Were Dinosaurs On Noah's Ark?

Were Dinosaurs On Noah's Ark?
First of all let’s first understand some things about dinosaurs. The word dinosaur comes from a combination of the Greek words deinos and sauros and means "terrible lizard.” It technically refers only to terrestrial reptiles that, according to the fossil record, disappeared long ago. Scientists have dug up thousands of dinosaur bones around the world and have classified them into more than 500 different types or genera. Many of them were of gigantic size, like the Sauroposeidon, that was taller than a five story building! Others, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex, were virtually killing machines, with sharp teeth almost a foot long.
One thing we find in the Bible is that the great majority of the animals described in the Scriptures can be identified with those of our modern world—an earth filled with mammals, smaller reptiles, amphibians, fishes, birds and insects. If thousands of dinosaurs coexisted with mankind, it’s strange the Bible never recorded any important encounters.
Yet in the first description of the animals made by God, we find they consist of “great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good…Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping thing [small animals that creep along the ground] and beast of the earth, each according to its kind, and it was so. Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:24-26). These are readily identified with animals that live today.
Later in the biblical record, we find man confronting wild beasts described are fierce mammals, such as lions (Genesis 49:9); wolves (Genesis 49:27); and bears (2 Kings 2:24). Yet no towering and aggressive dinosaurs are ever mentioned battling mankind.
Although there are tales of dragons in man’s annals, as there are of many other mythological animals, these dragons are usually described as fire-breathing flying serpents, and no remains of such creatures have ever been found nor do they exist in the fossil record. During the Age of the Reptiles, there was a flying reptile called a pterosaur, but it was not fire-breathing and its remains are not found alongside human or modern animal bones.
The main problem with classifying dinosaurs and other ancient flying creatures at the same time as mankind is that whenever dinosaur fossils have been discovered around the globe, they are found in completely different strata, or layers, than the animals of our modern world.
The earth’s surface that contains fossils is on average a mile thick. It is similar to a layer cake with each layer being of a different thickness but with the same overall layering pattern. The layers follow a rough sequence as if each layer could be labelled with a letter of the alphabet. Of course, as we dig deeper some letters are often missing in the pattern due to many disruptions and disturbances but the general alphabetic sequence still remains intact throughout the world.
For instance, if a geologist finds layer C, then he is quite certain layers D, E, and F will follow. At other times, layers G, H, I and J are located with sometimes a letter missing due either to no build-up at that time or perhaps due to erosion but the general alphabetic sequence is unmistakable.
Oil companies depend on this general geologic pattern and spend billions of dollars drilling until they find the right letters in the sequence and then they usually strike liquid gold. They are quite successful at finding oil, natural gas and coal, thanks to this established sequence. They have used this basic geologic model for over a century in most of the known world and it has been verified time and again.
What palaeontologists (fossil experts) normally find in the geologic sequence are invertebrate marine animals on the bottom layer, then as you go up the stages, fish, amphibians, reptiles and finally, at the highest level, mammals and human remains. Most human bones are too recent to even be fossilized. So when excavations are made around the earth and thousands of human remains are found, they are discovered along with the animal bones typical of our modern world—not with dinosaur fossils.
The animals God told Noah to bring into the ark are generally described as creatures that we can recognize as living today. God told Noah, “You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female; also seven each of birds of the air, male and female, to keep the species alive on the face of all the earth’....On the very same day...they entered the ark--they and every beast after its kind, all cattle after their kind, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, every bird of every sort” (Genesis 7:3, 14).
There is no description of the great dinosaurs that should have come along if they had existed then. Instead, the animals described in Genesis 7 are similar to the ones that live today. So where do the dinosaurs fit in the account of Noah’s ark?
The Bible records a time period before the earth became “without form or void” that is mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Notice this includes our entire universe—and our earth. But then in verse 2 it says the earth was (or became) “without form or void.” The New International Version has a footnote on this verse explaining that the verb “was” can be translated as “became.” Several Bible commentaries including Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary, The Jameison, Faucett and Brown Commentary and Barnes Commentary confirm this translation.
So something transformed the earth into a chaotic and empty place—and God is not the author of confusion but of peace and order (1 Corinthians 14:33, 40). The dinosaurs could well have existed and become extinct during this indefinite period of time before man was created—an age known as the pre-Adamic world.
When we read about Adam and Ever being created, the plants and animals mentioned are also characteristic of our modern world. There are flowering plants and tame animals such as cattle, beasts and birds in Eden (Genesis 2:9, 19-20), not the giant dinosaurs and huge gymnosperms [ferns and other spore bearing plants] of the Age of Reptiles that are found in the geologic record.
Likewise, when Noah brought the animals aboard the ark, they were descendants of those that had lived in Adam’s day and are described in the Bible in similar terms to those we see around us today—not like the ones from a dinosaur age.
As the narrative of Genesis proceeds, we see a world where man domesticates animals such as sheep (as Abel did in Genesis 4:2), or goats, camels and donkeys (as Jacob did in Genesis 30:40-43). Nowhere in the Bible do we see dinosaurs battling mankind for dominion. There certainly are large creatures on the earth today—mammals such as elephants, giraffes and whales in the sea--but nothing like the 500 types of terrestrial dinosaurs, many of them huge reptiles, known to have existed in the past.
So we ask again, were there dinosaurs in Noah’s ark? From the biblical and the geologic records, and as far as we can tell, the answer is that Noah never had to bother with all of these terrible lizards since they were from an age before his time. Consequently, we should give thanks to God we also don’t have to deal with those dinosaurs today!