Participants: Stan Hudson
Series Code: ITB
Program Code: ITB000004
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00:14 Hello I'm Stan Hudson speaker for In the Beginning.
00:16 Today we look at one of the most favorite topics that 00:19 everybody seems to have and that is on dragons and 00:22 dinosaurs and we hope you enjoy. 00:28 Thank you, thank you Dr. Johnson. 00:30 It is good to be here. 00:31 We are always wondering when you have the night off, 00:35 you wonder if your attendance will be up, so we were 00:38 sneaky with that giveaway, making sure you'd be here. 00:42 So thank you, it is not very difficult to get people 00:45 to come to a talk on dinosaurs. 00:47 Everybody loves dinosaurs, right? 00:50 Everybody loves dinosaurs, we got some young fans 00:55 here who would Amen that all day long. 00:57 So today we are going to talk about dinosaurs. 01:00 So In the Beginning, in the beginning of course we will 01:03 talk tonight about Dinosaurs and Dragons. 01:08 Well the book of Revelation, the book of endings mentions 01:12 a Dragon, a big Dragon. 01:20 The word dragon there comes from a Greek word very 01:23 similar and it is "drakon". 01:26 Drakon simply means large reptile. 01:29 So when you think about Dragon, you are going to be able 01:32 by the end of tonight think about dinosaurs as a roughly 01:36 synonymous word for Dragon. 01:39 The Greek drakon. 01:41 So you can see may be some similarities. 01:44 Now I thought about how am I going to go through the 01:47 topic of dinosaurs, and I thought of this subtitle. 01:51 A Modern History of Dinosaurs. 01:53 I like that so much, I just think that is a clever title. 01:56 So I give myself a little smiley face because I love that. 02:01 A Modern History of Dinosaurs 02:03 we are actually going to go through the history of the 02:06 discovery of dinosaur bones. 02:07 How people began to understand them in the setting of the 02:12 last few hundred years. 02:14 It was Sir Robert Plot who was the first discoverer and 02:18 publisher of dinosaur bone. 02:20 He was head of the chemistry department at Oxford 02:23 University and came across this bone that he described, 02:27 this was the first time a bone was written about and 02:30 studied by a scientist that we know was a dinosaur bone. 02:35 However he did not know quite what it was, it was found 02:38 in England and so take a guess as to how he identified 02:41 this bone? 02:42 What do you think he might have guessed it was? 02:44 Well, not a Dragon, no. 02:46 That's right, very good, a bone from an elephant brought to 02:51 Britain by the Romans. 02:53 That was not a bad guess, such a big and large bone. 02:56 It would be very similar to this bone right here from 02:59 roughly the same place, the leg of a Duckbill Dinosaur. 03:02 And that is exactly what he saw, very similar to this 03:05 chunk right here. 03:07 We will talk about this as we go along. 03:09 And I have some as you can see and fossils to show you. 03:12 It was Edward Hitchcock who in: 03:16 What he thought at the time of these footprints, 03:20 that were visible to townspeople in the area, turned out 03:26 to be a huge, a huge deposit of dinosaur footprints, and 03:33 this comes from the same basic formation in Connecticut. 03:37 You can see the three toes of this dinosaur. 03:40 He thought they were giant birds, you see the earliest 03:42 encounter with fossil evidence led people down various 03:47 guesses as to what they were. 03:48 You know, elephant bones, bird tracks, and so on. 03:53 We began to figure that the things we were looking at 03:58 were something different and part of that happened in 04:01 1825 in Great Britain. 04:05 A Dr. Gideon Mantell, a physician, began to assemble 04:09 some bones that he had found, and others, he liked to dig in a 04:13 Tinet Forest in England. 04:15 He found this tooth, a beautiful tooth. 04:19 He asked some of his friends, tell me what this tooth is from? 04:24 They said well, I'm not sure, but it looks like the tooth 04:30 of an iguana, accept it is 20 times the normal size. 04:34 20 times the normal size. 04:37 So based on that found in 1822 and written in 1825, 04:42 they began to identify dinosaurs, what would become 04:53 dinosaurs, and these are the first artists renderings. 04:55 Iguanodon's tooth an iguanodons were estimated by 05:04 the tooth size, if it is a 20x tooth that means we are 05:09 talking about a 60 foot long iguana. 05:11 That would be something they're not quite ready to imagine. 05:15 It was a difficult thing to picture in many peoples minds. 05:19 These are the first pictures of what they thought dinosaurs 05:22 might have looked like. 05:23 Now, incidentally, Iguana has gone through evolution, 05:27 excuse me, of artist renderings for a number of years it 05:32 began to look like that with more fossil evidence 05:34 and more skeletons being found. 05:36 Now today this is the most modern view of what an Iguanodon 05:39 looks like, or looked like. 05:42 The same for a Megalosaurus that has gone through a 05:46 transformation with more fossils being found, this is 05:49 now what they think it looks like. 05:51 Great Britain was finding, look at the years 1859. 05:54 What is significant about that? 05:56 What happened, Darwin's great book Origin of Species was 06:00 being published in 1859. 06:03 So a lot of things are coming together now for the 06:06 scientific world on the subject of origins and it points 06:10 to a very interesting past. 06:13 It was Sir Richard Owen, if it weren't for Darwin, 06:16 probably would have been the most famous British naturalist 06:19 of the 19th century. 06:21 He pretty much set up the British Museum the way it is 06:25 with all the wonderful natural displays. 06:34 Guess what those words put together mean? 06:37 Deinos and Saurus equals awesome lizard. 06:40 I know you have heard terrible lizard, but terrible has 06:44 lost its meaning, awesome is what we are talking about. 06:47 It's fabulous lizard and of course that makes Dinosauria! 06:52 Incidentally Richard Owen was not a evolutionist. 06:56 I just thought I would throw that out, to coin the term. 06:59 At least he had some problems with it, 07:02 he was a Darwin antagonist. 07:04 Dr. Joseph Leidy, now let's move the story to the United 07:09 States because the British were finding fossils. 07:12 But let's face it, if you really want to find some good 07:15 fossils, some good dinosaurs, come to United States. 07:18 We got the good ones here. 07:19 Isn't that right? Well a lot of them anyway. 07:21 Dr. Joseph Leidy was invited to take a look at some 07:25 bones that were being found in mud pit in Haddonfield, 07:31 New Jersey in the 1850s. 07:34 He took a look at the bones, Dr. Leidy was a curator of 07:40 the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. 