#91 Dinosaurs, Humans, and the Biblical Timeline + Dr. Tim Clarey

Big claim that we're going to be discussing today, dinosaurs. Did they really live alongside humans? Welcome back to the show, Dr. Tim Cleary. So dinosaurs, what is your hot take on that?

People have so many questions about dinosaurs.

Looking back at the Bible now, is there like a word that we should look for in a dinosaur?

Tannin or tannin, which is often translated as dragon in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. You can also see the Hebrew word behemoth and leviathan, which I think might be referring to actual dinosaurs that were still alive after the flood.

Do you think that dinosaurs are the pre-evolved chickens? Why aren't more people talking about it? Why is it more hidden?

Hi, it's Cass.

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Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Blino. Big claim that we're going to be discussing today, dinosaurs. Did they really live alongside humans? And the wonder here is if that is true, why is there no clear record of it in mainstream history?

And more importantly, does the Bible support this claim? Because in past episodes, we've discussed dinosaurs and humans kind of working alongside. I mean, Dr. Robert Carter describes timelines, chronology, mega sequences of rocks.

Dr. Marcus Rocks explored fossil record and pre-flood habitats. And then Dr. Jeff Miller unpacked the global flood and why that matters theologically. But today we're going to take that one step further with a repeat guest.

Welcome back to the show, Dr. Tim Cleary, because we're going to be talking about the key question. Where do dinosaurs actually fit in the biblical timeline? And does that hold up scientifically? I feel like when I was discussing this topic way back when the podcast started, I was like, there's no way there's overlap.

It's something that Christians learn about in school, but then we never talk about in church. I'm so excited to talk to you. And for those that have not seen the last episode I have with Dr. Tim Cleary, go back and listen.

But for those that are new, stay. This is, you know, you're more than qualified to talk about this. You hold a PhD in geology. You spent over a decade studying rock layers across six continents. You've analyzed thousands of geological samples.

You're the author of Carved in Stone. And you work with Institute for Creation Research.

Welcome to the show.

Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here, Cassian. It's always a pleasure.

Okay, so dinosaurs, what is your hot take on them?

Well, I think they're a wonderful way to introduce, you know, the Bible to a lot of young people. You know, everybody loves dinosaurs. Everybody loves dinosaurs. And so how they all fit in. So even though people that are 80, 90 years old, they're still kids at heart.

And they still have this, you know, way back when at some point, everybody was fascinated by dinosaurs. So I think it's a good way to try to reach some of the younger kids in particular, but even some of the adults and explain to them how they all fit into biblical, you know, story, how they, you know, they worthy of the earth.

The people have so many questions about dinosaurs. And because they're told so many things by the conventional scientists and by conventional media, people are often very confused.

Absolutely. I mean, they just aren't addressed specifically. Of all the animals that are talked about in the Bible, you just never hear of Moses or Abraham or Noah interacting with like a stegosaurus.

It just, it seems almost like there's mythical land of like the science world. And then there's like the Bible land that seems completely separate from each other.

Yeah. And I think a part of that is because dinosaurs weren't even, the word wasn't invented until 1841 by Sir Richard Owen. And so we didn't know what a dinosaur was until well after King James Version came out in 1611.

It's over 200 years later before they actually coined the phrase, you know, word dinosaur.

Wait a second.

So that's why you don't see the word dinosaur in the Bible. It's because there wasn't, that word wasn't there. It didn't exist.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So looking back at the Bible now, is there like a word that we should look for where you see it and you're like, they're talking about a dinosaur.

Well, there's some Hebrew word, I think it's pronounced Tanin or Tanin, which is often translated as dragon in the Bible made in several places, especially in the Old Testament. And then you can also see the Hebrew word Behemoth and Leviathan, which I think might be referring to actual dinosaurs that were still alive after the flood that he was talking to Job and saying, look at these creatures I made, you know, what are you?

And I make these things. And this is some of the wonders that I've made, these wonderful creatures. So I think some of these actually refer to dinosaurs, real dinosaurs that existed even after the flood for a while before they finally did go extinct.

I'm pretty sure they're extinct today.

Okay.

And I don't want to get too far off this topic because I have so many questions, but just to follow up on Leviathan and Behemoth, when I, so again, like I talked to so many people, I spoke with Dr. John Walton and when he, so we did a whole thing on Job and it was a wonderful episode, but obviously we got to the Behemoth and Leviathan and he said that was more, it was a Jewish literature element kind of representing like a mythical creature.

