G1 Conference Session 1: Brian Thomas "Dinosaurs and the Bible"

Genesis Apologetics

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Hello, and welcome to the best session at the G1 conference. It's the dinosaur session.

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I hope you guys are ready for this. I am a dinosaur scientist, and so obviously it's my favorite topic, and I talk about dinosaurs.

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They're just so interesting and fascinating, and I love to put the pieces of the puzzle together about how dinosaurs, instead of refuting the

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Bible, actually confirm the Bible in three different ways. So welcome to the

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Institute for Creation Research here in Dallas. I'm here at the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History, and boy, we've got a beautiful stage and beautiful facilities here, and we want you to come visit.

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So whenever you're in town in Dallas, come and see the Discovery Center. You can walk through a room of Noah's Ark.

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You can see a diorama of the life of Christ. We've got dinosaurs on display, 360 videos.

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You can go in to experience the Ice Age. We have a lot going on here, and we have dinosaurs going on today.

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So I've got three questions that we're going to answer, and I'm going to let science do the answering for us.

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And the first question is going to be, where did they come from? We'll answer the question, where did they come from?

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Well, I was taught that they came from evolution over millions of years, and that's where they came from. But here

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I am outside the Field Museum in Chicago, leaning on this brachiosaur leg.

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These things were immense, just tremendous size, stature, structure.

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How do you build? Let's say you're going to build a building, and you want it to walk around.

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You want to build maybe the Star Wars AT -AT walker, something like that, where it's a giant thing and it walks around, and it's heavy.

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I mean, how do you do this? And if you look at the details of the construction of these animals' bodies, we start to come up with good answers as to where did they come from.

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Did they come from natural processes, or does their construction demand supernatural processes?

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I came to believe the latter, especially after I saw this placard, this sign on display at the

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Field Museum in Chicago. And it says sauropods. Sauropods, you know, that's the dinosaurs with the four legs, long necks, four legs that go down, long necks, long tails, were, sauropods were engineered.

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They were engineered. Well, last I checked, anything that's engineered was engineered by an engineer.

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It's like a painting was painted by a painter. It's just intuitive, and it's valid.

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And so there's every reason to think that, hey, if these things were engineered, then an actual engineer must have done that engineering, and not natural processes.

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And specifically, we're going to zoom in on this. Here it says, strong pillar -like legs.

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You got to have that. A light, hollowed -out vertebrae.

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That's the neck bones. I'll show you a picture of that in a second. That strengthens the backbone.

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That way, sauropods were specially adapted, I would say specially crafted, why not say what we're looking at, to grow so large.

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They have to have all these specializations and features in place all at once in order to do what they did.

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Where do they come from? Well, here I am at the Carnegie, sorry, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and there's

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Diplodocus behind me, and you could see all those neck vertebrae and raised ridges, hollowed -out spaces, super lightweight, weight -saving features.

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Had to have it. If these were block -shaped, heavy, dense bones like most other dinosaurs' bones were, then

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I mean, his neck would be too heavy. If his head was big and had a big brain, his head would be too heavy, and he'd lie his head on the ground and just,

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I guess, eat worms until he died or something. I mean, you've got to have all these features in place for him to do what he did, or she, walking around.

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And standing in one place could eat for an hour just off of one or two trees just by moving that neck, not spending a lot of energy, but gaining a lot of energy from the way that it lived its life and ate.

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Well, weight -saving neck features raised ridges at exactly the point where it needed at structural integrity.

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So engineers marvel at how excellent these things were crafted. And I'm looking also here,

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I'm taking a picture of a few colleagues of mine working on one of the biggest

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Triceratops skulls ever found, and they found it in, let's see where the, this is in Texas, but they shipped it from where they found it in Wyoming, Lance Formation.

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So 2 ,000 pounds, just the head. I mean, how do you anchor a 2 ,000 -pound head to a body and have that head not just fall off?