07:45 He was taking a look at these bones that were being found 07:49 in Haddonfield and recognize them as a new animal because 07:52 it was huge, just huge. 07:55 They unearthed the fossil itself and the skeleton and it 07:59 was the first skeleton of a dinosaur ever found anywhere 08:04 in the world, this was the first skeleton. 08:07 He was approximately 2/3 complete. 08:09 It didn't have a skull unfortunately, so they had to 08:13 make one out of papier-mâché. 08:15 Nevertheless they mounted it and put it on public display at 08:18 that Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. 08:21 They could not deal with the crowds who were paying 08:26 to come in, there were so many people that 08:28 wanted to see this. 08:29 For 15 years this was the only dinosaur on display, 08:35 skeleton on display, in the entire world. 08:37 So you can imagine people came from around the world 08:41 just to see this thing. 08:43 It was propped up as a two legged Bipedal dinosaur 08:46 and it was designed by a rather famous British man 08:50 who is good at putting displays together. 08:53 He was quite a sensational thing as you can imagine. 08:56 You really put dinosaurs on the map. 09:01 This is an early depiction of what the duckbill dinosaur, 09:04 this is a second-generation picture. 09:07 The first ones were a little different. 09:09 You saw that skull were shorter because it was an iguana 09:12 shaped skull, because they thought they were looking at 09:14 an iguana type critter. 09:16 They eventually found some skull fragments and made this 09:20 image and it looks quite a bit different today. 09:22 Now about the same time, we are rushing through history 09:27 now, in the 1850s Archaeopteryx was found in Germany. 09:33 The Archaeopteryx was a famous fossil, of what appeared 09:38 to be, an ancestor of birds. 09:41 It is somewhat different because it has claws on the wings. 09:44 It had teeth, a beak and a fairly substantial tail. 09:49 Some of those things are not totally unique to 09:52 Archaeopteryx but it was different enough looking thing 09:55 that they assumed this was once again evidence and Charles 09:59 Darwin is right, birds have evolved and changed over 10:02 the years and so on. 10:04 This is a really beautiful specimen here from the stone 10:08 limestone of Germany. 10:10 The famous place where they find fabulous ancient fossils. 10:15 The public was interested in such things, we will 10:19 talk about bird dinosaur evolution in a little bit. 10:21 Early public display of dinosaur skeletons started to pack 10:25 people in and it began to be a tremendous market for 10:29 dinosaurs to be displayed in museums. 10:33 Museums were catching on and this is America, let's face 10:36 it, we want our institutions to make money and looking 10:40 for ways we can do that. 10:41 So they were suddenly sending out treasure hunters, 10:44 dinosaur hunters all over Montana, Wyoming, Utah, 10:49 Colorado to try and find some of these bones. 10:52 South Dakota and they did, they started to find fabulous 10:56 dinosaur skeletons. 10:59 They began to make world tours in the whole world was 11:02 beginning to find out about this display in Paris on the 11:05 right, and I believe this is the original Hadrosaurs, 11:09 I think this was in the 1870s and was going to Europe on 11:12 display for people to see. 11:15 They made a tour, a world tour. 11:18 They were beginning to imagine how these dinosaurs were 11:21 in size in comparison to mankind. 11:23 That is sensational stuff, just blowing people away. 11:27 You are used to dinosaurs now because you have read and 11:30 it's all well-documented, but imagine never, 11:33 ever imagining anything like these existed, 11:35 and then suddenly the stories are starting to come out 11:40 and the evidence is starting to build that at one time 11:42 there was tremendous sized animals walking on 11:46 the face of the earth. 11:47 Incidentally what the creationists do when they first 11:50 heard about these things? 11:51 They at first did not know what to do with them. 11:55 In fact, maybe even at the second didn't know what to 11:57 do them and they started to say things like these are 12:00 bones of the devil created to make us doubt 12:03 the history of the Bible. 12:04 Things like this, they didn't immediately have good answers. 12:07 Hopefully will give you a little better answer 12:10 tonight than that. 12:13 The evidence was scant but coming in truckloads and 12:18 was difficult to deny that dinosaurs once lived. 12:22 Have you heard of a brontosaurus? 12:24 You heard about the brontosaurus in school. 12:27 You know some of the history of the brontosaurus, 12:29 it is an interesting one. 12:31 An American natural history Museum the Smithsonian was 12:34 the second institution to have a dinosaur on display. 12:39 It also had its own Hadrosaurs like Philadelphia had. 12:42 But when news came of the bigger ones, the Jurassic 12:47 period dinosaurs, the big four-legged, long necked big 12:51 gigantic dinosaurs, they wanted one. 12:54 They finally found a suitable one to put on display. 12:57 The problem is, they call it the Brontosaurus, 13:00 like thunder lizard. 13:03 Brontosaurus was quite a display, however the problem 13:08 was with the head. 13:09 Have you heard about this story? 13:11 The head of the Brontosaurus was actually from another 13:13 animal and they didn't realize that at first. 13:17 So they put it on this, they didn't have an original head 13:20 to put with it, or somehow misplaced it and ended up 13:24 putting on a Camarasaurus head on Apatosaurus and somehow 13:31 coined the word Brontosaurus. 13:33 This day the Brontosaurus is still thought by many people 13:35 to be a separate kind of dinosaur. 13:37 It is actually a melting of two. 13:40 It is a glitch in the history of dinosaur displays. 13:48 Here is a Camarasaurus, I'm going to show you something 13:52 from a Camarasaurus. 13:53 that is a big guy wouldn't you say? 13:55 He's one of the big ones from Utah. 13:58 Most of them are found in Utah on the Henry Mountains. 14:01 I want to show you what I have here on the table. 14:04 You have been wondering what it was. 14:06 But suspected that it might be from a dinosaur. 14:09 That was a good guess. 14:11 This is actually part of the fibula of a Camarasaurus. 14:15 When I say a Camarasaurus I want you to understand that 14:19 this is from, they told me this when I purchased it, 14:22 this was from a sub-adult. 14:25 Now a sub-adult translate out to teenager. 