And like in that time, it was more story-based rather than an actual animal. Obviously you guys disagree on this.

Yeah, I think he's, I think the Lord was really referring to real animals. He was like, he's pointing at this animal that Job knew about. Job knew this, you know, Behemoth, this big animal that appears to be something like a sauropod or a long neck dinosaur.

You read the description of it and you read through Job 40, you can really see the verbiage. And it even ate grass. You know, for years, people didn't believe grass evolved. If you're an evolutionist, there was supposed to be no grass during the time of dinosaurs.

Even the latest Netflix show on dinosaurs, which is kind of slow, they don't show any grass. And so they, you know, but there really is grass. They found grass in the dinosaur dung right with the sauropod bones back in 2005.

So they found five species of grass that these animals were eating. So they really were, you know, the Bible had the story right all along. We just, you know, scoffed at it as a secular community.

We're like, oh, that can't be.

There was no grass at the time of dinosaurs, but there really was. And so I think these were real features. You know, God talks about a lot of real animals.

Even Job,.

But Jonah was swallowed by some sort of animal. We don't know what it was. Maybe it was specially created just for that. We don't really know what the story was, but Jesus refers to that story as real history.

So it's these things I think, I don't think there's a reason to make them a myth. Just people don't want to believe that these are real. People don't want to have their mind made up that dinosaurs didn't exist with humans.

And if we accept the millions of years timeline, they weren't extinct millions of years ago. And so they don't want to, you know, John Walton also, you know, I think he thinks the beginning of Genesis is just myth of history too.

And so it's, you know, he kind of, so they, you know, if you don't want to believe the biblical timeline, you have to come up with some other way to fit that time into the Bible. And I think that's what he tries to do by saying, these are myths.

And then obviously you can't have dinosaurs and humans. So these must be a myth as well.

Yeah, that's a fair, fair understanding.

You read through it.

It's very descriptive about the teeth and Leviathan and things very, very descriptive.

Will you bring up a good point with Jonah? I mean, do you think that that was some sort, I mean, like what fish today could have swallowed him in three days, like a whale? Is that fair to say, or do we have to think of a different species altogether?

I mean, for all we know, it could have been a huge mosasaur. We don't know what swallowed him up. But I think it obviously was miraculous. There was some sort of miraculous preservation of him and that to happen.

But it was kind of a precursor to Christ dying for three days. And he was in the belly of the whale or the fish or whatever it was for three days. I don't know if they've ever translated that correctly.

But it's an interesting story. Nonetheless, I don't think we'll ever know what that is. And until we get to heaven ourselves, we can ask.

Okay, so let's jump into timelines and stuff. But before we do, like what should we as Christians be aware of, like we don't need to get, like what advice would you give a Christian who says like, well, what's right?

Either they were or they weren't. Do you, as a scholar, as a believer, kind of say like, listen, I don't know this 100%, but what I do know for sure is, what would you say?

Well, for sure, dinosaurs are real. I mean, there's some people that I've had in my classes. I taught at a public college for a while. Some people came in, they didn't believe dinosaurs were even real.

And so they are real. The bones are real. You know, it's one thing I was going to add when he talks about the bones in the book of Job. He's describing the bones, how thick they were, you know, how solid they were.

That's a very good description of a real animal. I mean, why would you? Anyway, to me, they're real. And the question is, do they fit in, where do they fit in the Bible? Because you don't see the word dinosaur in there.

And that's the whole point of this conversation. I think they're the beasts of the earth. You read to the King James, it talks about God created the beasts of the earth. And he doesn't name, you know, camels and horses and all these other animals as well.

He just collectively calls them the beasts of the earth and they will reproduce after their kind. And so I think there's about 60 kinds of dinosaurs. And you look at all the different dinosaurs found, there's, you know, over a thousand species named, but species and kind are, you know, very specific species.

And the kind is kind of a bigger group.

Okay.

Let's get, because yeah, I've got a million questions. So for you, when, and you're a young earth creationist or an old earth creationist?

Young earth.

Okay. Young earth.