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I mean, you need a solid anchor. Have you ever thought about what it takes to hitch a 2 ,000 -pound trailer to a car?

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I mean, you have to have a sturdy, well, it's a trailer hitch, and it's got a ball and it swivels on the ball on the trailer.

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Same thing with Triceratops heads, and here on display at this museum in Texas, it shows the ball, you know, on the, that anchors the

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Triceratops head to its body. There's the ball, called a condyle, and then there's the socket.

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You can see it, actually, I'm going to see if I can point to it here. Here's the socket here, and it fits right on the surface of this ball, and so this connects to the vertebrae, this connects to the head, and they connect together.

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And that way, these creatures could actually spar with one another. I mean, they could actually take their horns and ram them into one another.

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We know because of holes in the frill, the big frill, the big head crest, and the hole is just the shape of one of these horns.

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Anyways, so that's a lot of mass, and it needs a tight junction.

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Can you imagine this 2 ,000 -pound head connected to the body with a sauropod vertebrae, you know, it just wouldn't work at all.

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So we have exactly the right construction for what each of these creatures' bodies needed, and Triceratops was like a walking tank, and everything about it was just what an engineer would have done, and so I think this fits what we see here in Genesis 125.

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And God made the beasts of the earth, Triceratops included, Brachiosaurus included,

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Diplodocus included. God made, not nature made. Well, so some people say, you know, maybe

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God made it through natural processes. Okay, maybe,

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I mean, he could, right? He could use evolution, I guess, in theory. But the problem with that is he said that he didn't.

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So are you going to go with what he said? Are you going to believe his word? And I've come around to thinking, yeah,

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I want to believe his word, just like the Lord Jesus did. The Lord Jesus took, I mean, he referred to Adam, he referred to Enoch, he referred to Noah and to Moses as though these were real people who experienced the things that Genesis says they lived through.

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Jesus thought that way also, and so who am I to know more than the Lord Jesus, the creator and sustainer of the universe?

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So I'm going to take his word for it. And the more science I see, the construction, the design, where do they come from?

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Clever design says they came from creation, not from evolution. If evolution explains it, then why don't we see, you know, transitioning fossils that go from one form of dinosaur into another form?

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Or for that matter, transitioning fossils that show reptile morphing into a dinosaur.

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It's either a dinosaur or it's the other reptile. It's a triceratops or it's not a triceratops, or ceratopsian anyways.

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Lots of varieties of ceratopsians. Some of them had lots of little horns on their frill, some had no horns on their frill, but all of them have the basic tank -shaped body, body plan, and some kind of frill, and so they're all ceratopsians, and God created them as ceratopsians to multiply and fill the earth, the pre -flood earth.

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So I think these fossils came from, well, the creatures came from clever design, but how did the fossils get here?

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So that's kind of our next question. When did they live? And we've got two paradigms.

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The one I grew up believing, the paradigm I grew up believing says that these lived something like 200 and plus million years ago, and they all died out 66 or so million years ago.

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Millions of years. And I believed that because that's all I had been taught. But then

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I started studying a particular feature about dinosaur bones, and that is carbon -14.

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So carbon -14, as I explained in the fossil session that we had a bit ago, it has a maximum shelf life of 100 ,000 carbon years.

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Those are theoretical years. That's in theory the longest you can get carbon -14 to last before all of it turns into nitrogen.

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So if we find any carbon -14 in a dinosaur bone, and it's in the dinosaur bone, not stuck to the surface of it later on or anything like that, but actually in part of the bone itself, if we find that, then it's got to be fewer than 100 ,000 years.

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And so we've got two paradigms. One is the millions of years paradigm, and the other is the flood paradigm.

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And in this flood model, we have creation in Genesis 1, and then we've got the flood,

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Genesis 6, 7, 8, 9. And that flood occurred, according to Genesis, 1 ,656 years after creation.

