Digging up Bones with David Rives

Last week, I raised the question if there's going to be YouTube in heaven News at 10

Okay, so let's go ahead and pray dear Heavenly Father. We are Grateful and humbled to come before you again for another

Thursday evening of fellowship that we are able to just spend our time focusing on the truth of your word and how

Magnificent you are as the creator of the universe what a blessing that you've given us to be able to behold everything around us the beauty in nature and the

Interesting and fascinating designs that you've put into creation and the laws that you govern our universe with Thank you for David Reeves and his ministry.

Thank you that we're able to hear from him tonight and thank you that we're able to hopefully bless him as well by Sharing his message with other people and we just ask for a blessing over our time that technology goes well for us tonight and that Your word will be proclaimed and people will be able to hear it as truth

Especially in a time that we need so much. Hope in our world in Jesus name.

Amen Okay, so I am Terry Cameriselle and I'm here on behalf of creation fellowship

Santee and we've been doing these Virtually their fellowships on zoom every

Thursday night since I think April And tonight we are thrilled to welcome back our ministry friend

David Reeves David is the host of creation in the 21st century on TBN where he interviews many popular creation scientists and Apologists.

He also has a book and video series on NRB network called wonders without numbers in which he explores the fingerprints throughout the universe

Of God God's fingerprints throughout the universe and his infinite number of wonders using science and biblical history

David is an author speaker researcher TV host musician and Explorer who has captured the attention of generations of Christians and skeptics of all ages

So last time David was here he shared with us from from his book 21 verses backed by science and you can find that presentation on our

YouTube channel If you just search for creation fellowship Santee on YouTube you'll be able to find all of the videos of our or most of the videos of our

Fellowships this year including David's last one, which was August 29th

Tonight he's here to share about some of his findings from his own

Dinosaur digs and we have a lot of group members here tonight from the last trip that he took in Kansas And so we're all excited to hear from them

From David and I think they're excited to be here with him again and have a little reunion so if you have any questions for David during his presentation whether you're on the zoom platform or if you're

Following along on the Facebook livestream you can put them into the respective chats and then at the end of his presentation

We'll go ahead and ask I can ask the questions for you. So, all right with that David We'll turn it over to you.

Thank you. Terry. That's that's great. It's a pleasure to be here I tell you what I do I was looking through the list and I see so many friendly faces so many people that Have become friends even in the last short while It looks like about half of our last dig is represented our

Kansas paleontology dig that we got back in September and So it's great to have everybody here and I just wanted to kind of talk a little bit about digging up bones paleontology in the field because that's something that I'm passionate about that's something that Has become an interest of mine in the last short while So basically about 13 years ago

I started with you know astronomy using telescopes to take pictures of space astrophotography

That turned into a ministry a very very very tiny ministry out of my bedroom basically and my brother and I started sharing this message of creation and God's beautiful design and It turned into Some remarkable things so many doors opened and it's it's allowed me the opportunity to go

Really around the world and not only share the gospel but get to hang out with so many smart brilliant people

I mean some of my colleagues are some of the most brilliant scientists on earth who are strong Christians, by the way so what

I wanted to do today is It's kind of take you through a few different details about dinosaurs in a

Fun casual way, right? So before we get into that This if everybody can see this on the screen.

This is This is my favorite kind of Favorite kind of biology right the living stuff

This was from my last trip that I led to Africa. I Love walking with real live lions.

I love Getting to interact with giraffes with animal planet film crews

I love looking at nature. In fact, I just saw a bald eagle In two miles from our ministry center here in Tennessee a couple of days ago

So I just love nature because God's creation is so Beautiful, it's so well designed.

I also Have had the chance to interact with some really big cats and things like 600 pound grizzly bears

That is and that's not a fake picture. It's not photoshopped So, I love the live things

I will just tell you that right off the bat but When it comes to the fossil world when it comes to paleontology

What I have found is that You've got some of the most remarkable clues for catastrophic processes for a

Global flood that took place a long time ago that buried so many creatures in the rock layers

The rock layers when they were mud before they became rock before they lithified And in those bones the bones of dinosaurs the bones of these giant creatures the bones of these pre -flood animals

You can find clues you can find all sorts of Details about how they lived how they died and you can try to interpret that in a number of different ways

Now that's where a lot of people get into trouble because they try to do too much interpreting the rocks can't tell you

The behavioral patterns of these animals. I know many people

In museums, they'll take the tiniest fact such as Deinonychus right the the dinosaur deinonychus they'll find three of them together

Buried in the in the rock layers and next to them will be a different type of an animal, right?

And so they'll say well deinonychus must have been hunting this other animal and they hunt in packs And they do this and they do that and then they extrapolate all of these details about How these animals behaved we don't know exactly how dinosaurs behaved but we can tell some things

Especially we can tell things about that snapshot Right as they died And that's where the clues come in one of the things that we notice

When we look at those snapshots preserved in stone forests god's done a remarkable job at preserving history

When we look at those snapshots what we see is many times very well preserved animals sometimes

They were buried so quickly that they were snap frozen in time fully articulated That means all put together with their heads arched back gasping for that last breath of air

Probably being drowned in the catastrophic flood sometimes you'll find the bones in jumbles where the animal carcasses have jumbled around in the water for Days, maybe weeks and they've gotten all clumped together in a mud bank like we see in the

Morrison formation in in Colorado and other places So you can tell a lot about that last moment before they died

You can sometimes tell about What they looked like you can sometimes find skin. We'll talk about that more later

You can find all sorts of clues and all of these become important when we get to the question

Well, so what is the real history of the dinosaurs? And so that is

That's our first question. Where do dinosaurs fit in history?

now when we talk about dinosaurs Most even at the kindergarten level most children have been indoctrinated.

It's not educated. It's indoctrinated that millions and millions of years ago dinosaurs

Roamed the earth before they finally went extinct and they've been extinct for millions and millions of years

So we've got the secular explanation And the secular explanation

Is yes that the dinosaurs lived over 66 plus million years ago and that they

All died out about 66 plus million years ago in a meteor strike now uh, the meteor strike is significant because what we find is that They suggest a spot in the

Yucatan peninsula for this meteor strike All right, what appears to be a crater and they say well a giant meteor struck there and it sent debris all over the earth and it

Caused the dinosaur population to go extinct. Okay Their proof for this is that in some situations in the layers where we find dinosaurs

We find traces of iridium now i'm i'm interested in astronomy

I know very well the first time someone says oh we found traces of iridium That's typically found in space objects.

