Did Adam See Dinosaurs?

(4 Minute Read)

What is your favorite dinosaur?
Is it a Tyrannosaurus Rex or a Stegosaurus?

Do you think Adam saw, worked with, or played with your favorite dinosaur?

Did Adam open a McDino’s and serve dino-burgers? Did he enjoy them for dinner?

From television to textbooks, a barrage of evolutionist propaganda on dinosaurs bombards us daily. Some years ago noshing at my desk, I read on oatmeal packets these misleading “Dino-Facts” from the Encyclopedia Britannica intended to indoctrinate children at the breakfast table:

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 140 million years but died out over 60 million years before man appeared. Dinosaurs hunted in packs and nested in the same place every year, with a lifespan of 50-60 years. Their teeth indicate whether they ate meat, plants, or both.

However, this oatmeal-packet tale is stuffed with imaginative nonsense. The truth is that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time starting about 6,000 years ago. Evolutionary age estimates have been torpedoed by startling fossil discoveries: at fossil digs over the last 20 years, fossilized dinosaur bones have broken open to reveal soft tissue, including flexible blood vessels. Also, dinosaurs never ruled Earth; man has ruled from the beginning as God commanded (Genesis 1:26-28).

If bones are “100 million years old,” how could one possibly tell from them a dinosaur’s lifespan, whether it hunted or grazed, or what its nesting habits were? From looking at a panda’s teeth you would conclude pandas are carnivorous, but eyewitnesses report that those teeth actually are for chewing tough bamboo stalks. It is not even known whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, much less Britannica’s other speculations.

Dinosaur fossils have been discovered on every continent beginning in the 1820s. Most are in massive water-deposited bone graveyards, probably resulting from Noah’s Flood. Dinosaurs averaged about the size of a pony, though some were the size of a hamster, and some were even larger than the 50-foot Tyrannosaurus and weighed up to 80 tons. Their skeletal structure was more like a mammal than a reptile.

“Dinosaur” comes from two Greek words meaning “terrible lizard.” The word “dinosaur” is not in the English Bible, because it was not coined until 1841 by creationist scientist and head of the British museum Dr. Richard Owen, centuries after the King James Version was translated.

Yet it is certain that Adam saw dinosaurs. The land dinosaurs were created the same day he was — on Creation Day Six. Dinosaurs would fall in the category of “beasts of the earth.”
Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:24-25)

Later that day God gave Adam the privilege of naming the “beasts of the field.” So Adam named dinosaurs. While looking for a companion for Adam, God brought dinosaurs to Adam:
“God formed every beast of the field…and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. … The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18-20)

Can you imagine a stegosaurus companion for Adam? I am glad that Adam held out for Eve!

Did Adam eat dino-burgers? It is certain that Adam never enjoyed a dino-burger. God provided seed-yielding green plants and fruit for food for man and beast (Genesis 1:29-30). He did not give permission to eat meat till after Noah’s Flood (Genesis 9:3).

Dinosaurs Used To Be Called Dragons

Dragon legends exist in every people group worldwide and are surely based on real confrontations with real dinosaurs. From China to Australia, from Europe to India, from Scandinavia to Persia, over 200 cultures have stories and art with dragons. Dragons adorn many national shields and family crests.

St. George and the Dragon

Dinosaur pictographs and carvings on cave walls provide extra-Biblical evidence that man knew dinosaurs. Far-flung people groups depict identical dinosaurs in their art.

Battles between ancient mariners and great sea monsters were likely genuine encounters with ocean dinosaurs. Monstrous dinosaurs once swam the seas which supported their enormous bodies.

Deep in remote African jungles, unconfirmed sightings report dinosaurs still alive today. Accounts of monsters in isolated lakes around the world may be plesiosaurs.

Dinosaurs in the Bible

The Bible has many references to dinosaurs or dragons. Eve’s tempter in the Garden of Eden may have been a dragon or dinosaur before transformation by Yahweh’s “on your belly” curse. John calls Satan the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil. (Revelation 20:2)

Noah took specimens of every kind of land animal on the ark, and this includes dinosaurs (Genesis 6:19-20). Although hundreds of dinosaur species have been given names, many from scanty evidence, yet only about 50 dinosaur kinds would be needed for the ark. All baby dinosaurs were small, since the largest fossilized dinosaur eggs ever found are football size. Noah probably took hatchlings or young dinosaurs to save space, and to ensure that their entire reproductive life cycle would be available for replenishing the earth.

Literary scholar Dorothy Sayers authored an advent calendar The Story of Noah’s Ark in 1956. Fritz Wegner’s calendar illustration shows animals, including dragons, gathered at the Ark. Sayers wrote, “To be sure there were Dragons in the Ark, or there wouldn’t have been one for St. George to fight.” Sayers logically deduced the presence of dragons on Noah’s Ark from history’s evidence of St. George’s battle with a dragon and from the Genesis record that all air-breathing animals outside the Ark died.

