Tag: dinosaur

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Animal Sizes and Human Benefits

Animal Sizes and Human BenefitsThere have always been large animals living on planet Earth, and there are also massive numbers of small animals. The question is whether there is a reason for each of these to exist. What is the reason for animal sizes?

Large animals require not only a lot of room but also significant amounts of food to provide energy for their massive bodies. In ancient times, dinosaurs became enormous. Their capacity to eat large quantities of plant material and spread the seeds was also huge. Today, our large animals such as rhinos and elephants are nowhere near the size of many of the dinosaurs. Still, they are large, and they consume enormous amounts of plant material. A whole ecosystem is built around these large animals, but the space available to house them is becoming smaller and smaller. Most scientific studies indicate the likely extinction of the large animal forms.

Researchers at England’s University of Southampton have been studying 15,500 mammal and bird species to ask what the future holds for large animals. Their studies show that in the next 100 years, the average body mass of mammals will shrink by 25%. As the larger animals become extinct, smaller, fertile animals will replace them.

The design of this system is amazing. In the primitive Earth, there was a need to provide resources in massive quantities over a large geographic area, and the larger animals could do that. As we dig into the fossil records of Earth, we see evidence of how successful this system was. Massive coal beds speak of conditions very different from those of today. Providing these resources required enormous animals.

Environmental change has made the production of these kinds of resources unnecessary. God designed the system in such a way that size fits the needs of the ecosystem. While we are reluctant to allow large animals to become extinct, their survival is no longer critical to the continuance of the ecosystem in which they live. Human influence has also been a factor in the reduction of animal sizes.

We find an example of the importance of small animal sizes in the oceans. Coral reefs are critical to the survival of ecosystems along the shorelines of the world. The United States Geological Survey reports that in U.S. Waters, coral reefs provide more than 1.8 billion dollars in flood protection benefits every year. The reefs are vast collections of tiny organisms which break waves, drain energy from ocean storms, and protect the land along the shoreline. In 2017 tropical storms caused more than $265 billion in damage in the United States. Much of that damage was due to the destruction of coral reefs.

God has designed animal sizes to allow them to benefit humans. He has left it to us to understand how these systems work and protect and nurture them. We live in an amazing world that has been created with wisdom and purpose. Understanding how animals benefit us will lead to protecting and caring for the world in which we live.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Data from National Wildlife, October/November 2019, page 8.

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Elephant Ecology or Extinction

Elephant Ecology or ExtinctionThere are those who like to change things, even if they have not investigated all the ramifications of that change. When God’s creation is involved, there are especially drastic proposals that are sometimes a product of ignorance. There is an ongoing battle between those who want to preserve elephants as a species and those who say that elephants are an ecological disaster. Instead of elephant ecology, they believe that elephants need to travel the road to extinction.

Those who want to allow elephants to go the way of the dinosaurs say that the volume of plants they need to survive makes them too destructive to justify their existence. To support such claims, they show pictures of areas decimated by elephants and tell stories about the invasion of elephants into agricultural regions. Elephants, they say, have threatened the survival of whole communities of subsistence farmers by eating the plants humans depend on.

On the other side of the fence is the “Save the Elephant” campaign in Kenya. They maintain that there is interconnectivity in the natural world between all organisms. They argue that elephants provide a variety of connections to various African ecologies. Elephants are ecosystem engineers. Scientists tell us that elephants knock over trees, trample brush, prune branches, and disperse seeds, which increases the biodiversity of the areas in which they live. Elephant ecology helps to maintain the savannas and forests.

A recent discovery connects the largest animals in the African ecology with the smallest. Herpetologist Dr. Stephen Platt has been studying the Nay Ya Inn wetland in Myanmar (Burma). He found that frogs depend on elephants in a very surprising way. As elephants travel in wetland areas, they leave Jacuzzi-size pools in the ground that stay full of water during the dry season. Frogs depend on these pools to lay eggs and develop tadpoles to maintain their populations in a fragile environment. Platt says there other small organisms that also depend on these pools for their survival. In Platt’s words: “Such microcosms of life are probably commonplace, but almost no one has bothered to look before.”