Okay So this is where they say well Then a meteor must have struck the earth and it caused this iridium to go out across the the earth on this layer

As it buried the dinosaurs Right. It sounds logical at face value.

And in fact, uh When I go out and speak on these issues on our online videos as they rack up millions and millions of views

I get all of these people coming back and they say but the dinosaurs died in a meteor strike And how do you know the dinosaurs died in a meteor strike?

Well, because there's iridium in these layers. It appears to be an an object from outer space to which

Here's here's the simple response Okay We don't find iridium in the crater impact site

So wait a second If that is our excuse of iridium is our excuse of saying that the dinosaurs died in a major meteorite impact

But you don't find iridium at the source of the impact Well, then maybe we need to rethink our theories

Maybe that iridium was part of some mineral structure that got stirred up during the great flood

Maybe that iridium came as a result of something else Maybe it did come from meteors that were striking at the time of the flood.

We don't know but the point is The meteorite impact theory doesn't hold water and I use that in a in a light term

Doesn't hold water when it comes to the extinction of the dinosaurs. All right, so that's the the secular explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs

About 66 plus million years ago. Now. I really just want to make this a fun night

I don't want to spend a ton of time on anything Uh, I just kind of want to touch on some things but last night

I did put together a couple of videos uh from our wonders of creation center where I looked at certain dinosaurs that we have on exhibit here and I just wanted to Show you a couple of things that I think you'll find interesting that relate to this whole dinosaur topic and i'm going to start with Where dinosaurs

Went because if you were to ask a secularist Many of my colleagues in the secular world of paleontology

Would then say dinosaurs didn't fully go extinct. Not all animals died in this this horrific meteor strike this asteroid strike

Some of them evolved Well, let's see what they say they evolved to all right Y 'all tell me if you can't hear the sound on this video, but I hope you'll be able to hear the sound

All right. So when you come to the wonders of creation center, we do have birds on display That's right

Because they're pretty But you see a lot of other museums have birds on display because then

They will proceed to tell you that these birds over millions and millions of millions of years actually evolved

From these dinosaurs That's right. They'll say that these dinosaurs sprouted wings

And took off and got a lot smaller and became birds and that is taught by paleontology

Experts to this day if you go to college to learn this, but this is a deinonychus raptor

Deinonychus or deinonychus doesn't really matter how you pronounce it different people pronounce it different ways, but it basically means terrible claw and It had a sickle shaped claw right here, which would have been quite ferocious

This is actual size this is about 11 feet long from head to tail and these were the ones used in the jurassic park movies

The deinonychus and utah raptors They called them velociraptors. Yeah, except velociraptors were tiny little things

So this was the real deal. This is actually uh, what was the pattern for those dinosaurs that you see in the jurassic park movies?

And this is actual size So that was the um the secular view

Uh again, they would say well dinosaurs are still alive today They've just gotten much smaller and they flew off and that's what our chicken is in our backyard

The the point of well, there are a lot of problems with that, uh, one of the

Unbelievable problems is of course Every structure every major structure of the dinosaurs had to change

First off there are some debate about this, but I believe there is a very very good indication that dinosaurs.

Um, we're um, We're cold -blooded Uh now, of course birds are warm -blooded.

There is an entirely A radical change right there. Okay There's no way to get around that.

Um The beak Is much much different than most of our raptors of the dinosaurs that you see that would be considered raptors the bone structure

Is much heavier, of course on the raptors, uh than they are on chickens and on other types of birds obviously, but the big one, okay, there are

We know we find the preserved scales Of these dinosaurs the imprints of the scales of these dinosaurs

We know they had scales now There's a lot of debate going on over whether some dinosaurs had feathers over where those were just pre -flood birds

Over there's all sorts of debate on the topic of feathers, but we know that many many dinosaurs had scales

And scales are fundamentally different than feathers There's no way to get around that to turn a scale into a feather

Uh, my friend. Dr. Joe Martin, uh who has researched animal biology extensively

He talks about the difficulty of that the really the impossibility of that it can't just evolve into a feather even given millions of years of mutations and supposed natural selection

Okay, so that's where we go What about the biblical explanation? All right

So the biblical explanation is a lot more straightforward and a lot clearer you see

If we look at what the bible says it says that nearly every animal on earth died in a catastrophic flood several thousand years ago not 66

Plus million years ago. Okay. So if we look at the the idea of a global flood well

Let's think about the mechanics for just a second because you've got the the fountains of the great deep breaking open

You've got tremendous amount of mud water, sands, silts, sediments washing across the continents in tsunami -like waves and as they do they're laying down layer after layer after layer of all of these sediments

These water -laying sediments again, they lay down in layers just like we find all over the earth But as they do that they trap

Successively the animals that are are being buried underneath these mud layers first the animals that you find

At the bottom of the pre -flood oceans, so we would be talking about You know things like sea creatures like trilobites

Just like we have here things like fish things like all sorts of marine life

And then they would come up onto the land the swampy areas they would bury all of these

Dinosaur creatures they would bury a lot of amphibian type creatures Then as the waters progress again, it's filling everything up with mud layer after layer of mud

Successively it comes higher onto land. It grabs the mammals. It grabs humans. It buries pretty much

Everything and then leaves a layer of water on top of all of that So it preserves these dinosaurs

In a snapshot of time and that's what's so amazing when we dig up bones.

That's what digging up bones is all about You can find the record of history

Of how these animals died and we'll talk more about that in in just a few minutes another

Common question is okay. Were dinosaurs on those arc. That's that's a super popular question that I get literally all the time

Of course dinosaurs would have been on noah's ark Dinosaurs are land animals by very definition the definition of dinosaur is a is a land dwelling animal that walks upright on four legs

When we talk about other types of dinosaurs a lots of times Pterosaurs pterodactyls things like that get lumped into the group

That's not an entirely accurate When we look at the description of dinosaurs a lot of times marine creatures get lumped into the group

But they don't walk on land upright on four legs. So those would typically be marine reptiles.