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And the whole world was flooded, and that's thousands of years ago. So thousands of years ago would fit the thousands of years limit that radiocarbon would bring were we to find it in dinosaurs.

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So several years ago, back before I had all this gray, I was working here at the

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Institute, and there I am trying to get at the interior of a hadrosaur vertebra so I could scrape away some of the bone material and send it off to a radiocarbon dating laboratory, which we did.

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And guess what they found? Radiocarbon. We didn't tell them, you know, necessarily that this was a dinosaur bone because they would just send it back and say, well, this is ridiculous.

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We're not going to do this. This is obviously millions of years old. But you see, that's circular reasoning. Dinosaurs are millions of years old because we think they're millions of years old.

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Why not actually look at the data? And so we collect data here. It's part of what we do as scientists, and we found radiocarbon as though this is fewer than 100 ,000 years old.

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So the flood is fewer than 100 ,000 years old. I think that fits what we found there. Here is, on the right, a

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Triceratops skull on display at the Bozeman – what's that museum in Bozeman?

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The Museum of the Rockies, I think, MOR. And then on the left, you see a

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Triceratops horn core fossil that we acquired here at the

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Institute. And so I broke the thing. Super hard to break. I mean, this – the bone and the structure of this bone is super tough.

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Even so many thousands of years after the flood, when this was deposited, I have now become convinced.

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But why? Why did I break up this beautiful fossil? Well, I want to get at the bone that's in the middle of it.

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You know, I don't want the contaminated parts on the outside of the bone, although the process of carbon dating already removes contaminants by dissolving it all in acid.

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But nevertheless, I want to give it the best shot I can, and so I reached into the interior of this bone, sent it off to a carbon dating lab, and we got radiocarbon – measurable amounts of radiocarbon – as though it's thousands, not millions of years old.

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We just kept doing this. We're like, really? What about some of the –? Now, this bone here is – it's got – it's not very mineralized at all.

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Came from the Hell Creek Formation, so the minerals didn't replace the bone. This is actual bone.

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It looks like it's sort of been baked or something, but it's got the little tiny – it's got the structure of bone.

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These, however – this is Stegosaurus. This is Jurassic, so it's in layers that are below the

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Cretaceous layers, so they were deposited earlier than the Cretaceous layers. But these are highly mineralized, so when you pick up one of these bones, it is rock in the shape of a bone, or mostly rock, or maybe it's just partly rock in the shape of bone.

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So we got a sample from the Carnegie Museum, and we sent it off for radiocarbon dating, and we got radiocarbon in a

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Stegosaurus bone. What's it doing there? I thought it was completely mineralized.

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I thought that the minerals replaced the original bone. Turns out, there's some original bone left, there's some original carbon left, and there's some very young -looking radiocarbon still left in there.

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And we've collected, I'd say, 50 samples from fossils, me and my colleagues around the nation, and we found radiocarbon in all of these.

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So this is actually consistent with what secular geologists and geoscientists have found.

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They've found radiocarbon in coal. Some of this coal has got, you know, ages of like 300 million years, or diamonds.

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You see the picture of diamonds there. Diamonds are supposed to be a billion years old, with a

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B, and yet there's radiocarbon in coal, and there's radiocarbon in diamonds, and they publish these results in the scientific technical literature, but somehow they never make it into the classroom.

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They never make it into the textbooks. But I think they should, because radiocarbon is too young to be a billion years old.

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It's too young to be 300 million years old. It's too young to be 65 million years old. It's too young to be 100 ,000 years old.

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These things all, fossils, earth materials, they all look young according to their radiocarbon content.

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So when did they die? The first question was, you know, how'd they get here?

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Well, God made them. That's how you get such excellent construction. Well, when were they around? Well, the

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Bible gives us a chronology, or a series of timestamps. You go from Adam to Abraham, that's about 2 ,000 years.

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From the first Adam to the last Adam, sorry, from Abraham to the last Adam, that's the

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Lord Jesus, another 2 ,000. And from the Lord Jesus to today, a third 2 ,000 year.

