Where Did All the Dinosaurs Go?
You can go to the zoo and see an elephant, hippopotamus, kangaroo, or koala bear. But you cannot go see any dinosaurs. Why can't you? Why are there no T-rexes in huge cages for us to visit and watch? The simple answer to that question is that dinosaurs are extinct. The word "extinct" means that a certain animal or group of animals is no longer living on Earth (as far as anybody knows). We know that extinct animals once lived because we find their remains or fossils, but we no longer find any extinct animals alive. If we did, then they would not be labeled as extinct.
When we study dinosaurs, we quickly realize that they are extinct. Most of us then wonder what happened to them. Where did all the dinosaurs go? That is a very good question. In order to answer it, we must first get some things straight. Dinosaur extinction is interesting to us because dinosaurs were such amazing creatures, but extinction is not rare. Most animals that lived in the past are now extinct. In fact, it has been suggested that over 95 percent of all the animals that once lived on the Earth in the past are extinct. We no longer see dodo birds, saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, African wolves, or thousands of other creatures. It is especially true that many of the larger animals who lived in the past, like dinosaurs, are no longer around today.
Also, most people who talk about dinosaur extinction say that it happened 65 million years ago, long before humans "evolved." But that is impossible. Dinosaurs were created on day six of the Creation week, the very same day as humans—neither dinosaurs nor humans evolved over millions of years but were created by God fully formed. Furthermore, the Earth is not millions or billions of years old. Whatever happened to the dinosaurs did not happen millions of years ago. We know this because we have lots of evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together only a few thousand years ago.
Another thing that we sometimes hear about dinosaur extinction is that mammals "began to evolve" and eat the dinosaur eggs, killing the dinosaurs' offspring. The problem with ideas like this is that neither dinosaurs nor mammals "evolved" earlier or later than the other. All the land-living creatures were made on day six of Creation. That means dinosaurs and mammals would have lived together from the beginning of time. Any ideas about dinosaur extinction that include something "evolving" or millions of years simply cannot be right.
Many scientists who teach evolution believe that a huge meteorite about six miles wide hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused dinosaurs to become extinct. On the Yucatan Peninsula there is a crater known as Chicxulube that is about 112 miles in diameter. Scientists believe that this crater is evidence that their theory is right. But there are several problems with this idea. First, evolutionists' ideas about 65 million years cannot be right, as we have already shown. Second, in very recent studies, it has been discovered that the same animals and plants that were alive before the meteorite supposedly hit, were still alive after the crater formed. Scientists have discovered that, even if there was a huge impact, it did not cause the animals and plants in the area to become extinct. And third, many animals that scientists say lived before or during the time of dinosaurs and huge marine reptiles are still alive today. For instance, sharks were supposed to be alive during the age of the dinosaurs, but they are still alive. Why didn't the meteorite kill them? Also, some types of turtles and crocodiles were supposed to be alive during the dinosaur days, but they are still alive as well. The truth is, since God created all the kinds of animals on days five and six of Creation, then all the kinds of animals that are now living would have to have lived through the meteorite crash. What would cause such a crash to destroy only the dinosaurs and not lions, tigers, or komodo dragons?
The truth is, dinosaurs did not go extinct because of a huge meteorite. So why did they go extinct? The best answer is that many dinosaurs would have died in the global Flood of Noah. But they would not have gone extinct then. Since the whole world was flooded, the dinosaurs that Noah had on the ark would have been saved. He could have taken young dinosaurs so that they would not have taken up as much room on the ark. After the Flood, we have evidence that humans lived with dinosaurs for many hundreds of years. From the records, it looks like humans sometimes hunted them. In fact, we have records that talk about huge reptiles like dinosaurs living with humans until just a few thousand years ago. Dinosaurs did not all die out at one time in a huge event (although the Flood would have killed many), but instead they gradually died off over time. The biblical explanation of dinosaurs living with humans, and living through the Flood on the ark, matches perfectly with the real scientific evidence much better than theories about dinosaur evolution and extinction by a meteorite.
Reason & Revelation Bound Volume 2013
A year's worth of Reason and Revelation articles