Those would typically be air You know birds that are reptiles so What we have to remember

Is that land dwelling animals got on noah's ark? Land dwelling animal not not a lot.

Most of them were buried during the flood a few land dwelling animal dinosaurs Got off of the ark

Now what happened to them after that? Well, I mean that's uh Most of them went extinct obviously

Most of them went extinct very quickly okay, and uh That's probably because Well, the post -blood world was not so totally suitable number one.

Uh, there was a lack of vegetation there may have been uh, lots of different features that would have made the dinosaurs, uh, it would have

Made it hard On them to fill ecological niches. There was obviously a lack of food

And the large dinosaurs, uh would have required a lot of food So many of the different dinosaurs probably went extinct very shortly after the flood

Some of them probably went extinct much much later Uh, and that may be where we get some of the the dragon legends all throughout history, of course the secular secular explanation again goes to a meteor or asteroid impact the biblical explanation

Is a lot clearer the biblical explanation actually gives us a a reasoned history

Of these snapshots in time where we see dinosaurs with their heads arched backwards they're gasping for that last breath of air

Okay so Let's tackle the question just for a second are there dinosaurs in the bible and i'll get into that in a little bit more detail very very shortly, but Yes, absolutely.

We don't find the word dinosaur in the bible There's a good reason for that. Our modern english bibles were written in the late 1500s early 1600s uh,

Tyndale, Geneva, and King James Those were the seminal english translations

Uh, and really those first english translations we would have used the words available to them

Well in the english language if you were to pick up a geneva bible, uh, we've got on display at our museum a full

Geneva bible you flip through it You there are portions that you can't hardly read

Uh, that's because the english language has changed dramatically Dramatically over the last 400 years but dragon was a term that was available to the english language

Back in the late 1500s and early 1600s and dragon is the word that was placed

In most of the instances that would have referred to a dinosaur in the bible

That's because the word dinosaur was not even invented until sir. Richard owens came along much much later in the 1800s

Uh, he began using this term dinosaur and even in his journals

For decades he still used the word dragon interchangeably with dinosaurs these dragons these dinosaurs these dragons

These dinosaurs in other words dragons and dinosaurs Mean the same thing dinosaur as a word was just introduced to the english language

After our bible after most of our english translations were written And it hasn't been changed since the the word dragon still remains.

Okay, so we read about Many different dragons all throughout the bible We read about leviathan a dragon in the sea.

We'll talk about him in a minute We read about a giant beast so fierce that none dare stir him up That is the creature leviathan.

He lived in the sea. He was a sea serpent. We read about a giant beast called behemoth uh that has a lot of strength in his belly and That's what

I want to just touch on very briefly for a moment because in africa, okay I got the chance to get up close and personal with a number of elephants and these elephants uh are giant beasts

I remember We we got the chance to ride on the back of african elephants african elephants are much taller than than asian elephants uh

They're kind of intimidating, but they're amazing when you're on the top of the elephant's back

You can see all around you i'd been riding in four -wheel drives These giant land vehicles for days

And then I got on the back of the elephant and I was just surprised How much more I could see?

I was spotting herds of gazelle and and impala and Giraffe in the distance and all of these different creatures from the backs of elephants so it's easy to see how many different bible historians many different commentators

As they read the bible and they're reading the description of behemoth. They're like, okay It's a giant beast with a lot of strength in his belly

Maybe it's the elephant And that's what a lot of bible commentators interpret it.

They said well, maybe it's the elephant. Maybe it's the hippo All right. I want to play you a short video.

It's about a minute and a half long I took on location In south africa an experience with an elephant i'll play it for you right now

We're here at wild side at the legends resort we are about to load up on four -wheel drives and Go off on photo safari we know that they have a lot of wildlife here and we're hoping to catch as many of the big five as we can so Let's load up and see how many we can find

One of the big five we're uh, we're going for two right now. There's an elephant sighting not too far up the road.

So It'll be good Check this out.

We just are looking at some Elephants here in south africa and they are truly a sight to behold majestic creatures

One of them swung around just a second ago, he walked right back here I was noticing his tail

You see he's got a small rather small tail And there's a passage in the bible that says that this giant creature behemoth moves his tail like a cedar tree

This beast is described as a chief among what god has made with bones of iron and a massive belly

So people said well, maybe behemoth was an elephant But it doesn't appear to be an elephant because he's got like a little fly swatter tail

However, there are giant long -necked dinosaurs that fit the description of behemoth in the bible

It's far more likely that god was referring to the largest land animal ever created the sauropod dinosaur as behemoth

I'm telling you what though Elephants here in africa are an amazing sight. They remind us of god's creation.

They're Giant ears are shaped almost like the continent of africa and on top of that Their ears

Are very large and they help radiate excess heat from the sun in the african plains here.

So Truly an amazing creature and they should remind us of god's incredible design

All right. Uh, so that is um, it's just a little It's it's just some basics

On why the elephant doesn't make sense as behemoth Why giant sauropod dinosaurs like dreadnoughtus the titanosaurian sauropod?

other dinosaurs 120 130 feet long in some cases make a lot more sense as being the biblical designation

Of a behemoth, right? So dinosaurs seem to be mentioned in the bible But they weren't called dinosaurs because the word dinosaur wasn't wasn't invented at that point

Also, I noticed that we had a question um or a a

A note, let me see if I can find it uh, erica said If we evolve from chimps and apes, why do we still have chimps and apes?

Why did some not evolve? Why is evolution selective to the whole species?

versus partial uh Can I just touch on that question for one second? Yeah, david and then also did you notice that um, erica was actually responding to elise who was asking about um, if why is it that dinosaurs that evolved into birds were the

Saru, I I'm having a hard time pronouncing. Yeah. Okay. You see that comment, too Yes, and and elise that's an excellent point number one uh because you would think that The saurischian dinosaurs would have either gone extinct or not turned into the birds

You would think that these bird type dinosaurs, uh, the bird hip dinosaurs, obviously uh

Would have evolved into these other bird creatures. And so the whole thing is so messed up It doesn't make any sense

It it really goes against Proper evolution. It goes against logic, right if evolution were true

And evolution were logical Then that's not how it would have worked. Okay, so It really goes in the face of evolution number one

Number two, so that's excellent point elise. Uh, erica when you talk about Chimp if if we evolve from chimps and apes, why are there still chimps and apes?