14:28 I said I've got sub-adults too. 14:31 That is from a sub-adult and if it were an adult you 14:35 would add another 50% on, it would be about like this. 14:38 That gives you a little bit idea how big of an animal. 14:41 When they started finding bones like this you can imagine 14:43 how exciting that was, how interesting that was to the 14:46 world to look at things like this. 14:48 Camarasaurus fibula. 14:51 Camarasaurus, there he is from a sub-adult being held 14:57 by a post-adult I think. 14:59 Then they found something. 15:01 In 1905 it came to the attention of Harry Osborn, he was 15:09 a second-generation American paleontologist. 15:12 Incidentally, paleontology really took off in the United 15:15 States almost entirely because we had the good dinosaurs here. 15:19 It wasn't because they had the good brains here, we just 15:22 had better material to look at, dig up and study. 15:24 So paleontology is probably produce the most experts on 15:29 the subject that has been produced in the United States. 15:35 Something they had not seen before. 15:37 Do you know what that was? 15:38 Tyrannosaurus Rex, which of course means 15:42 king tyrant lizard. 15:44 Now this is not a genuine tooth because I can't afford 15:50 a genuine tooth because everyone wants a T Rex tooth. 15:54 I'm terribly sorry you are not getting a T Rex tooth 15:57 tonight, if I can't have then you can have one. 16:00 But this is a museum quality copy of a T Rex tooth. 16:04 About that much stuck down below the gum. 16:06 You can see that is a very serious looking guy and it 16:11 is definitely T Rex because of the way it is fat, 16:14 T Rex teeth are fat. 16:16 Rafter teeth are fairly flat. 16:18 T Rex teeth are fat with serrated edges on two sides, 16:21 opposite sides like that. 16:22 If anybody says I have got a T Rex tooth that doesn't 16:25 have those two features I just told you about, hold 16:28 onto your wallet anyway let's keep going. 16:33 Let's take a look at T Rex. 16:39 This was a pretty good size one. 16:41 47 feet long and 181/2 feet high, so that is 16:44 100 year old picture. 16:46 It is one thing to see a big dinosaur, it's another 16:52 one, to see a big one with big teeth. 16:55 Do you understand the difference? 16:57 Vegetarian versus carnivorous. 17:00 There is an impact in the image. 17:03 One thing we know is that T Rex did eat Triceratops. 17:08 The reason we know that is because we found some ground-up 17:11 Triceratops bits of bone in the stomach cavity. 17:18 The rough area were stomach cavity would be in a 17:20 skeleton of a T Rex. 17:22 It is still a big debate as to whether it is a scavenger 17:26 or a predator. 17:28 Scientists now believe this and wait a few months and 17:31 go back to the predator, now they go back to scavenger. 17:35 I have seen about five or six switches in the last few 17:38 years, so it is fair to say it is inconclusive as to 17:42 whether it could run very fast with those big legs. 17:45 What I used to tell people is we know how fast the 17:48 Hadrosaurs ran, we know they ran 25 miles an hour. 17:52 How do we know that? 17:53 Because T Rex could run 24. 18:01 that probably is this good a way to tell it as any. 18:06 You know there has only been about 30 T Rex skeletons 18:08 have been found around the world. 18:10 The ones that are unquestionably a T Rex are 18:13 the ones in North America. 18:15 There is an animal that has been found over here, 18:17 there are a few skeletons over here that are similar 18:19 they argue that they are the same animal, 18:22 it is pretty similar. 18:24 But only 30 T Rex skeletons have been found. 18:27 How much of a bone mass, or how many bones in a skeleton 18:31 qualifies to make it a skeleton versus some bones together? 18:37 Do you know how much? 10%, if you have 10% of the animal 18:41 left that qualifies in scientific jargon as a skeleton. 18:45 You have found a skeleton. 18:47 Now I say that because many people think when they find 18:49 a skeleton they have pretty much all of it. 18:51 Far and away most dinosaurs skeletons that exist are 18:55 just small pieces of it. 18:58 Which explains a little bit about what happened to them 19:00 when they got covered up. 19:02 We will talk a little more about that later. 19:04 There is only been one absolutely for sure, 19:06 no questions asked, baby T Rex found. 19:09 There is another species of Tyrannosaurus called Nano- 19:13 Tyrannosaurus and there is a big argument as to whether 19:16 that is a young T Rex or a different smaller, dwarf 19:22 variety of T Rex, something like that. 19:25 There is one, and now there is potentially two T Rex 19:30 footprints that have been found. 19:31 There is the negative and the positive and they are both 19:34 33 inches long and 28 inches wide and 9 inches deep. 19:38 It is in an unrevealed, to still remain secret place in New 19:45 Mexico where they found this. 19:47 To make that kind of a footprint you had to have a 19:52 pretty big foot and a lot of weight. 19:55 Now this T Rex is on display in South Dakota in Hill city 19:58 and it's name is Stan. 20:00 No really it is, now you can see the resemblance. 20:07 up until a few years ago, Stan was the king of T Rex skeletons. 20:13 It had 40+ percent of the original bones together. 20:18 That was considered quite a deal. 20:20 So Stan is on display in South Dakota in Hill city, 20:23 in a little museum there. 20:25 That was until they found Sue, you've heard of Sue? 20:29 Sue is on display at Chicago's Field Museum. 20:41 That is the Queen of dinosaur skeletons. 20:46 She was found over 90% complete. 20:49 So more than twice as many bones that has been found 20:52 in any other T Rex. 20:53 They had a big fight over who owned it and 20:55 millions of dollars and I think the Chicago Field museum 20:59 paid, I believe 15 million for Sue. 21:01 I'm sure it is done very well. 21:04 When we talk about T Rex's people have heard about the 21:07 sensational discovery of just three years ago when they 21:10 found a bone, unlike this bone here of T Rex however. 21:15 A femur, a leg bone. 21:17 They broke it to move and that is not unusual because, 21:20 because if you come up and take a look at this it's 21:22 cracked a lot. 21:24 It is not unusual because the dinosaur bones were often 21:26 covered in mud or mud sludge and when those things dried 21:30 out and compacted it would crack a lot of the bones. 21:32 So a lot of times the dinosaur bones are found cracked. 21:35 So they don't think anything of breaking them apart to 21:39 just transport them and then glue them back together again. 21:41 So they broke open this T Rex femur to move it and 21:44 suddenly somebody was noticing there was soft tissue inside. 21:49 I was the first time it had been documented, 21:53 although there has been some other. 