We have seen examples of that when Mount St. Helens erupted, causing ashfall and flooding. Many things were fossilized in that catastrophe and found later. Therefore, it is easier to assume that most of our fossil beds resulted from the flood.
The flood would also explain why dinosaurs became extinct. Before the flood, men did not eat animal flesh (Genesis 9:3). Thus, after the flood, it is likely that men hunted what we know as dinosaurs to extinction—we've done it to a number of species. Also, the flood likely changed the global climate to the point that dinosaurs had a difficult time surviving. Together, these factors could have led to their extinction.
Regarding fossil dating, yes, the methods are suspect for numerous reasons. One reason is that the same sample sent to different labs can yield a wide variety of dates. Most fossils are dated from the soil samples surrounding them, not the fossils themselves. Some of the African samples are dated because the fossils are found within volcanic lava flows.
Dalrymple's early work on 26 historic lava flows showed that many had excess argon and were not set to zero at the volcano's eruption. The following is the data from these tests:
| Location | Date of Eruption | Laboratory Date |
|---|---|---|
| Hualalai basalt, Hawaii | AD 1800-1801 | 1.05 to 1.19 million years ago |
| Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily | 122 BC | 100,000 years ago |
| Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily | AD 1972 | 150,000 years ago |
| Mt. Lassen plagioclase, California | AD 1915 | 130,000 years ago |
| Sunset Crater basalt, Arizona | AD 1064-1065 | 210,000 to 220,000 years ago |
| Glass Mountain | 130-390 BC | 130,000 years in the future |
| Mt. Mihara | AD 1951 | 70,000 years in the future |
| Sakurajima | AD 1946 | 200,000 years in the future |
Evolutionist William Stansfield, Ph.D., California Polytechnic State, has stated:
"It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological 'clock'." [William D. Stansfield, The Science of Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p. 84.]
What you've bought is a story fed to you by people with an agenda to produce the oldest possible dates in order to support their theories.
What is interesting is all the excuses that have arisen from recent finds of dinosaur bones with intact soft tissue inside. They tout it as 64 million years old, but they can't explain why the soft tissue hasn't decayed. A consideration that perhaps the bones aren't nearly as old as they suppose never seems to enter their minds. Oh, and in all those years of supposed evolution, the amazing thing is that the tissue structure is the same as modern birds. [T. rex Bone Tissue Reveals Creature's Gender]