It's a great point But I wouldn't recommend to use that in an actual

Uh debate with a skeptic and here's why here's what they're going to say you see there it's so tricky

There are so many band -aids that you can put over evolutionary theory So what they'll do is they'll say

Well, you see we're not saying that we evolved from chimps and apes. We're saying that There were ape -like ancestors millions of years ago and those ape -like ancestors, whatever they looked like Uh then evolved into chimps and apes on on one path and they evolved into humans on another path

And so we evolved from ape -like ancestors and the apes and humans evolved from ape -like ancestors and we just started to fill certain ecological niches they started swinging from trees and we got intellectual and started philosophizing about our existence and started building cars and Really when you when you break it down to that, it's ridiculous

But you see you you can't even combat atheistic thought with saying well, why do we still have chimps and apes?

They'll say no. No, we didn't evolve from chimps. We didn't evolve from from monkeys. We evolved from ape -like

Ancestors and we don't know exactly what those things look like. We've only got a few specimens of those to try to determine

So evolution as a whole is so tricky. There's really no way to get around this uh

These rescuing devices that have been placed on the theory if it's not logical

Well, then we'll just invent some way to make it work Uh, so anyway good point erica.

Um There's a lot of things wrong with evolutionary theory and There's not enough time to to cover it all tonight, obviously let's talk about What types of fossils that we find i'm going to talk about igno fossils for just a moment uh

Igno fossils Are basically trace fossils. They're fossil imprints of things for instance on the banks of the plexi river in texas

Are a is a trackway And one of these trackways there are 63 acrocanthosaurus dinosaur footprints in a row 63 one after the other after the other after the other there's lots of other footprints

Dinosaur footprints all over the place. There are juvenile, uh dinosaur footprints

Scurrying along but some of these things are big. That's That one pictured is not even nearly

Um, well, that's not the largest one by by far Some of them young children can actually take a bath in they're so big.

They're so deep Uh acrocanthosaurus means high -spined lizard. It was it was very similar to the

The t -rexes that we see but it had a higher spine on it a little bit of a different structure uh

Again, 63 in a row. Now, let me point out a couple of a couple of details about the acrocanthosaurus prints at plexi

Near glenrose, texas. Okay at the plexi river You've got all of these dinosaur footprints in a row

Boom boom boom boom. You've got a bunch of other dinosaurs running along beside it

You have a bunch of young dinosaurs scurrying back and forth and they're all running in one general direction uphill

Okay, let's think about this for a second uh Last time I was at the beach And I left my footprints in the sand

They weren't there but a few hours the tide had washed them away last time I left footprints in mud

After the first rain those footprints were utterly destroyed How do number one how do you preserve footprints in stone?

Well, you have to preserve them first They step in something soft soft enough to leave an impression and then they have to be covered up very rapidly

So all of these dinosaurs, let's just imagine this All of these dinosaurs are running uphill.

They're running away from something I might suggest rising flood waters All right, they're running as fast as they can

They're leaving their footprints behind them a layer of tsunami of mud basically comes crashing down on top of the tracks that they just left and it pancakes it it

Sandwiches the prints and it preserves those prints in between the two layers of sediments

So that we can still see those footprints today as the top layer of sediment Breaks off through erosion.

Okay, that's the way it works Right. So if those dinosaurs millions of years ago left their footprints and those footprints laid around for hundreds of years

A few years a few weeks even the dinosaur footprints would not be there any longer.

Okay, they would be eroded away It was catastrophic That these dinosaur footprints were covered over with another layer of mud very quickly

Second clue we've got all of these footprints all headed uphill no dinosaurs

Guess what you find several miles up the road in the next the upper layers the next layers of sediment

You find the dinosaurs Okay, so the dinosaurs are running away from some catastrophic event

I'm gonna say rising flood waters with tsunamis Chase they're running away from these tsunami waves of mud and debris and sediments

It covers over their footprints A little ways up the next layers up. They can run no faster.

They can run no farther The mud comes boom collapses on top of them. It preserves the dinosaurs themselves

Within these layers of sediment. This is super powerful evidence Of a catastrophic event of a worldwide flood just like we read about In our bibles in the historical book of genesis

Uh in genesis chapter 6 we read about this flood that reshaped the earth as we know it

All right So we've got these acrocanthosaurus footprints. These would be an example of ichnofossils of trace fossils

What other types of fossils do we find? Well, we find fossils of many many creatures including clams

I know a lot of you right now, um who were with me, uh on the the most recent paleontological excavation are smiling because you probably stepped on uh, oh

I would say Millions of those clams during the course of the excavations. All right

Millions of clams in kansas. All right. I brought along just this one fossilized clam.

This one's not from kansas uh, but this This type of bivalve is is known.

Okay It's turned to stone fossilized in the closed position as we see

All right. Well, it's interesting that these types of creatures can burrow in mud and sand whatever

All right, and they will often burrow in mud and sand and then they'll come back out and they'll burrow and they'll come back out

All right Well, we know that these particular types of creatures can burrow

Up to four feet in sand and work their way out If you bury these underneath the five feet of mud or sand they can work their way out

If you bury them underneath six feet of mud or sand they can work their way out

If you bury them underneath seven feet They can work their way out if you bury these things underneath more

Than seven feet. Let's just say eight feet or more They cannot work their way out.

They will die before they can work their way out. It's too much pressure, it's too much sediment on top of them.

Well, we find millions of these all around the globe. Closed clams, clams in the closed position.

This is something catastrophic. These clams died underneath so much sediment before they were able to work their way out.

Okay, clams typically open up, the muscles disintegrate, and they'll drift, the two halves of a bivalve will drift apart.