Earth’s history has been full of examples where large animals supported an ecosystem that produced not only life, but also resources for humans. Dinosaurs were huge for a reason, and it was not to make movies. Like the elephant, dinosaurs provided for humans by being the ecosystem engineers of their day. Without them, we would not have the coal, gas, iron, and many other resources that make our modern world possible.

God has provided for us in some incredible ways, and elephant ecology has opened our minds to a whole new way of seeing that.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

Reference: Scientific American, September 2019, page 16.

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Dinosaur Blood Pressure

Dinosaur Blood Pressure in BarosaurusIt’s an animal that does not exist on Earth today and which poses some serious challenges to a chance explanations. It’s a dinosaur called the barosaurus. Skeletal remains of this animal show that its head would have towered fifty feet (more than 15 m) above the ground. We have seen drawings of these huge herbivorous dinosaurs. Many of us have seen the reconstructions based on the bones such as the one shown in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. No one denies the size of the animal. The problems come when we start looking at its anatomy. The problem of dinosaur blood pressure raises some serious questions.

The animal with the longest neck today is the giraffe. To get blood to its brain, a giraffe has a systolic blood pressure as high as 350. Systolic pressure is the pressure produced when the heart contracts. For humans, anything over 140 is considered high. To create that much pressure, the weight of the giraffe’s heart weighs is about 25 pounds (11.3 kg). A human heart weighs about 11 ounces (310 grams). For a barosaurus, the heart would have to weigh tons. Also, the blood vessels would have to be extraordinarily thick. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that such conditions could exist.

Years ago, two scientists working at the investigative Cardiology Laboratory at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York developed a proposal that barosaurus had eight hearts. They suggested a heart like ours pumped blood from the body to the lungs and back. They then suggested a complicated series of seven other hearts. Their idea was that there would be a single-chamber secondary heart above the primary one. It would have one-way valves to boost the blood into the neck. Above the second heart, the artery would divide into two branches sending blood to the brain. Three hearts along each branching artery would pump the blood to the next heart until it reached the brain. This arrangement would reduce the dinosaur blood pressure so that the systolic pressure would max out at about 180.

This is a theory which in all probability will always remain as just another imaginative proposal. It is doubtful that there will ever be any way to test it. The point is that the anatomical complexity and the number of critical parameters required would make this dinosaur blood pressure system virtually impossible to happen by chance. Each heart’s pressure would have to be critically adjusted to just enough to move the blood to the next level. If the dinosaur blood pressure were too high, it would damage the delicate valves of the next heart. What would happen when the animal ran? Each heart would have to speed up, but not at the same rate.

We suggest that proposals like this defy any possible accidental cause. If a person wants to accept chance as a faith proposition in spite of its inadequacies, they are certainly free to do so. But the more variables that must be controlled to achieve the desired effect, the less likely it is that the result can be a product of chance. They can better be explained by design.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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God’s Horticulture System

God's Horticulture SystemOne of the most interesting designs in the natural world is the way plants are seeded. For plants to grow, there must be soil, moisture, and the planting of the seeds. Many places have moisture and soil that could support plant life, but how do you get the seeds to that area? The solution is God’s horticulture system.

In our area of the world, we have seen human influence cause an area to be bare of significant trees or vines. The building of highways or the destruction of fires and floods can leave an area completely void of any kind of plant growth. Around the interstate highway system in our area, we see the growth of red cedars. These desirable trees are slow growing and can become valuable timber. The state doesn’t plant trees, and yet many red cedars are growing along our highways.

The animals planting these evergreens are birds. The cedars provide valuable habitats for the birds, and the birds plant the trees. Cedars produce blue berries that the birds eat. If you put one in your mouth, you would cringe at their bitter taste and obnoxious consistency. Birds eat them with zest and in large quantities. Birds get nutrition from the berries, and their digestive systems are specifically designed to process the seeds for growth. The birds drop the seeds along with natural fertilizer in barren places. Birds and trees benefit from this symbiosis in God’s horticulture system.