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So it's about 6 ,000 years old, the whole world. Flood about 4 ,400 years ago, that's the

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Bible's chronology. If you add up all the dates and ages, that's the chronology that you get.

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So 4 ,400 years ago, that's how old these fossils are, 4 ,400 years. Well, the thousands of years picture that the

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Bible gives matches what we see in the radiocarbon content of dinosaur fossils.

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And, you know, this fits also with what the Lord Jesus himself said. For example, in Mark 10 .6,

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saying, but from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female.

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Jesus talking to the Pharisees about the origin of marriage. And he's saying, he's quoting, made them male and female.

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That's a quote from Genesis chapter 1, as though it's literal and historical, and that God gets the credit for speaking them into existence.

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When did he do that? Well, billions of years after the Big Bang beginning, right?

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No, not at all. From the very beginning of creation, at the creation week, God made

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Adam and Eve, male and female, in marriage, right there in the beginning, not billions of years after the beginning.

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So the Lord Jesus treated Genesis straightforwardly. And I used to not, but the more

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I looked at how much the science supports this recent creation and recent flood view, the more

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I became convinced that, you know, I think Jesus was onto something here. I think the Bible deserves a little bit more of my respect.

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And that started to change my life. And that's why I do what I do today here at the Institute. So when did they live?

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Thousands of years ago, not millions. And that means they would have gone on board Noah's Ark. Unless they survived, you know, like fishes did outside the ark, you know, smaller versions of the dinosaurs might have gone on Noah's Ark.

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How much of that space would have been taken up? Probably about a third, no more than 45 % of the space on the ark would have been taken up by all the animals.

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Now, he wouldn't have put fishes on the ark. We're talking about land animals and sky animals.

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So birds, pterosaurs, a lot of them have gone extinct since the flood, but they were on board the ark and they survived through the flood, on board this ark according to what scripture teaches.

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And so this leads us to our next question, when did they die? When did they die? They're no longer around.

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I mean, they're not in my backyard. And so when did they die? Well, a bunch of them would have died in Noah's flood.

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And that's where we get the fossils of dinosaurs to prove to us that they really did exist. I got to make that point because I talked to my bike mechanic at the bike shop the other day and he was like, what do you do for a living?

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Oh, I'm a dinosaur scientist, but I believe the Bible. And so he's like, well, that's weird. You know, I talked to some Christians just the other day, he said, and they were like, they were trying to convince me that dinosaurs weren't real.

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And that was their way of dealing with dinosaurs was to just pretend like they're all a fabrication.

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And I just think that's so irresponsible. Of course, they were real. But they weren't really deposited millions of years ago.

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They didn't really evolve. They were created. And they were deposited thousands of years ago in Noah's flood.

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That's why you get fossils at all. And fossils of dinosaurs are found on every continent of the globe, including

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Antarctica. It's a global phenomenon, this fossilization. And these dinosaur fossils are global.

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So it takes a global cause to produce a global effect. Hey, the

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Bible says that there was a global flood. Maybe that's the cause. When did they die? Some of them died in that flood 4 ,400 or so years ago.

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But some survived on the ark, maybe, and lived for some time after the flood.

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What would we expect to find if the dinosaurs and other extinct reptiles survived for a while after the flood?

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Well, we wouldn't find fossils because the fossils were formed during the flood and shortly after the flood.

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So you can't look in fossils. That's flood time. That's the flood year and maybe some fossils a little bit after the flood year.

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But if these creatures persisted into our past, you wouldn't find them because creatures don't form fossils today.

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They just don't. But you might find them in human artifacts. So we have on display here at the

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Discovery Center replicas of some of these artifacts that our ancestors left for us to inspect.

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And here we have a replica of a column at Ta Prohm in Cambodia.

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It's a medieval, European age system. It's medieval, but anyway, it's really old, thousands of years old, this stone carved column.