But that's not what we find in many, many places. And I'm telling you what, in Kansas, it is truly spectacular.

You'll find clams, we've seen them out there, you know, a foot and a half in diameter, maybe a little bit more.

In the same area where I lead these paleontological excavations, you will find them up to four or four and a half feet in diameter.

Giant clams. And that indicates a catastrophe because we're talking about over 1 ,000 miles from the nearest ocean, 2 ,500 feet above sea level.

What are clams doing there? The secular explanation, there must have been a giant inland sea.

You see, there are always these rescuing devices for every theory. But it is much, much more plausible that these areas were the pre -flood shallow seas that started to shift during tectonic movement, that started to get buried underneath these layers of mud.

And not only clams, but so much more. And we'll get into that in just a second. I wanna show you one other video.

This one is some of the more interesting creatures that we find buried in mud layers. This particular type we find in Texas many times.

It's called Areops megacephalus. Let me show you one really weird thing.

It's not exactly a dinosaur, but this is called Areops megacephalus.

Now, Areops megacephalus was a creature that seemed like it was almost part salamander, giant salamander, as big as an alligator.

So it's very, very large. Areops megacephalus means broad face, large head.

So it had a very wide face and a very large head. And the whole thing was extremely large, especially for a salamander type animal.

But these have been found partially mummified in Texas of all places, in Texas.

So you find different types of creatures all around the world. And some of them are in remarkable shape.

When we're talking about partially mummified, that's when you can start to find things like tissues, skin samples, soft tissues, blood vessels, all sorts of things.

Even in some cases, in these mammoths, you find the stomach contents, their last meals preserved so well.

Areops megacephalus. Again, a shout out to Buddy Davis. Buddy, I spent a day or so with Buddy and Kay up at their cabin, gracious people.

And he took me out to his workshop and he gave this piece to me. I donated it to our collection.

So again, Buddy is great. Yeah, DJ, I noticed you said it looks a little bit like that head that we dug up.

It does look a little bit like it, like a small one. But you do find those types of creatures in the

Permian. You find them partially mummified, like I said, in Texas. So there's a vast variety of creatures.

We talked about clams a long way from the sea.

We've got fish a long way from the sea. This came from just a few miles from where we were previously working in September.

I lead these tours every September to Kansas. And this particular piece is one of the most famous ever found there.

That is a 18 foot long scissortail zafactinus. And you see the fish in the middle of it.

Well, that's a gillicus that the zafactinus swallowed and it is still not digested.

In other words, it swallowed this other fish and then they were both buried so quickly that nothing was digested and they were both preserved in stone.

That is, I don't know, that's pretty rare. It points to something catastrophic. Here's some of the field work out in Kansas.

You can see these are, so we call the Niobrara formation. The Niobrara formation is chalk mostly.

And in that chalk, you find all of these giant remains, including those clams, including those fish.

This chalk, you'll find lots of shark's teeth. In fact, listen, Elise.

Elise found one of the best shark's teeth that I think we've ever found out there in Kansas.

It was very, very large. And we actually have that on display here at the

Wonders of Creation Center. We can't wait to get Elise out here to see some of those finds. So that was exciting.

What we do is, and I feel like I'm going over some of this because so many of you were there with me in Kansas, but I know many will be watching this after the fact.

And so I just wanna go through the process just for a moment. What we typically do, we find a fossil or a remnants of a fossil.

It could be articulated, it could be disarticulated. That means that it could be broken apart into multiple fragments.

It might not be the entire creature, whatever the case. Then when we find those things, we like to excavate just a little bit.

We have to see how far those samples go, how far the animal goes. And then once we determine how far the animal goes back into the rock, we find the edges of it.

We cut around the edges of it. We then cut basically a mushroom shape in the rock there and we plaster over it.

So we take a plaster cast, a plaster jacket, just like you would plaster, put a cast over a broke bone and we take it back to the lab and that's where we excavate it.

I'm gonna show you another video clip. This one was of an animal, a gillicus that we found a couple of years ago.

In this same spot. All right, you guys, come on into one of the displays at the

Wonders of Creation Center. I wanna share this with you. Check this out, we just got this.

This is a gillicus. It's similar to the scissortails efactinus.

I don't know if you can see this, but that is a five, approximately five foot long fish, fossil fish.

Let's get even closer if we can. And this fish,

I actually was part of the team that found this several years ago and we just got it on display here at the

Wonders of Creation Center. So it's really exciting to have this. That was an amazing find.

I remember it was on the edge of a cliff and we worked for many days right on the edge of a cliff looking down, we were having to work in very perilous conditions and we were able to get that piece out and now it's on display here.

So that is a major, major blessing, but fully articulated.

There's a few bones missing. That was a very, very complete structure. Erica mentioned out of place fossils.

I know in archeology, many people call them oop arts, out of place artifacts, right? But out of place fossils are actually pretty common.

You will find sea creatures buried with land plants all over Tennessee in my area.

You will find, as you said, different mammals and all sorts of stuff jumbled together.

Again, you will find pterosaurs jumbled with the fish fossils that we find in Kansas.

You'll find, of course, mastodons or mammoths jumbled with all of that as well.

There are so many things jumbled together and secularists, they don't really have a good explanation for that.

Most of the time, they just don't talk about it, number one, but they don't have good explanations for why we find these fossils sometimes out of order, why we find these fossils jumbled together with other types of fossils that supposedly lived millions of years apart from another, and there are no really good explanations for that.

So most of the time, secularists will avoid it. In some situations, they will say that tectonic movement pushed up a layer on top of another layer and that the uplift caused one layer that is older than the layer above it to be on top, making it look like it's a younger layer, and so therefore, there's our excuse.

Sometimes that is the case. Sometimes there are uplifts that will shift things around like that, but those are rare.

Most of the time, it's a serious problem for secularists. Now, I was showing you a picture of Sunrise.

This was on the last, I took this one on the last day of our excavation this September, and this was as we were all packing up.

It was kind of a bittersweet moment. I think I even have pictures of, oh, who is this? I think some of you might recognize yourselves in these pictures right here.

We would hang out and we would have lunch. We would really have a lot of good fellowship in the field, just take a break digging up bones and go have conversations, meaningful conversations.