Other important seeders are squirrels. They are designed to bury seeds such as acorns, but their brain limitation causes them to forget a percentage of the seeds they bury. The design of fruits and nuts provide nutrition for animal life while the animals provide a means for the plants to grow in places far from their ancestors.

When scientists look at the diet of dinosaurs by examining their petrified excrement, they find that dinos were the seeders of their day. The plant-eating dinosaurs spread the seeds of the plants they ate along with nutrients that allowed fantastic jungles to form. The meat-eating dinosaurs kept the population of plant eaters under control so they wouldn’t eat all of the plants.

When we look at all the different kinds of seeds, the nutrients they contain, and where they can grow, we see a plan and design. Humans are still learning how to copy God’s horticulture system to feed our growing population.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Major Fossil Find Again

Major Fossil Find AgainWe recently reported on an amazing fossil find in Qingjiang, China. That discovery allows us to learn more about the Cambrian Explosion of life on Earth. Now we have another major fossil find. This one is near Bowman, North Dakota. This fossil trove validates the asteroid collision in the Gulf of Mexico and explains the extinction of the dinosaurs.

One of the assumptions of Darwinian Naturalists is uniformitarianism. They claim that everything we see can be explained by science and that no process has happened in the past that is not going on today. A process so violent that it would destroy virtually all life on Earth does not allow constant small changes over millennia to produce the biota on today’s Earth.

In 1980 Luis and Walter Alvarez produced evidence that an asteroid had hit the Earth near a Mexican town named Chicxulub. According to the Alvarez hypothesis, that impact contributed to the demise of many forms of life, including dinosaurs. Many years later Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield provided evidence that there was a large crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. Recently Robert DePalma found a fossil bed that ends any speculation about this event. NationalGeographic.com gave the following description:

“..a 7.5-mile wide asteroid smashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico. It ripped a hole in the Earth’s crust some 50 miles wide and 18 miles deep. Mega-earthquakes and colossal tsunamis rippled out from the impact site, and billions of tons of molten rock was hurled into the sky and across thousands of miles. That debris fell back to Earth as tiny globs of glass known as tektites in a pulverizing rain that lasted for 45 minutes.”

The major fossil find discovered by DePalma near Bowman, North Dakota, is full of fossils of sea creatures mixed up with trees and land-dwelling animals. The gills of the fish are clogged with tektites. There seems to be very little doubt that this deposit is confirmation of the asteroid collision.

The present is not a clear picture of the past. Processes have taken place that are not happening today. The story of life on Earth is far more complex than either Darwin or Moses could have understood. Given the number of asteroids that we know exist in space, it is incredible that our planet has been spared another impact, but maybe Someone is looking out for us.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

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Fake Artifact Claims

Fake Artifact Claims
One of the problems with putting together an accurate picture of the past is determining what is real and what isn’t. Whether we are talking about fossils or archaeological discoveries, there are always people who make fake artifact claims. Sometimes they do it as a means to get notoriety, sometimes to get money, and sometimes both. Time magazine, February 4-11, 2019, page 10, presented is a short list of famous fakes:

THE PILTDOWN MAN was introduced as a missing link in human evolution. Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered the skull in 1912. Forty years later it was exposed as a forgery. The portrait painted in 1915 by John Cooke shows a group of distinguished scientists examining the faked skull. Notice the picture of Charles Darwin on the wall.

SCOTTISH STONE CIRCLE has been a subject of archaeological interest because it was considered to be a remnant of early man. It turned out to be a structure that a local farmer built in the 1990s.

THE GOLDEN TIARA was supposed to have belonged to an ancient Scythian king. The Louvre purchased it in 1896, and it was later shown to be a fake made by an Odessa goldsmith.

THE MISSISSIPPI MUMMY was part of the old Capitol Museum since 1920. It was claimed to be from the time of Christ and perhaps related to Joseph and Mary’s time in Egypt. In 1969 a medical student X-rayed it and found it was composed of paper-mâché, a wooden frame, and nails. Fake artifact claims often take a long time to be discovered.