21:56 Don't be surprised if you go to museum now with 22:00 dinosaurs in the back and they are cracking them open. 22:02 I'm just kidding, but I think there is some effort to 22:05 look for this, this would be sensational. 22:07 Soft tissue, still flexible, what appears to be blood 22:11 cells depends upon your interpretation, but it appears 22:14 to be the remnant of blood cells still left. 22:18 This is sensational stuff, it is sensational for a lot 22:22 of reasons, it's sensational if you are an evolutionist 22:24 because now you have a chance to understand and study 22:26 dinosaurs even more closely. 22:28 It's sensational for a creationist who might not 22:31 believe in the 65 million years required for T Rex bone to be 22:35 found like this good of shape. 22:38 There is no known explanation for preservation of that 22:43 quality, you can pretty well sealed it in lead and I 22:47 don't think it would be quite this good. 22:49 This throws into question the subject of dating. 22:52 We will talk about dating tomorrow, a big problem for 22:56 creationist is dating, and we will talk 22:57 about that tomorrow. 22:58 I will be very honest with you, very frank with you about 23:01 the challenges we have on this into the aisle. 23:04 I had the privilege of going on a dinosaur dig. 23:08 I hope that everybody here gets a chance, some day, 23:12 to go on a dinosaur dig. 23:14 It is a lot of fun. 23:15 I joined a university group one summer about two years ago. 23:19 In northeastern Wyoming, the least populated county of 23:27 the least populated state of the 48 states. 23:30 But there are a bazillion rabbits there. 23:33 We went on this very desolate, it's on the edge of the 23:37 Badlands in South Dakota, near the South Dakota border. 23:40 There we had a chance to be involved with a number of 23:45 people that were Christians. 23:47 There was prayer in the morning and we had our 23:49 worship and so forth. 23:50 Off we went to the sites and here I am cleaning off, 23:55 almost all the bones that were found were Hadrosaurs 23:58 called the Edmontosaurus which is like this, 24:01 something like this guy. 24:03 A little bit bigger however, it would be 30 feet from 24:05 head to toe, head to tail. 24:08 A lot of the bones from that guy were found there. 24:12 This is a rib bone of a Hadrosaurs that I'm cleaning off 24:14 There was about an 18 inch layer. 24:18 This is called the Lance Creek formation which is absolute 24:21 tip top of the Cretaceous. 24:23 This is the very last dinosaurs covered up. 24:26 Just above the area that I am digging there are no more 24:30 dinosaur bones found anywhere, for that matter on that 24:33 same level all over the world. 24:35 We will talk about that when we talk about the geological 24:37 column another night to come. 24:39 So in this 18 inches or so layer you almost can't put a shovel in 24:47 without hitting something. 24:49 It is that thick, but they are all individual bones. 24:52 They are disarticulated, not parts of skeletons. 24:55 They are all in the mud stone. 24:59 So they were transported there from some other area. 25:03 Here's the thing that is really interesting about this 25:06 site, this Lance Creek site. 25:08 I asked Dr. Chadwick, who was in charge of this dig, 25:12 I said I am seeing this layer over on that side of the 25:16 canyon, and it's a little over there and over there. 25:20 I said have you surveyed those areas too? 25:22 Yep we sure have, they have the same density of bones. 25:26 Have you estimated what we are talking about here? 25:29 Yes, in just this area somewhere between 20 and 30,000 25:34 Hadrosaurs are represented. 25:36 Between 20 and 30,000 Hadrosaurs because the density 25:40 is consistent wherever they have surveyed. 25:42 I want to show you what they do at this site. 25:46 Here are some of the bones for the days dig we dug up. 25:50 They are large bones because it was a large animal. 25:52 What they do is take a GPS, global positioning system, 25:58 put it on the corner of the bones they find before they 26:01 are removed from the area. 26:02 They take a photograph of the bone uncovered and drop 26:08 it into a computer. 26:11 This gives you an idea if you remove all the dirt, 26:13 this is to scale what this area looks like in terms of 26:17 dinosaur bones. 26:18 Look at how many there are there, they are all just 26:19 disarticulated, they all washed in from some other area. 26:22 They somehow got transported in, quite something. 26:26 This is an Edmontosaurus here, it gives you some idea 26:28 of the size, especially if it is standing up on its rear 26:33 20 to 30,000 of these in this area. 26:37 When I was digging there I had a chance to dig up a 26:43 a vertebrae, and they are really mean people I was working 26:48 with because they wouldn't let me take it home. 26:50 So I was able eventually to locate one somewhere else. 26:55 This is a vertebrae of a Edmontosaurus. 27:00 You can see the channel here on the backbone of the 27:06 vertebrate, if you can imagine another one of 27:08 these right here in the spike of the tail would go right there. 27:12 This is a Caddo-vertebrae, in other words on the tail. 27:15 right there where the little bump is on that guy. 27:19 It is a little bit deformed but not too bad. 27:24 I finally got one like I dug up. 27:27 Footprints are also fossil evidence. 27:31 Any trace of living things is considered a fossil. 27:36 It doesn't have to be a bone, just an animal had 27:39 been there evidence. 27:41 So fossils include footprints, and you can see a 27:44 three toed one there. 27:45 This is the place in the Paluxy River Valley, near Keen Texas. 27:50 Again if you are ever around Fort Worth, and I know 27:53 you are probably planning a trip as we speak. 27:55 If you go to Fort Worth, Southwest of Fort Worth there 28:00 is a state park there like no other. 28:02 Because you can go down into this Creek bed and frolic 28:08 in the water with the kids and everyone else. 28:10 You are standing among dinosaur footprints, as clear 28:13 as anything, all around you. 28:15 There are not many state parks that 28:16 I can think of like that. 28:18 So three toed dinosaurs are all over the place. 28:22 It is this place where some creationists have made claims 28:26 that there are human footprints alongside of dinosaurs 28:29 footprints, you may have heard those claims before. 28:31 This is a sensational claim. 28:33 You will see before the evening is over that I actually 28:37 believe there is good evidence that dinosaurs and humans 28:40 coexisting, but I did not consider this that good. 28:43 You have to study the footprints very carefully. 