This was, again, many of you might recognize yourselves in this photo, but this was at one particular find and we were in the middle of excavating that.

We would load those things onto the backs of these four -wheel drive side -by -sides that you see in the photo, and then we would take them back to the ranch, and then at the very end, then we would take those back to our paleo lab here in Tennessee.

Some of them, obviously, we will store other places because our leave in the field to work on in another time if they are not as significant or if they're just too large to get out because there's always next year.

It's super exciting though. Digging up bones in the field also requires a little bit of exploration.

So we would go on scouting missions to try to find the fossils. Before we actually started working on a site, we had to find the sites of interest, and sometimes that's super fun too.

It's a little bit like a needle in a haystack, but at the same time, when you come across something for the first time, you really get pumped about that.

We actually had some help. Listen, this is Pete. Pete was one of our digging dogs.

He would help us dig, and it was a major benefit for us, but he thought he was digging to try to find himself a cool spot in the dirt.

So it works out mutually beneficial. This is a past trip to Kansas.

This was the most recent trip. We would hang around at nighttime singing songs, standing around the lake, just really, really great times, learning a lot about God's creation, but sometimes you find things that are significant.

Sometimes you find things that are impressive, things like the

Gillicus, things like some of the things we found on the past, this last trip, that fishtail that we had found is very impressive, and we still haven't gotten into the second plaster jackets that we pulled out, so we don't know exactly what we have there, but we're working on that.

This was one of the trips where we had found a portion of a jawbone. This was one of the trips where we were plastering up a section of rock with a fossil inside of it to take that out.

One of the trips, I actually took a three -dimensional subsurface radar. It's kind of exciting.

Many years ago, I was trained in ground -penetrating radar, three -dimensional subsurface radar, which is a technology where you can dig, where you can run an antenna over the surface of the ground, and you can see what's underneath the ground for up to 30 feet, sometimes more.

They used it a lot to find mass graves in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would use it for bridge work.

They would use this technology to locate structural problems in roads, to locate wires in a concrete slab.

But in archeology and paleontology, it's kind of a rare thing. So we were able to take these units out and try to explore.

Fish bones are so delicate. It's hard to see them with this technology. But in some cases, you can spot the skeletal remains underneath the ground before you even put a spade in.

So it's kind of exciting technology. This was our last day of the last excavation in September.

I see a lot of friends in this picture, and I know a lot of you are watching tonight. So we can't wait to do this again.

And this was the picture that I had taken, I guess it was the first or second night that we got there.

The stars are spectacular, unbelievable. I mean, it's very little light pollution out there.

And anyone who knows me knows that I'm very passionate about astrophotography, about how the heavens declare the glory of God.

Now, I just wanna give you a sneak preview of a very secret thing.

You can't tell anybody about this. Oh, wait, is this going out online right now? All right.

No, we're not gonna send it out. No, it's okay, it's okay. You can put it out.

But you get a sneak preview of our paleo lab and of some of the fossils that we found on the last mission.

All right, so it's okay, you can keep recording. But again, this is brand new, you are getting a sneak peek at it.

And now for the super secret room behind the scenes, you guys are getting a look at this.

This is what we like to call the paleo lab. Don't tell anyone

I let you in here. All right, this is our paleo lab.

This is where we have specimens, plaster jackets from previous excavations.

We've got tools that we use in the field and in the lab. We have vacuum systems to keep the dust down.

Here's where we mix some of the chemicals that we use in the prep, like adhesives and things like that.

These are some of the fossils we found in the most recent excavation.

I led a paleontological tour to Kansas. We had about 21 people and it looks like in our next trip, next in 2021, we are going to have even more than that.

So it's really exciting. What you see here, we have microscopes.

We have a dark field microscopes for more biology, biological samples, as well as epi -illumination for geology and paleontology.

We have displays where children and groups can actually watch us excavate and even participate in some excavation.

What you're actually looking at here is a scissortails effectinus, the tail section. You can see this one was actually longer.

It was about out to here and we found the pieces that had eroded away. So we'll be able to restore this.

We excavated all of this matrix over the top of this off. And on this side, we're almost through.

We've got some areas to work on, but we're able to excavate all of this.

We're able to allow others to participate in the excavations. We have tools like, for instance, this is a

Chicago that you're looking at right here. This is like an air -driven jackhammer, miniature jackhammer, like an air scribe.

And then we've got some of the chemical components we use to preserve this. Over here, this is from a different specimen.

This is some type of a gel bone yet to be determined. But we found that in the most recent excavation as well.

Again, vacuum systems to keep the dust down. We have cameras and it's just really exciting, but I wanted to give you guys a quick look at a behind the scenes.

The paleo lab here at the Wonders of Creation Center, again, just our secret.

So Elise, you got to make it out here. We need some help excavating these things. The in -lab work is pretty tedious, but it's exciting.

We were able to uncover a lot more of that fishtail. Some of it is pretty flaky.

And so we think we may have lost a little portion of it just through erosion, but we still have portions of it to put back together again.

So really exciting, really exciting stuff. All right, I'm gonna do a couple of other things as we wrap up.

Number one, you do find Tylosaurs, Mosasaur, Leviathan type creatures in Kansas.

On these same excavations, I've actually found portions, small portions of what appear to be their skulls before, but to find the whole thing is spectacular because some of them were over 50 feet in length.

In our sea fossils display, this is a giant

Mosasaur. It is a Tylosaur, Leviathan type creature. This one's a juvenile, a small one, of course, but you can see these types of things when you come to the center with actual chunks of jaws from the adults.

This one is a copy, it's a reproduction. This, of course, is the real deal because we actually found this one, and this is the real deal, just a portion of the jaw off of one of the adults.

Look at that, had hundreds of those teeth. Got a couple other cool things to show you.

All right, and finally, let's talk just a little bit about, we said, what types of fossils did we find?

Well, we find ichthnofossils, trace fossils. We find fossils a long way from the sea of sea creatures.