Ironically, the Bible’s most extensive description of any animal (44 verses) portrays two terrifying dinosaurs, Behemoth and Leviathan. Behemoth was a monstrous beast with a tree-like tail, bones like bronze, and limbs like bars of iron. Leviathan was king of God’s creation, an enormous fire-breathing dinosaur with vicious teeth and stone-hard impenetrable scales. Leviathan probably spawned the fire-breathing-dragon legends of antiquity. (Job 40:15-41:34)

The evolutionary dogma that men never saw dinosaurs has infected many Bible commentators. Thus Study Bible notes and commentaries often identify Behemoth as an elephant or hippopotamus and Leviathan as a crocodile. This is absurd in light of the actual Biblical descriptions. The only reason for these gymnastics of poor interpretation is to avoid the obvious conclusion that Scripture writers saw dinosaurs vividly and repeatedly, and expected the reader to recognize a detailed eyewitness description.

The words “dragon” or “monster” (Hebrew tanniyn, Greek drakon) appear 48 times in the Bible and probably refer to dinosaurs (Job 7:12; Psalm 74:13; 148:7; Isaiah 27:1; 51:9; Jeremiah 51:34; Ezekiel 29:3). The flying serpent of Isaiah 30:6 may be a winged dinosaur. In Revelation, the figurative use of “dragon” for Satan (13 times) was surely based on John’s awareness of horrifying real monsters which we would call dinosaurs.

Some Bible verses mention dragons right along with other well-known animals:
You will tread upon the lion and cobra,
The young lion and the dragon (literally, tanniyn) you will trample down. (Psalm 91:13)
The Psalmist expected readers to recognize the dragon (dinosaur) creature just as they would a lion or cobra.

Contrary to evolutionary belief, dinosaurs were contemporary with man. Adam named them about 6,000 years ago. They were on the Ark with Noah around 2500 BC. They were well known to Job (circa 2000 BC). Dinosaurs were familiar to Isaiah (700 BC), Jeremiah and Ezekiel (600 BC), and the Apostle John (50 AD). Dinosaurs run, swim, and fly through the Bible — starting with Adam in Genesis all the way to John in Revelation.

Questions to Ponder

1. What fresh insights can you find if you challenge yourself to hear Scripture at face value without “politically correct” distortions?
2. Have you bought your children some exciting illustrated dinosaur books that are Biblically faithful?

Share your thoughts on these questions in the comments below. It could encourage or help another reader.

Soli Deo Gloria.

This is the 36th of a series of weekly blog articles on Adam.
Read the prequels:
1. Was Adam in the Garden of Eden?
2. Did Moses Believe in Adam?
3. Did Jesus Believe in Adam?
4. Did Paul Believe in Adam?
5. Does Belief in Adam Matter?
6. Adam and Puppies
7. Why Did Adam Sin?
8. What Should Adam Have Done?
9. What Did Adam Cause?
10. What Was Adam’s Forbidden Fruit?
11. How Long Was Adam in Eden?
12. Was Adam’s Garden of Eden Real?
13. Christmas & Adam (with videos)
14. Where Was Adam’s Garden of Eden?
15. Did Adam Wear Clothes in Eden?
16. Was Adam Backward or Brilliant? (with video)
17. Who Was Mrs. Adam?
18. Adam’s Dream Girl
19. Adam’s Prolific Princess
20. Adam’s Problematic Princess
21. How Many Children Did Adam Have?
22. Whom Did Adam’s Sons Marry?
23. Did Adam Ride a Unicorn?
24. How Long Did Adam Live?
25. Did Adam Swat Mosquitoes in Eden?
26. Did Adam’s Garden Have a Talking Snake?
27. Why Should Adam’s Sin Affect Me?
28. Did Roses Have Thorns in Adam’s Garden?
29. Adam the Image-Bearer & Harambe the Gorilla
30. Did Adam Ever Return to Eden?
31. What Was Adam’s Tree of Life?
32. Will Adam Be in Heaven?
33. Did Adam See the Big Dipper?
34. Did Adam Know Earth Is Round?
35. Did Jesus Say When Adam Was Created?

Read the sequels:
37. Did Adam Like Steak?
38. Could Adam Read & Write?
39. Did God Use Evolution to Make Adam?
40. Adam & the Olympics
41. Adam and the Gospel
42. Adam and the Genesis Road

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©William T. Pelletier, Ph.D.
“contending earnestly for the faith”
“destroying speculations against the knowledge of God”
“for the defense of the gospel”
(Jude 1:3; 2 Cor 10:5; Phil 1:16)
Wednesday July 27, 2016 A.D.

The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. (Genesis 2:16; 3:1-6 NASB)