28:48 What this is thought of is that this is human footprints, 28:51 whereas this is clearly three toed dinosaurs going off 28:54 there, so looks like the same strata and of course that 28:57 would be good evidence for humans and dinosaurs together. 29:00 The problem is, as you study these narrow prints, they 29:03 appear to be deformed perhaps by water or something. 29:06 They just made a sensational find in Utah of hundreds and 29:12 hundreds of dinosaur footprints in a not very hiked to 29:19 area in a park there. 29:21 Now they are talking about documenting and I wanted to 29:24 show you a good place where you see three toed dinosaur, 29:28 that's clearly three toed. 29:29 Well what is this and this, so you can see when water was 29:33 washing in there all these footprints were being made. 29:36 You will see later that there is talk and I believe these 29:41 were all made in water conditions. 29:43 You will see that water had a tendency to wash them out 29:47 misshapen them a little bit. 29:49 That is probably what has been done here. 29:53 One of the things that is very interesting about 29:54 Edmontosaurus is they have been finding them recently 29:57 a few of them with, with all the things I show my science 30:01 friends this is one thing they will gasp at. 30:04 So this is pretty cool, you don't find these very often. 30:08 This is actually a skin impression from an Edmontosaurus 30:11 This is a skin impression. 30:13 Now what happens for dinosaur to leave a skin impression? 30:16 It means that when they died, the material or mud, 30:19 the material that covered around it and it's so made a 30:24 good impression that when the dinosaur skin deteriorated 30:29 it left this mold and you can actually see the shape of 30:32 the scales of the dinosaur in here. 30:35 If you ever had a question as to whether they were 30:37 reptiles, that solves it a little bit for you. 30:42 It has clearly reptile skin. 30:43 They don't find these very often and you may have heard 30:47 they recently found mummified, they call it mummified. 30:50 I am not sure if I would use the term. 30:52 I do Bible studies and think of Egyptians and those kinds 30:57 of things are mummies to me and the skin will still be there. 31:00 What they call mummified is if the skin is preserved so 31:04 very well it is like that or many times better. 31:08 The cast is so good and the original skin is actually 31:13 gone I think, as I understand it. 31:15 They say it is iron hard. 31:17 They get to see organs and everything of the dinosaur. 31:20 It is really sensational some of the finds. 31:23 They found about six or seven, what they would term as 31:27 mummified dinosaurs, so far, they are that well preserved. 31:32 When we talk about eggs, everybody is curious about 31:36 dinosaur eggs. 31:38 This is a genuine dinosaur egg from China legally exported. 31:43 People always ask about dinosaur eggs. 31:48 Is there one in there? 31:51 What is very interesting about dinosaur eggs is that 99 31:55 point and then some percent of dinosaur eggs do not have 32:00 embryo preserved in there. 32:03 There is just a handful that have been found. 32:05 When they find one with bones in it they are quite 32:08 excited, but for whatever reason they weren't preserved, 32:11 or weren't fertilized or something. 32:13 Dinosaur eggs are quite interesting. 32:16 You know when you look at dinosaur egg, again I am 32:18 sharing with you what I could think of as a kid. 32:21 In my minds eye I thought about dinosaur egg is probably 32:24 be in roughly the size of a Volkswagen beetle. 32:27 That was my image of what they must surely be. 32:30 But the fact of the matter is there aren't too many dinosaur 32:34 bones are much bigger than this. 32:36 The predator ones are a little longer and narrow. 32:38 They are not always sure which dinosaur to tie these to 32:45 because it is rarely a dinosaur laying next to with the 32:48 egg, but they are pretty sure this is a Hadrosaurs. 32:53 Not unlike the pictures there from China. 32:57 They found quite a few of these in China. 32:58 But they are all small, pretty small. 33:01 Not much bigger than that which means all dinosaurs 33:03 started off fairly small. 33:08 If you ever get a chance to go up to Drumheller, which 33:10 is not that terribly far from here, you must go to this 33:13 museum, it is a world-class dinosaur museum. 33:16 One of the things I really like about it is when you went 33:20 in the Tyrone museum on the left-hand side as your just 33:23 going in, there was a plaque with an inscription that said, 33:28 "speak to the earth and you it will tell you. " 33:31 It was a quotation from Job and I thought that was cool. 33:36 They are open-minded, of course millions of years all over 33:39 the place, but beautiful dinosaurs skeletons. 33:41 Fabulous display, a real world-class museum. 33:44 I can't think of any better any better than this. 33:47 Unfortunately they took that down, I don't know if they 33:50 had pressure later because the last time I went they didn't 33:53 have the Job inscription up anymore. 33:58 Does the Bible tell us anything about dinosaurs? 34:00 First of all you will not find the word dinosaur in the 34:03 Bible, not if it was coined in 1842 it will not be in the 34:08 Bible, but it are ready hinted that a dragon isn't a 34:11 terribly different word than dinosaur. 34:13 Let's take a look to see if the Bible tells us anything 34:15 about dinosaurs. 34:17 If you look at the Genesis creation account is that God 34:20 created, on the fifth day, create a great sea creatures. 34:24 The word for creatures there is tanninim a Hebrew word. 34:26 Tanninim is generally translated in the Old Testament 34:31 as a reptile, that is the usual definition. 34:34 That is the usual translation. 34:36 So you might say great sea reptiles. 34:39 Of course every time God made something, in the creation 34:41 account, He pronounces it good. 34:43 When you start to suggest to some Christians that maybe 34:48 God created dinosaurs, there is a little hesitation there. 34:51 Hey wait a minute why would God do? He wouldn't have? 34:53 I don't think so, but we want to take a look at the 34:58 biblical record and see. 35:00 It says that God created great sea reptiles, tanninim. 35:05 How interesting, but when people asked the question, 35:09 is there anything in the Bible about dinosaurs they 35:11 always talk about Job. 35:13 There's two animals mentioned in the book of Job. 35:14 One is a leviathan. 35:16 It says. 35:42 Now when you take a look, I was very curious at the Word 35:46 leviathan, I wanted to know if there was any hint in Hebrew 35:49 as to what the animal might have been. 35:51 In my studies on at the only place I found a root word, 35:56 a hint of a root word in there, is a word that means boil. 36:00 To stir or boil something. 