We find very well preserved fossils, but occasionally we find not so much fossils is what

I like to call them, and that's things like soft tissue, all right? So a few years ago, some of my colleagues had discovered soft tissue in a

Triceratops horn, and we actually did a documentary about this called Echoes of the

Jurassic. It was produced by the Creation Research Society, and it had a custom music soundtrack.

It looks at the laboratory test. You can see stretchy tissue being stretched.

Now, here's the thing. So a number of years ago, some of you already know this story, two paleontologists are working in the

Hill Creek Formation in Montana, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, her colleague, Dr. Jack Horner. They come across a remarkably well -preserved

T. rex, okay? It's lying there in the rock, very well -preserved. The femur bone, the leg bone of it, they say, well, we gotta get this out.

We have to get this back to the lab. So they bring in a helicopter. They're going to cradle the bone underneath the helicopter and take it back to the lab, but it's too large.

So they get a bright, I mean, because it's giant. It's a T. rex leg bone, all right?

So they get the bright idea to cut it in half, and then they're going to take one half out, helicopter it out.

They'll take the other half out. They'll glue it back together. Sounded like it should work. Well, it did work, but when they cut the bone in half, what they realized was that there was still soft tissue inside of it, soft, stretchy blood vessels, collagen, proteins, osteocytes, things that should not be there if that dinosaur had been lying in the rock for 66 plus million years.

And soft tissue, stretchy still to this day. That doesn't survive for 66 plus million years.

And it shocked the secular paleontological community. And they started coming up with all of these rescuing devices, all of this duct tape.

How do we figure out how to make soft tissue last for 66 plus million years? Well, there's not been any good ways to fix this huge problem for evolutionary scientists to date, but if the dinosaurs were buried catastrophically, rapidly in a worldwide flood thousands of years ago, well, then that would have preserved them very well, preserved them so well that even though the outsides of certain bones may have started to fossilize, well, inside, there's still remnants of soft tissue in some cases.

And most significantly, listen, there was a hadrosaur vertebra that they introduced a stain to it.

And the stain only clings to double helix DNA. That means that it's got base pairs still inside of it.

And it lit up, the dye lit up on it, which means that there's technically, there could be

DNA still inside some of these bones that have soft tissue. Well, that's Jurassic Park type stuff right there.

It's really exciting, but is it exciting? I mean, genetic experiments, Jurassic Park, I don't know.

It's exciting, but scary. So are people going to use that ethically moving forward?

There's no way to know. We still don't have nearly enough knowledge into this world.

But since the initial soft tissue discovery, over 80 secular reports have been filed of soft tissue in dinosaur bones.

That's in the secular literature. And then many of my friends and colleagues, we're still finding this in bones.

I'll show you a little clip here. What you're looking at here is a replica of a

Triceratops horn. And the Triceratops horn is very important because colleagues of mine who are

Christians actually found soft tissue in specimens like this.

And we worked together on a documentary. I was the host, Creation Research Society produced it.

And we did a documentary called Echoes of the Jurassic, where we look at soft tissue in things like a

Triceratops horn, in things like hadrosaur vertebrae, in things like T -Rex femur bones.

All over the place, we're seeing these reports of soft tissue.

And now, fellow colleagues, Christians, are now finding the exact same things that our secular colleagues have found for years now.

And yes, Robin, I just saw your comment. The Mosasaur is the creature in the Jurassic Park, the newer

Jurassic Park movies that, yeah, that plays a major part in the end of the movie. I won't spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it.

Listen, we cover, I'm approaching the hour mark here. So I'm just gonna say, we cover a lot of breaking discoveries, including the new soft tissue research in our magazine and on our website.

You can get to the magazine for free. It's delivered to your door every other month.

It's called the Creation Club magazine. My brother and I formed the Creation Club a number of years ago as a place for biblical creationists to share and learn.

So you can submit your articles, submit your ideas to this platform, to this website.

It goes through a moderation process, and then we put it up on the website. The best articles are then chosen for the

Creation Club magazine. Those, and then it's put in print form. It goes out to over 10 ,000 households all over America every other month, free of charge.

You can sign up for that on our website. Connie says the magazine is great for preteens too.

Yeah, we do include children's activities. We'll include word finds.

We'll include articles that are very simple. We like to look at creatures, like God's amazing design throughout the animal world.

So it's great for children and adults. And then we give ministry updates in there as well.

But we do all of this free. It's our way of outreach. We're a 501c3 nonprofit. And we just like blessing other people.

The Lord has blessed us tremendously over the past 13 years in being able to share this information with millions.

I'm talking about millions of people, 100 million households in America have access to creation in the 21st century every week.

I've hosted that now for coming on eight seasons. We've got millions over in the

Middle East, millions in Israel that see our program every night, our Wonders Without Number television program, every night on the largest cable provider in Israel.

We have TikTok with millions and millions of views, YouTube and Facebook, Facebook, hundreds of thousands of friends, and we're interacting on a daily basis.

So it's our passion to get this information out. We do most of it for free. We appreciate the prayers and support that you guys give us.

But sign up for our free Creation Club magazine, go to the website, submit an article.

Let's get your content out to the world. I'm gonna look at one other thing as we conclude, and then

I'd love to take a couple of questions and answers. And the last thing is

Genesis Science Network. Genesis Science Network is our free 24 -7 television network.

My brother and I love watching Discovery Channel, National Geographic, NOVA, PBS, NASA TV.

And yet we got so tired, we love the science. We love the science that they present.

And at the end of every program, they would always get to the end. And so all of this evolved over millions and millions of years.

Evolution has taken place, and it's given us the universe in such abundance. And I'm like, why can't we give the creator glory for his creation?

And so my brother and I founded this network. It was the Lord, because within three months, we had a fully functioning 24 -7 network up online.

It went to 24 -7. It went to Roku. It went to Amazon Fire TV. It went to...

Then channels around America started calling us up, and they were like, David, can we have the 24 -7 feed?

We've got an extra channel that we don't know what to put on it. So, I mean, in South Carolina, you can watch this in Greenville 24 -7 just by flipping on your

TV, free of charge. If you've got any of these devices, your iPads, your

Apple TVs, your Rokus, and so forth, you can find

Genesis Science Network, and we receive salvation reports as a result of the network.

