Hey ... Parade Magazine ... here is your answer about man and dinosaurs living concurrently.

About that dinosaur display in the

Petersburg, KY, Creation Museum

A response to the Parade Magazine solicitation for comments.

The Parade Magazine of July 29, 2007, ran a short blurb on the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, which opened in May, 2007. The brief article said:
"The privately funded museum, designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director, even depicts dinosaurs among the animals on Noah's ark. Let us know what you think at Parade.com."

Since there will undoubtedly be many folks weighing in with their "well-informed" opinions about how bizarre and ridiculous may be such a notion of man and dinosaurs living at the same time on earth, here are a few things "informed" critics should know about before they throw too many rocks at Noah's (God's) big boat:

(1) The Bible in Job 40:15 - 41:34 clearly describes two creatures ("behemoth" and "leviathan") which are clearly not animals living today, despite Jewish or Christian commentaries to the contrary.

(2) And no problem to get all the animals, including the dinos, on the ark. See J. Woodmorappe, Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study (El Cajon, CA; Institute for Creation Research, 1996). Hint: you take the young dinosaurs before they get too big. Duhhhh.

(3) Dinosaur activity has been reported and recorded at many sites around the world. Just one result of that is the "dragon" is one of the 12 "zodiac" creatures of the Chinese calendar. The other eleven are all observed today, so where did the dragon idea come from? And the Chinese name for dragon ("long") has been in use throughout China for centuries. For example, the snow-peaked mountain in SW China called "Jade dragon" by the Chinese was called "Old Scarface" by the WWII Flying Tigers because of the number of planes which crashed on the mountain during cloudy weather.

(4) Following is a photo of a really scary reptilian creature over 25 feet long known as "Queen of Nagas" seized in the Mekong River by American military men, Laos Military Base, on June 27, 1973. Many river areas of SW China are virtually clear of fishermen and boats due to fear of "dragons" in the rivers. Maybe "Queen of Nagas" shows why.

If creatures like this are still around, what else has lurked in human history - or even yet lurks?

Dec 31, 2007, update. The "Queen of Nagas" photo is of a fish now claimed to be found on a beach in southern California in 1996. The title has been edited for fun and profit in Thailand. Says Trevor Ranges, who claims to be one of the men in the photo, "the photo was taken September 19, 1996, at the Naval Special Warfare Center, Coronado, California. We were on our morning physical fitness run when we came across this huge fish lying on the sand. At 23 feet in length and four feet in circumference, it was quite a shocking sight for the Navy SEAL cadets. We called it the AGE fish, because if you saw it underwater you would rocket to the surface, exploding your lungs, hence AGE (Arterial Gas Embolism)." My (DU) take on it is that the photo took on a life of its own in Thailand (with added title and not much touchup) because the ancient stories of serpentine fish in the rivers of SE Asia did in fact have observational basis. I personally interviewed two people in SW CHina who had knowledge of recent sightings of large serpentine fish in a major river next to the Mekong in China, I personally interviewed the local guy in SW China asking why no fishermen on the river and have his "dragons in the river" story on video. I also personally know individuals who were with reliable groups who had sightings of such creatures in the rivers of far northern Burma in the mid-twentieth century. So the phony title on the California fish picture still does not rule out the existence of some really strange serpentine water creatures around the world. And of course that one in the photo would surely give you the willies if you saw it just past your snorkel.

(5) The book "After the Flood: The Early post-Flood History of Europe" (by Bill Cooper, New Wine Press, West Sussex, England, 1993), mentions that dragon activity has been reported at nearly 200 sites in England (p. 133), of which 81 are listed (p. 143). And there is much much more in that book.

(6) Only one of the many examples mentioned by Cooper is the most unfortunate demise of King Morvidus: "The early Britons, from whom the modern Welsh are descended, provide us with our earliest surviving European accounts of reptilian monsters, one of whom killed and devoured king Morvidus (Morydd) in ca 336 BC. We are told in the account, translated for us by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the monster 'gulped down the body of Morvidus as a big fish swallows a little one.' Geoffrey described the animal as a Belua."

(7) The 2005 discovery of "fresh" tissue in the femur of a fossilized T. rex in Montana was quite a surprise (except to informed creationists), reported for example March 25, 2005, by Reuter News Service, "Scientists recover T. rex soft tissue: 70-million-year-old fossil yields preserved blood vessels". National Geographic News reported also in an article March 24, 2005, in which lead researcher Mary Schweitzer was quoted as saying, "Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation]." One photo of the "stretchy" "squishy" material follows:

(8) More on the T. rex "fresh tissue": A more recent article, "In Startling Advance, Study Identifies Dinosaur Protein" by John Noble Wilford in The New York Times, April 13, 2007, summarized analysis on the Montana T. rex femur material by two research teams and reported in the journal Science on the same date. The NYT article reported: "In a retrieval once thought unattainable, scientists have recovered and identified proteins in a bone of a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex that lived and died and was fossilized 68 million years ago." Further along in the article there is a most telling statement: "In a press release from Harvard, Dr. (Lewis) Cantley said, 'Basically, this is the breakthrough that says it’s possible to get sequences beyond one million years,' which had been thought of as the absolute time barrier for the preservation of organic matter in animal remains. In the fossilization process, minerals replace the constituents of bones, turning them to stone."


So ......

there you have it ... only a surface scratching of all the stuff available to suggest that man and dinosaurs coexistence was a likely reality (and may still be if you have movie cameras aimed at Loch Ness).


Hmmmm …... the folks who put together the Creation Museum in Kentucky did not have to rethink rates of fossilization processes in bones. The soft-stretchy-squishy stuff fits quite well into the museum's Biblical time scale, thank you. It seems more reasonable that it is the (unobserved) evolutionary time scale that needs rethinking instead of the (very well observed) rates of mineralization processes in organic material. When intact proteins, which had been heretofore thought to not survive beyond an "absolute" time barrier of one million years in natural environments, are found intact in material "known" to be 68 million years old, that is a stunning result. It fairly demands that all the assumptions be questioned. And the Creation Museum's Biblical time scale should be on the table for consideration rather than summarily dismissed.


Oh, and I forgot to mention the final documented proof of the concurrent existence of man and dinosaur. The coup de grace, provided by no less than the official U S of A Postal Service, follows in (1995) pictorial form:






See you at the museum in Kentucky.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.