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And looking closely, we've got this weird guy with a lion face. And we've got real live, above it, you've got a parrot and then there's a bull.

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And then there's this one right here. So let's just zoom into that one. And here's the real one, there's a photo of the real one in Cambodia.

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And it's got these plates on its back. And boy, it looks suspiciously like dinosaurs that we might know from fossils only.

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And so how did these ancients know what this creature looked like and were able to carve it with a reasonable amount of fidelity to the original form?

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I mean, no artist is perfect. So you've got to expect these guys to get some of the anatomy a little bit off, just like you do when you draw things.

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And I do anyway. Maybe you're like an expert illustrator, but these guys were maybe not that.

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Anyway, so there's that. That's Cambodia. What about Egypt? So we've got these long -necked creatures on this really ancient

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Narmor pallet, the Narmor pallet that shows long -necked creatures. Actually, those look like these long -necked creatures on a little tiny cylinder seal from Uruk, which is in modern -day

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Iraq. And this is also, let's say, 3 ,000

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BC, something like that. That's the secular age, at least several millennia old.

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And those, I mean, long tail even, long neck, necks intertwined, looks like what

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I saw when I went to Carlisle Cathedral. In fact, these sauropod lookalikes in a brass grave decoration with tails, long tails, legs go straight down, long necks intertwined.

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It's been worn off by foot traffic. But these have, like, tail spikes. And it wasn't until the 1990s when scientists discovered

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Shunosaurus, a sauropod with four tail spikes. And this guy has, of course, four tail spikes.

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But this was carved in the early 1400s, whereas this was discovered in the 1900s.

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And so, how did they know the exact anatomy unless they saw the thing alive there, first or secondhand at least?

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And then in Europe, we have other places in Europe, like here in Chateau du Chambord in France.

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We've got a Platyosaurus lookalike carved in a castle. And then in Barcelona, Spain, we've got a depiction of St.

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George slaying the dragon. Well, where did they get this particular dragon? It's not a dinosaur, at least, yeah, we wouldn't call it a dinosaur.

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But it exactly resembles a Nothosaurus, which is a Triassic marine semi -aquatic reptile.

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So the teeth go outside of its mouth. It's got the right size, the right body proportions, head proportion.

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I mean, it fits exactly what we know from the Nothosaurus fossils. And there it is. You can see it today on display.

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Well, it's in a government building, so it's not like it's on display, but it's there. And then just a few more examples to help us answer this question, when did they die?

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They died off after the flood in many places, in many cases.

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So here is a Nile of mosaic, and it's in Palestrina. And it's like a little temple.

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This was constructed with little pieces of tile, so it's a mosaic. And the artists who did this were alive and constructing it just before the

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Lord Jesus. So we're talking about 100 BC, something like that. Anyway, so they're depicting a scene on the

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Nile, and they're looking at this, so the natives are restless. And what is this thing?

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The Greek lettering says Crocodile Lepordalis, something like that. It's a crocodile -like and it's leopard -like, so it's mammal -like and it's reptile -like.

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Well, we've got fossils of mammal -like reptiles, including Gorgonopsid, with these giant big teeth.

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And you can see the giant big teeth on the depiction there. So anyway, the answer is the flood explains these fossils, explains that most of them died in the flood.

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You get this whole stack of pancake layers of rock formed in just one year. And so this answers our question, and it points to behemoth, behemoth being like a...

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It's got a tail like a cedar. It's a sauropod dinosaur, alive and described by Job. And so the science fits the scripture.

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When did they die? Clashes with dragons from our ancestors. It says that they died thousands, not millions of years ago.

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Clever design supports Genesis 1 creation. Carbon decay supports Genesis flood. And clashes with dragons supports animals, dinosaurs alive after the flood, just like Job indicates for us.

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Have a great rest of your session and be encouraged and equipped to know that scripture is defensible and the

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God who wrote it is trustworthy himself. Thanks.