So go check it out. It's a great resource. Again, like our Facebook page.

And I would just encourage you, go out there. Let's dig up bones.

Let's look at God's creation, because when you actually get into the field, you see the history comes alive.

Not only the biblical history, but the significance of it, because I don't wanna stop at just digging up bones.

I want there to be a lesson behind it, and the lesson is there was a judgment on the earth.

That judgment is preserved in stone for us to see. We dig up the fossils of all of these dead things, these things that perished during a global flood, all right?

But the ones that went through the one door of Noah's Ark, the animals and the humans that went through that door, well, they actually made it through the flood.

Eight people were all that got on and got off of the Ark, right? Narrow is the way.

There's one door. God stands at your door and he knocks. That's because God loves you so much that he reduced himself to flesh.

He came to this earth to live, to die, to be raised again. He wants to be with you for eternity.

So the gospel message is key to everything that we do. And if you're not taking the science and connecting it with God's word, if you're not taking the science and connecting it with the gospel, you're missing out on a witnessing tool that you can use.

It's not just about the evidence. It's about how we can use the evidence to share the gospel, ultimately the gospel message with others.

So I just wanna thank you for allowing me to come on, share some of these things. It was a very relaxed, sort of easy format.

I know I wasn't too formal today. I just wanted to share some little video clips and some of the things that we've recently uncovered in the field of paleontology.

Well, that was really great. Yes, and I don't like a lot of really formal things.

So I thought it went really well. David, we do have a question that came from somebody following along on Facebook.

Heather has a seven -year -old son who lives and breathes dinosaurs. In fact, he goes around telling everybody that he's gonna be a paleontologist when he grows up.

And she says their yard is full of holes to prove it. So she does provide him a lot of books about dinosaurs to read, especially creation -themed creation books.

But she wants to know any suggestions that you have on how to continue to encourage his desire to learn more.

Yeah, well, as a young person, probably about eight or nine years old,

I started getting into collecting rocks. I would dig up those. I had a lot of holes in my family's backyard, and I would find these little shell imprints.

I would find these pieces of coral, right? And I'd be like, the flood, the flood, everywhere we look, it's all marine, it's all ocean life, right?

And so that's the perfect way to get started. The second way to get started is to get outside of your home state and go visit another place.

I don't know, wherever you're from, try to go out and experience a different situation.

I know we've got a lot of people commenting on Zoom here how they've been to Texas or the Appalachian Mountains or England or wherever.

That's the best thing to do. Now get outside of your home state and see how all of geology worldwide shows this catastrophic evidence of the biblical flood.

And then come with me on a paleontological dig. Again, you don't have to have a lot of experience. We will teach you everything you need to know.

I think the youngest we've ever had was, well, I guess the youngest we've ever had was less than four, but that may be a little bit too young to really grasp the concepts, but it's never too young to start learning.

So just get out there and explore like you're doing right now. You will want to equip yourself with resources, with books, with videos, and then get outside of your state and then come with me on one of the paleontological digs that I host.

Okay, that's great. And then DJ wants to know, David, what is the coolest fossil you have ever found?

Oh, the coolest fossil I've ever found. That would be hard to say.

It is hard to pick favorites, I'll just have to say. I don't know, I don't know.

The coolest one that I've ever worked on, I've worked on big dinosaur bones like ceratopsids and things like that in Colorado, but I'll have to say these giant

Acrocanthosaurus theropod footprints that you can find in Texas, when you imagine the size of the actual creatures, that kind of leaves you in awe.

You can put your foot next to it and see that. So that's one of the coolest.

And then I would say the second coolest was not a fossil per se, as it was a piece of archeological evidence.

And I have friends in the Israeli government, we're hoping to lead a tour over to Israel very soon, but our team found a tiny little cylinder seal.

So again, it's not a fossil, it's a little seal made of glass quartz, and it had the impression of the moon

God's sin on it. So you would roll it out on wax and it makes the impression of a moon, of a pagan

God, right? Well, you can trace that pagan God all the way to Ur of the Chaldees, which is where Abraham came out of.

And yet we found this in Jerusalem. Now we found this in an area dating to the time of King Solomon.

Well, we know that King Solomon got caught up in the worship of pagan gods towards the end of his life.

So many people fell into that trap. And here we see pagan worship during the time of King Solomon's reign in Jerusalem, he had allowed it to infiltrate even that holy ground of Jerusalem.

And there's an important lesson because we can't let ourselves become so infatuated with whatever we're doing that it becomes an object of worship, right?

That's what they were doing. They would look up at the moon and they were so fascinated, or the sun, and they would look up with as they're so fascinated, let's worship it.

They worship the created more than the creator. They worship the creature more than the creator is the way that the

King James puts it. Well, wait a second. We can't worship the creature, the dinosaurs more than the creator.

As we're digging up fossils, be sure to always point back to the creator of those animals.

Definitely. Okay, well, it seems like our questions, I don't think that we've reached the end of the question.

So David, I thank you so much for coming back. We really enjoyed your last presentation and you mentioned that you could come back and talk about dinosaurs and so you did.

And we're glad that you did that too. So if you'd like to pray to close us out and then after that, we'll go ahead and turn off the recording and the live stream and then we can let the people in Zoom turn on their cameras to thank you and say goodbye, okay?

That'd be great. That'd be great. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this opportunity to share you and to share your glory with others.

We just appreciate everything that you've done for us. We thank you for all of the opportunities, the wonders without number that we find all around us that proclaim your glory.

We thank you for your sacrifice for us. We thank you for what you did for us, dying on the cross, being raised again in payment for our sins, that you want to be with us for eternity, that you love us so much.

We thank you, we thank you, we thank you. We know that this is a perilous time. We ask that you would just be with us, be with the world as we're fighting all of these evils that have encompassed us and be with America as we fight these evils.

It seems like an increasing, increasing frequency year by year.

It's an amazing time to be alive, but it's a scary time to be alive. We know that you have everything under control.

And we just ask that you would please help us remember that we're in your hands.

Again, we thank you for this opportunity to share today. We pray all of these things in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Amen. Okay, so we are going to leave Facebook, goodbye Facebook.