36:03 I'm thinking, to me, that's probably for my sake and is 36:08 open for interpretations. 36:10 At least for me I think that it is establishing that it 36:13 is a crocodile, a crocodile would boil the water's as it 36:17 turns and thrashes about. 36:19 That's apparent in the root word, but that's just me. 36:22 However, let's go and take a look at the behemoth. 36:31 The word behemoth is simply beast. 36:47 Now what in the world is this? 36:50 God is speaking to Job and saying Job listen, I am the 36:52 Creator and have things under control. 36:54 Let Me tell you about some of the animals I made. 36:56 You know some of them, but this is a pretty impressive 36:59 one, Behemoth. 37:01 Now about this animal, it is generally thought, the most 37:06 common interpretation is hippopotamus. 37:09 It says the now his strength is in his hip and his powers 37:12 in his stomach muscles. 37:13 Okay, he has a powerful body, and moves his tail like a 37:16 cedar, have you ever seen a hippopotamus tail? 37:19 Is that little thing in the back there. 37:23 It doesn't quite have the impact of a cedar tree being 37:26 swayed back and forth. 37:28 His bones are like beams of bronze and his ribs are like 37:30 bars of iron, he is the first in the ways of God. 37:33 That last phrase to me is an interesting phrase and I 37:36 tried to unpack that one as well. 37:38 It was like first, first things made, what does the 37:42 word first there suggest? 37:44 Again as studied the sources on this and the scholars 37:48 that have looked at this verse, you could translate this 37:51 to a modern language which is something like this. 37:54 He is the king of beasts, he is the most prominent. 37:57 He stands first among all the animals. 38:00 King, prominent, first. 38:03 Well if that is the case, it doesn't sound like a 38:07 hippopotamus to me, but dinosaur maybe. 38:10 A big huge four-legged, okay possibly. 38:13 This is the one place that I am open to the idea 38:17 of a description of some fabulous animal we are 38:21 finding the bones of, first of the ways of God. 38:23 Let's talk about the story, is there any evidence of 38:31 evolution in the animal world found in the Bible? 38:36 You might be surprised to hear that I actually believe 38:38 there was some evolution but not in the way 38:40 we are used to hearing it. 38:42 In this story in involving a serpent, Eve, and the 38:46 tree of knowledge of good and evil and so forth. 38:49 We don't think it was a serpent as such, but something 38:53 much more attractive to Eve before any scary animal like 38:57 we think a snake as being today. 38:59 I think of something between a parrot and a panda, 39:02 I don't know what it would be. 39:03 Something in the tree that is attractive and cuddly that 39:08 would draw a woman over to see it. 39:10 Whatever it originally was it was not a scary looking snake. 39:14 We know by what God said that the snake changed. 39:23 So there are two things there I want you to see. 39:25 Number one, you are cursed more than other animals, 39:29 suggesting that the animal world is now affected by what 39:32 has taken place here. 39:35 If all cattle are affected, but especially the serpent, 39:39 what does that mean? 39:42 Please notice He goes on to say now you're going to eat 39:45 dust, as if it didn't eat dust before. 39:49 So some kind of transformation, some kind of demotion, 39:52 some kind of, can I say it? De-evolution. 39:55 Downward, debasing took place that the serpent was 40:01 changed in form. 40:02 It is interesting to me that we are 40:03 talking about a reptile. 40:04 That a reptile has changed from something better that 40:08 it was, to something now inferior. 40:10 It suggests that all animals are affected as well. 40:14 To me that is open that door for some kind of change in 40:17 the reptile family, at least. 40:23 Let's take a look at Genesis 6 and get an idea of how, 40:27 maybe dinosaurs, if God made good ones, how they may 40:31 have been affected. 40:53 Now on two nights from now I'm going to talk about the 40:56 flood, the evidence for the flood. 40:57 Remember was a geology student and to me that was very 41:00 interesting stuff. 41:01 Please notice this, it is saying that God could have 41:06 if God was going to destroy the planet and start it over 41:11 again, and it was just people He was worried about, 41:14 He could have figured some way to do it with just people 41:17 and not affect the animal world. 41:20 It is clear by the description of Scripture that the 41:24 condition included animals were a problem too. 41:27 Something had gone haywire in the animal world. 41:29 It says all flesh, that were clearly means more than 41:33 people, all flesh had gone bad, gotten corrupted. 41:37 The world's particular condition was what God was worried about. 41:40 It was a violent world, it was turning violent. 41:43 So was not just human violence, violence in the human 41:50 world but also the animal world apparently. 41:52 Because God decided to destroy the animal world, and start 41:55 over with animals from the ark. 41:58 We will talk about that again in a night or two. 42:00 Do we see violence in the fossil record? 42:03 Of course we do, we see a very violent world. 42:05 Besides T Rex, which is frightening enough. 42:08 What about other critters, do we see other animals? 42:10 Take a look at this guy, this guy clearly is designed 42:17 for a paddle or something. 42:19 He clearly has got some kind of defense mechanism 42:22 working for him there. 42:24 They have only found one skeleton of this and bits and 42:26 pieces of others. 42:28 It is enough to reveal this interesting looking critter. 42:31 It looks like the animal lived in a violent world. 42:36 The Stegosaurus has got the defenses of bony structures 42:39 and a spike on his tail. 42:41 You would say that whatever world these animals lived in 42:43 was a violent world. 42:44 Of course we see something that has been comically referred 42:48 to a Pachycephalosaurus, a nice way of saying bonehead. 42:52 Or thick head we believe he ran around knocking things 42:58 with his very thick skull. 43:00 Again with all the horns it looks like a violent world 43:03 besides just T Rex. 43:05 Violence apparently filled the earth. 43:08 It was a dinosaury, dinosaur world I guess. 43:13 You can see the bite marks on the trilobites, there are 43:16 a lot of interesting evidence of violent world. 43:21 I know people are asking about, there is a question 43:25 I had a couple nights ago about this as to whether God. 43:28 This was somebody talking to me afterwards. 43:30 Long sharp teeth, surely these were always carnivorous. 