PINGYI MISSING LINK TO DINOSAURS was a fossil pictured on the cover of National Geographic in 1999 as proof that birds descended from dinosaurs. The fossil is actually a fake composed by a local farmer. Chinese paleontologists estimate that more than 80% of the marine reptiles displayed in China’s museums are forged.

All of this is a demonstration of a challenge to scientists to continually be aware that the old “rule of graduate work” made in jest is always with us. It says “make sure your data conforms to your conclusions.” Fake artifact claims sometimes result from the pressure put on researchers to publish or perish. When the truth becomes known it can be painfully embarrassing for the scientists involved. For us laymen, no matter what our belief system is, it is essential to be careful with our sources of information.
–John N. Clayton

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Why Did God Create T. Rex?

Why Did God Create T. Rex?
A reader sent a question that might be of interest to several others concerning the dinosaurs. The question was if God created everything, including dinosaurs, why did God create T. rex? Why would He create a creature so violent and cruel?

Denominational creationism maintains that God created everything good and T. rex and other carnivores went bad. When man sinned, bad came into existence and creatures that had been good became bad. So dinosaurs created as good and benevolent creatures suddenly became cruel carnivores. (See Acts and Facts December 2018, page 20.)

There are so many difficulties with that explanation, it would require a book to develop them all. Our book The Source attempts to do at least part of that. You can borrow it on our doesgodexist.org website or purchase it at THIS LINK. Here are a few points:

There is no Hebrew word in Genesis (or elsewhere in the Bible) that can legitimately be translated “dinosaur.” Some suggest that “behemah” and “remes” refer to dinosaurs, but the words literally refer to cattle and sheep or goats respectively. The Israelites were familiar with these animals, and they could eat them. (See Genesis 1:24-25 and 9:1-3). Genesis was written to Israel to explain how their animals came into being. It does not include every creature that ever existed – bacteria, viruses, platypus, dinosaur, etc. It seems that Genesis 1:1 describes God preparing planet Earth for humans. To do that, God created creatures that were extinct by the time He created humans and their domesticated animals.

Material found in dinosaur feces tells us what they ate. Coprolites of T. Rex do not contain plant material. Their dental structure in all cases was made to cut meat, not to grind up plants.

Being a carnivore does not mean that an animal is bad or a monster. If you don’t have carnivores, then plant-eaters eat all the plants, and soon everything dies. Why did God create T. rex? We need carnivores with the capacity to kill and digest herbivores to keep balance in nature.

Dinosaurs were not monsters any more than lions or largemouth bass are. They were part of the balance that God used as He fashioned the Earth with the resources that humans would need. At the end of the creation process “God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was VERY good” (Genesis 1:31).
–John N. Clayton © 2018

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Conflict Between Scientific Evidence and the Bible

Conflict Between Scientific Evidence and the Bible- Petrified Forest
For the past two days, we have been reviewing some of the things we saw and learned on the Canyonlands Educational Tour of last month. We explained our approach to the physical evidence of creation and all of the Scriptures that tell what happened. We say that the two sources must agree. If the same God who gave us the Bible also did the creating, they cannot disagree. If there seems to be a conflict between scientific evidence and the Bible, we either have bad science or bad theology or both. And there has been plenty of both.

There has been great conflict between the physical evidence that the Earth is very old and denominational interpretations of the Bible’s creation week. As we visit the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, the Painted Desert, and the Petrified Forest, the massive amount of evidence that the Earth is much more than 6,000 years old becomes obvious. So how do we resolve this apparent conflict between scientific evidence and the Bible? If we are not locked into those denominational belief systems, we can take the Bible literally. By that we mean, look at who wrote it, to whom they wrote it, why they wrote it, and how the people it was written to would have understood it.

