Creation for Kids
There was no age of dinosaurs
Published in Creation 41(2):32–35, 2019
Have you ever seen a book or TV show that said that the world was very different when dinosaurs lived? They probably showed that the only mammals were small creatures in a world ruled by dinosaurs. Other times we see books that depict dinosaurs in a barren land with very little vegetation and lots of volcanoes in the background. The fossil record actually tells a different story. A lot of the plants and animals that exist today are found fossilized right alongside fossils of dinosaurs.
‘Living fossils’
A ‘Living Fossil’ is an animal that lives today and is just like the fossils of the same creature we find in rocks that are supposed to be millions of years old. And there are a lot of ‘living fossils’! Salamanders, lobsters, crocodiles, and platypuses have all been found in rocks that are supposed to be dinosaur-era. This shows us that just because something is fossilized, doesn’t mean the fossilized item is millions of years old or even extinct. Have you heard of the Stone Bears of Yorkshire? People place teddy bears under a waterfall in Yorkshire, England for three to five months, depending on size, and calcium-rich water petrifies them, making stone teddy bears! It doesn’t take millions of years to do this, just the right conditions and minerals.
Sometimes we discover a ‘living fossil’ that was supposed to be long extinct. This happened with the coelacanth, a type of fish. It was supposed to have gone extinct millions of years ago, but it was found alive and well in the catch of a South African fishing boat! This also proved an evolutionary story wrong—they said it likely used its fins for walking on the seafloor. But this turned out to be wrong. The fins were actually used for swimming, just as you would expect.
Do things evolve over time or do they stay the same?
The fact that animals are found today that look just like animals that are supposed to be millions of years old is evidence that they really aren’t that old. Evolution is supposed to be about things changing to suit the changing world around them, or else they would die. But the fact that these animals are the same means that they aren’t millions of years old, and that evolution isn’t true.
Evolutionists say that an ancestor of apes and humans was a small mammal that lived during the ‘age of dinosaurs’. But that mammal is supposed to have evolved into something monkey-like, then into something human-like, then into humans, yet at the same time the horseshoe crab, the alligator, and the ginkgo tree didn’t change at all. If evolution were true, how could anything remain the same over millions of years while the whole world around it is supposedly changing?
We find every major group of animals and plants in dinosaur-layer rocks. So where is the room for evolution? The Bible tells us that God created all animals after their own kind. This means a cat is a cat, a dog is a dog and so on, and we don’t see dogs changing into cats. The fossil record actually confirms what the Bible tells us! The so-called missing links evolutionists need for their theory are just that, missing! Evolutionists need things called transitional fossils for the theory of evolution to work. Transitional fossils are put forward as ‘in-between’ stages from one animal to another that supposedly evolved from it. Many of the fossils that have been suggested to be transitional can also be explained as just part of the diversity God designed creatures to have from the beginning. For instance, Archaeopteryx was thought to be a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds, but it is really just a bird.
What about animals we don’t find with dinosaurs?
We have not found human skeletons or large mammal fossils alongside dinosaurs. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t live alongside dinosaurs, too—it just means that we haven’t dug them up yet. Fossilization of land animals is really rare with vertebrates like dinosaurs making up about one out of every 10,000 fossils. Most fossils are things that lived in the ocean.
But the big picture we see in the fossil record is that all the major types of animals appear together, and stayed the same. This is what you would expect to see, because the Bible’s account of creation is true!
Fast facts!
Repenomamus giganticusfast
Fast Facts:
- Created on Day Six
- Fossil finds: China, Liaoning Province
- Diet: These mammals ate dinosaurs! Fossils of the large mammal Repenomamus (which looked like a Tasmanian devil) were found with a dinosaur in its stomach!
Size:
- 1 m (3 ft) long
- Estimated weight up to 14 kilograms (30 pounds)
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