43:35 Did God design carnivorous teeth? 43:38 Was God making animals that kill animals in the Garden of Eden? 43:43 Was that original or did something else happened? 43:45 Take a look at these two bear skulls. 43:46 If you look at the canines on these guys, this is always 43:52 an indicator to scientist that these are meat eaters. 43:56 Yet on the left is a panda bear and on the right is grizzly bear 44:00 A panda bear uses canines to do what? 44:03 What do they eat? 44:04 They eat bamboo and only bamboo, that is the only thing 44:07 they eat, never less scientists will look at this and say those 44:11 are clearly meat eaters, there is no other option here. 44:14 So a panda bear used to be a carnivorous animal before 44:17 it evolved to a bamboo eating animal. 44:20 That is the statement on this. 44:22 Can you see a panda bear running something down? 44:32 the fact of the matter is you can have sharp teeth and 44:35 do very well on a vegetarian diet. 44:37 When you look at a grizzly bear, you know grizzly bears 44:39 and their habitats and so forth. 44:40 A grizzly bear is capable of being vegetarian. 44:44 It is true that certain times of the year when food is 44:47 tougher and berries are harder to find, the fish are 44:51 plentiful and an easy source of food. 44:53 But grizzly bears are capable of being vegetarian, even in nature 44:58 It is possible to have very sharp teeth and not, 45:01 necessarily, have to be carnivorous. 45:04 At least that is the evidence from some. 45:06 People wonder about the size of dinosaurs. 45:11 Let me give you a little bit of a sense of how big we 45:16 are talking there, that's pretty big. 45:18 On the Supersaurus they've only found a couple bones 45:21 from and I personally am thinking a lot of these guys 45:25 are more or less the same animal. 45:30 Now what people don't know is the typical size of a dinosaur, 45:33 dinosaur, a typical size of a dinosaur is actually much, 45:35 much smaller. 45:37 The average size is like dog size. 45:38 When you talk to dinosaur fans they always think they 45:43 are big, incidentally, here is a good trivia question. 45:46 I don't think it's in your workbook, but nevertheless 45:49 it is a good question. 45:51 What is the anatomical difference between a dinosaur 45:55 and a reptile? 45:56 It is very simple. 45:57 Anatomical difference between a dinosaur and a reptile? 46:03 Somebody said hips, very good, that's it, hips. 46:06 Not size, I always have people shout out size first. 46:09 How disappointing, you guys are too on this stuff. 46:12 It's the hips, it's basically reptile hips have the legs 46:16 go out side ways and they have a tendency to do this to get along 46:19 Where as dinosaur legs are angled downward whether two 46:23 or four-legged, they tend to go straight down and are 46:25 off the ground. 46:26 That is pretty much the difference between a dinosaur 46:28 and a reptile, size aside. 46:38 They were finding from the beginning, in the middle 1800s, 46:42 they began to find flying dinosaurs. 46:46 Pterodactyloids and so forth. 46:48 This was a sensational find as well and these were 46:51 different enough from birds that they had to wonder what 46:55 exactly they were, they were flying reptiles. 46:58 They had the skin folds and so forth, we found evidence 47:00 of the folds as well, along with the bones and skin. 47:04 When we talk about dinosaur to bird evolution, 47:09 this is a very hot, hot topic. 47:12 In-house, among the evolutionists discussing this. 47:18 This gets sometimes heated. 47:21 Two theories of dinosaurs assuming you believe dinosaurs 47:23 evolved into birds. 47:25 The two theories are something like this. 47:27 They start his large brown bipeds. 47:33 Roughly looking like ostriches, something like that. 47:36 Eventually getting longer wings and so forth. 47:38 Starting from the ground and learning how to fly basically. 47:41 The problem with that is, when you look at large brown 47:44 bipeds, they have large legs, small forearms and heavy tails. 47:48 They should have small legs, big forearms that would 47:53 become wings, and small tails that would not be so heavy 47:58 to drag to keep you from flying. 48:01 There's a problem with that and some people argue that 48:03 is good enough evidence to go with another theory. 48:05 The other theory is small crocodiles from the trees. 48:08 They use the word crocodile more, so they think it is 48:12 something that looked more like a crocodile perched in trees. 48:14 From that it would somehow have folds in the wings, like 48:20 the Pterodactyloids had, skin folds become wings. 48:26 Again that is a little bit of a stretch. 48:29 Also lung problems, dinosaur lungs to bird lungs. 48:34 They are finding some reptiles now they feel have some 48:38 Bird like lungs, but feathers. 48:41 Take a look at this. 48:42 I appreciate Dr. David Mentons talks on the subject. 48:46 I find them very interesting. 48:47 But he jokes around with this. 48:50 The top picture is a microscope picture of scales on the reptile 48:55 and below it are electron microscope look at a feather. 49:01 The top was supposed to have evolved into the bottom. 49:04 The top of course is just simply folds of skin. 49:08 The bottom is like a hair follicle that comes out of 49:12 the skin, beneath the surface of the skin. 49:14 It is hard to imagine what the midway steps would be 49:21 between folded scales and feathers. 49:24 That issue is one of the challenges of trying to imagine, 49:28 this is incidentally where the money is, or a least a 49:31 good chunk of the money for research. 49:33 It's a hot topic for evolutionists from 49:36 dinosaurs to birds. 49:38 Okay let's take a look at the question about birds. 49:41 Evolution from dinosaurs, a little bit challenging because 49:44 feathered birds are found all the way back to mid Jurassic. 49:49 Then you have dinosaurs and of course you have flying 49:53 dinosaurs and then you have the land dinosaurs. 49:58 Land dinosaur started mid Triassic level. 50:01 Flying dinosaurs not too much after that, but you see that 50:05 the feathered birds tend to go back further than would be a 50:09 comfortable fit, or easy evolution, you would like 50:12 to think that they weren't all going together but that one 50:17 would be a little more, or a little higher up. 50:19 It would fit better in the imagination of how dinosaurs 50:23 evolved into feathered birds if there was a little more, 50:27 like you say the birds are too far down. 50:30 They keep finding birds, especially in China right now. 50:34 When they find birds they can to find birds that look just 50:37 like birds, for the most part there is a couple of really 50:40 interesting oddball ones, but most birds they are finding 50:43 look like birds. 