Genesis was written in the style of Hebrew poetry to all of humanity–those living in the days of Moses as well as those living in the 21st century. We cannot expect the account to deal with quantum mechanics, because the people of Moses’ day would not have understood it. The animals described in Genesis are animals that people of Moses’ day would know. Don’t look for duckbilled platypuses, echidnas, penguins, or dinosaurs in the Genesis account. Don’t look for descriptions of stellar production of heavy elements or evolution of stars or even continental drift.

We could list hundreds of things that you would not expect in the biblical account because the ancient Israelites would have no way to understand them. Furthermore, there would be no reason to give such details, and the Bible would be too heavy to carry. For that reason, the Bible begins with the single sentence: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That sentence prepares the reader for a simplified description of the actual production of humans and their domesticated animals on the planet we call home. There is no conflict between scientific evidence and the Bible when taken literally. We will have more on that tomorrow.
–John N. Clayton

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Grand Canyon Formation

Grand Canyon Formation
As we told you before, this is the week of the 2018 Canyonlands Tour. We mentioned the plaque at the Grand Canyon watchtower with the verse from Psalms. Today, we would like to share with you a video segment from a previous field trip to the Grand Canyon. In the video, geologist and teacher John Clayton uses the diagram shown above as he describes the layers of the Canyon and the various processes that formed them. The Grand Canyon formation processes are complex and involve God’s work through natural forces over a vast span of time.
–Roland Earnst © 2018

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Bigfoot Legend and Human Evolution

Bigfoot Legend
Sixty years ago a headline in the Humboldt (California) Times read “Giant Footprints Puzzle Residents.” The paper reported that a road construction crew had found footprints 16 inches long and the paper gave the creature the name “Bigfoot” which has stuck to this day. Today’s media and film-makers have kept the Bigfoot legend going.

Animal Planet has run a series titled Finding Bigfoot for 11 seasons now, without actually ever finding it. There is a Bigfoot Field Researcher’s Organization that keeps a file of bigfoot reports and has at least one from every state in the United States except Hawaii. This year there are two children’s films: The Son of Bigfoot and Smallfoot.

It isn’t just in America that the Bigfoot legend exists. The Australians have a specimen called Yowie, and there is a Himalayan specimen called Yeti. Social media has made the problem worse where, for example, drone footage of a supposed bigfoot in a clearing in Idaho racked up millions of views.

In 1968 Frank Hansen exhibited “Minnesota Iceman” which was a bigfoot-like creature encased in ice. He claimed that it was found in waters off Siberia. In December of that year, Ivan Sanderson of the Smithsonian and Bernard Heuvelman of the Institute of Natural Science in Belgium examined the specimen in a trailer in Minnesota and declared it to be real. Heuvelman wrote in scientific journals that he had discovered a new species of human he named Homo pongoides. In 1969 the Smithsonian learned from a Hollywood prop house that they had created the Iceman in 1967. It was a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair. If you are interested, you can see the specimen at the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas.

The Bigfoot legend is not just a scam perpetuated by those devoted to proving that humans evolved from an ape-like creature. We personally visited Glen Rose, Texas, several times to examine “evidence” that humans and dinosaurs lived together in the same time period. In this case, Jake McFall was the primary figure in a film titled Footprints in Stone which was made on his farm and released as proof that science was wrong and that humans and dinosaurs did coexist. It later turned out that the human footprints in the film were painted into the rock and the film was pulled from circulation.

There is no such thing as a ”missing link.” No one specimen can prove or disprove human evolution. Those who try to use footprints or frozen specimens to prove or disprove human evolution do not understand the biblical definition of humans. The biblical idea of humans has to do with our spiritual makeup, not our physical bodies. Humans come in all kinds of sizes, shapes, and colors. What we look like is not what defines us. Our spiritual makeup is what sets us apart. Evidence of that unique spiritual makeup is all around us – in art, in music, in worship, and in our capacity to feel guilt and sympathy.

If you are interested in this point, we encourage you to watch video # 10 in our video series available free on doesgodexist.tv.
–John N. Clayton © 2018

Data from Smithsonian magazine, September 2018, page 13