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Creation 29(4):35, September 2007

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Dino dung overturns objection

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‘How is it possible that among the thousands upon thousands of plant fossils from the age of dinosaurs, there has not been found even a single blade of grass?’ That is the way a sceptic once challenged me about Noah’s Flood.

It was conventionally taught that grass only evolved about 55 million years ago, after the dinosaurs went extinct, and that it diversified into different types of grasses over tens of millions of years.

Image by ДиБгд, Wikipedia.org Dino

In this sceptic’s thinking, grass fossils had not been found ‘earlier’ because grass had not yet evolved. He argued that Noah’s Flood could not have produced that arrangement of fossils. If grass existed in the pre-Flood world, how could the Flood have delayed burying any trace of it until towards the end?

Of course, there are many possible answers, including different environments being buried at different times, and different sorting pressures on all the vegetable matter and dead (and dying) animals in the water.

But, even though the Bible describes the Flood we can only speculate about many of the details because we did not see it.

But as more fossils are discovered we are finding that the evolutionary stories are not as clear-cut as my friend imagined.

Recently it was announced that scientists in India discovered grass inside some fossilized dinosaur dung, found near the remains of a titanosaur sauropod dinosaur.1

This was astonishing to evolutionists because how could dinosaurs have eaten something that wasn’t supposed to have existed yet?2

Evolutionists were also surprised to find at least five types of grasses—i.e. from their perspective grass had ‘already diversified’. Some were just like grasses we find living today.

The long ages claimed by evolutionists for the fossils are imaginary. The estimated age ranges are continually being revised. The fact that certain fossils have not been found together does not mean that the animals or plants did not exist together. We simply may not have discovered the fossil yet, or the way the waters flowed during the Flood may have prevented it being buried.

My sceptic friend’s objection that Noah’s Flood couldn’t explain the fossils because no grass fossils had been found with dinosaurs has been ruined by a piece of (fossilized) dung!

Posted on homepage: 15 September 2008

References

  1. Prasad, V., Strömberg, C., Alimohammadian, H. and Sahni, A., Dinosaur coprolites and the early evolution of grasses and graziers, Science 310(5751):1177–1180, 18 November 2005. Return to text.
  2. See Catchpoole, D., Grass-eating dinos: A ‘time-travel’ problem for evolution, Creation 29(2):22–23, 2007. Return to text.