50:45 Everything is very similar to modern birds. 50:49 It is a little bit of a challenge, it is probably one of 50:51 the better theories that they have. 50:53 What happened to dinosaurs, well the theory is right now 50:57 probably a meteor strike is the best answer for what 51:01 happened to dinosaurs, and actually that is a pretty good 51:04 guess, that is a pretty good guess. 51:06 I actually believe that there may be evidence that would 51:10 fit along with the biblical account on this. 51:12 This is some KT material, it comes from Canada. 51:14 This little bit of rock comes from the area right where 51:18 the arrows are pointing, where it is believed that 51:21 whatever happened to make that layer right there is what 51:24 killed the dinosaurs. 51:26 What they find in this material is iridium, iridium is not 51:31 a commonly occurring material on earth. 51:35 It is pretty much meteorites and that area there is like 51:38 160 or so times the average amount of iridium. 51:42 So it is a very highly concentrated that is consistent 51:45 with an asteroid. 51:46 So the question is did an asteroid strike cause the demise 51:52 of the dinosaurs? 51:53 One thing I like to point out is, a few years ago they 51:57 didn't, the geological world was not all that excited to 52:01 talk about catastrophes in any form. 52:04 They preferred Uniformitarian models and we will talk 52:07 about that, in other words long ages, the same things you see 52:10 going on today pretty much is what we used to have back then. 52:14 But now it is pretty well and accepted thing that what took 52:18 out the dinosaurs was a catastrophe of some kind. 52:21 It was a worldwide catastrophe because wherever 52:24 dinosaurs were, and whatever continent we are talking 52:27 about, they all landed at that same layer. 52:29 That KT boundary, Cretaceous on the bottom and the 52:33 Tertiary above, and that little line is pretty much where 52:36 you do not find dinosaurs above. 52:38 Incidentally, that is an issue for creationist too, 52:41 that it is the second thing we will talk about, the 52:44 second problem for creationist and that is fossil order. 52:47 In other words how things are found only in certain layers. 52:50 A worldwide flood is a challenge. 52:52 They find these big guys, these big four-legged Sauropod 53:00 type of dinosaurs, they are huge things. 53:02 Dinosaur national Monument in eastern Utah and western 53:07 Colorado you will find some marvelous things. 53:10 Question that people ask is, I know this looks pretty 53:14 mythical, but take a look at this picture of the ark. 53:18 What people ask me, Stan do you think there were dinosaurs 53:23 that somehow snuck on the ark? 53:25 Before I answer that yes or no or up or down, with just a 53:31 reminder that dinosaur started off small so they don't 53:36 have to be adults right? 53:37 They could be little babies. 53:39 Anyway with that thought I want you to take a look at 53:42 some other evidence. 53:44 The Grand Canyon carving discovered in 1924 without any 53:48 chance of it being, remember a T Rex had been only found about 53:52 19 years prior to this. 53:56 So there's no graffiti chances to speak of in this part of 54:00 the Grand Canyon's. 54:01 Somebody drew something that looked like a T Rex dinosaur. 54:14 Again almost all cultures have stories of dragons. 54:18 Their stories will go something like this. 54:21 This is just generated from hundreds of stories its 54:24 generated down to a typical type story. 54:27 You have a community in the hills, and over there in a cave, 54:32 or by a bridge or somewhere off some distance from town 54:36 is this animal. 54:38 This animal is a problem to the locals. 54:40 Sometimes it just scares them, or it munches on somebody. 54:44 Sometimes it is a problem or whatever, and they either 54:47 send a hero over there, or they send the crowd, or 54:49 something to smash this animal, and that's the end of them. 54:53 There is almost never flocks or herds of them, or any 54:57 groups of them, it is always a solitary animal. 55:00 It is a scary thing and they take it out and it is no more. 55:05 It is a fairly consistent thing with many of the Dragon 55:10 stories and human encounters. 55:11 I'm just thinking, is this an ancient memories from all 55:15 these different cultures in the days when humans and 55:18 dinosaurs coexisted? 55:20 It is a possibility. 55:21 Let me tell you what the evolutionist answer to that 55:23 point is, they will say because the question how is it everybody 55:28 thinks of them as big reptiles? 55:31 Why isn't there big bears, or big coyotes, or big you know 55:35 they all seem to be pretty consistent on big reptiles. 55:39 What is the deal there? 55:40 So here's the evolutionist's usual answer is something 55:44 like this, people have found bones over the centuries and as 55:47 they looked at the bones they have imagined big 55:49 reptiles from that. 55:51 Now I do not know if that is the answer. 55:54 To me that is a little weak because if I saw a bone like 55:57 this, I wouldn't be thinking reptile, I wouldn't be thinking 56:00 lizard, I would be thinking something big. 56:02 But I'm not sure if I am atomically could tell from a 56:05 bone or two that we were talking about a big lizard. 56:09 To me I think you would like to hear a little better 56:12 explanation than that, I still think these may be the 56:16 remnants of ancient memories of encounters. 56:20 They get embellished with age and mythologized with a lot 56:22 things added from generation to generation and centuries, 56:25 but I am wondering if there is a kernel of consistency 56:28 that we find from China to Europe, 56:30 from Africa to all points. 56:33 There are these ancient stories of dragons. 56:36 I find them kind of interesting, in fact the very oldest 56:40 depiction that seems to be, at least one of the very 56:44 oldest depictions is found on the Ishtar gate of Babylon. 56:48 Here's a picture of part reptile, part bird, part lion 56:53 thing that might be considered an early idea of dragon. 56:57 On the gates of Babylon, which I find interesting. 56:59 So again going back to that old Dragon, the devil as it 57:04 talks about in Revelation, I am just wondering if we could 57:09 imagine the old Dragon is being an old dinosaur? 57:13 Using deceptive powers in these last days, maybe, to call 57:17 attention away from our Creator God and the story of Genesis. 57:21 I am just wondering if there is a certain amount of 57:23 coincidence in the imagery of the Dragon being the deceiver. 57:29 Okay, that is it and I hope you enjoyed our talk today. 57:32 Thank you very, very much. |
Revised 2014-12-17