It's the geographic research, we're all young earth. We're all pretty much committed to the biblical genealogy timeline of about 6 ,000 years old for the earth. And the flood about 4 ,500 years ago, 4 ,400 years ago.

Perfect. I'm way more familiar with that as well. So when dinosaurs, when for you, and like the timeline, when were dinosaurs created according to Genesis?

According to Genesis, all the land animals that walked, you know, the birds and fish created on day five, land animals, and then Adam and Eve were created on day six of creation week. So that would have been about 6 ,000 years ago.

They would have been part of the beasts of the earth. Again, they were created at that time. So anything that walked on the earth, essentially was created on day six.

Okay. And so that means that humans were created at the same time and they walked on the earth with these dinosaurs.

Yeah. And that's why in the book of Job, I think he says, and look at behemoth, which I made along with you, referring to made the same day of the creation week.

It's so hard for me to visualize. I mean, the garden of Eden, you think of like, yeah, there's like ferns and birds and maybe like a lion or two, but like a T-Rex?

Yeah. Well, I don't know if there were, the way I've worked out, studying the continents of the world and the sediments and how they're buried and looking through these mega sequences and correlating them all over the world.

I actually finished the seventh continent, by the way of Antarctica. We did do Antarctica where we can see what little bit of rock is around us. So that's all in our database now. And so we have all seven continents done, but there's only about a couple of percent of Antarctica that's visible.

Most of it's covered in ice. But as you look at all these areas, you can see places that were the lowlands were buried. There's shallow seas were buried first. You can see the actual thicknesses of these early mega sequences fill certain areas like the United States, the East Coast, the West Coast kind of west of the Rockies.

And then later you'll see this zone in the middle where it's kind of high and dry for a while. And that's what I kind of refer to you kind of jokingly as Dinosaur Peninsula, at least in the United States across North America, where a lot of the dinosaurs, I think we're living in a little bit above sea level in kind of a lowland area.

Sorry, while you're talking about this, did you send me an image on this that I could pull up?

Well, I did.

I did send you an image on that. Didn't I send you that to you?

Yeah, yeah.

Which one is it? And I'll pull it up.

The Dinosaur Peninsula one.

I think it'd be good.

Sorry.

Yeah, I have that.

That one.

That kind of shows the area where the, this is based on the rocks. This is based on the actual data were from oil wells and stuff plotted all over the United States and the columns. And it shows the areas that filled in first were, you know, was kind of went around that.

And so the blue area you see in that image, which I call the shelf, that area is just full of marine fossils. My home state of Michigan included is all full of marine fossils. And you really don't have any dinosaurs found in those areas.

And then that kind of that yellow area, that Dinosaur Peninsula, it seems to be the lowland area, which was flooded next and the next couple of mega sequences. And then finally they went over the top and the water kept going higher and higher and finally went over the top of Canada and stripped that right down to the crust and moved everything up there.

So I think most of the mammals and humans and, you know, you put Pangaea back together into Pangaea, you kind of combine a lot of these upland areas. Gardavena is probably one of those upland areas. So I think God might have paraded the dinosaurs past Adam to name them.

Then they went back to their respective locations, which I think was separate from humans. But the upland areas were populated by mostly the common mammals, the horses, camels, humans, you know, sheep, all that kind of stuff.

And so you kind of have this tiered world that you're showing here. And so early on, the flooding just the first three sequences that shows almost all marine things. This is greatly exaggerated and kind of a cartoon, but it shows the general idea.

So you go up higher and you get to these Cerakon Zuni sequences. You wipe out all the dinosaurs. Those include the Jurassic, Cretaceous dinosaurs. And this is happening all over the world though. It's the same pattern all over the world at the same time.

And so you're building different ecological zones as the water went higher and higher and that was pushed up by more seafloor. The more ocean crust you made at the bottom, the more it pushed up at the bottom of your bathtub coming up.

And as you made more and more and more, the water, the waves kept coming higher and higher and higher. So you see ultimately a progressive flood, which we talked about last time. Well, that progressive flood resulted in a very systematic burial of all the fossils, starting with marine fossils.

And eventually you went to the coastal areas. You started getting coal seams from the plants. You start getting land animals mixed in. All these things are happening all over the world at the same time.

And eventually you wipe out the lowland areas, that kind of a dinosaur peninsula land from south to north. And you finally get to the uplands and the uplands, you strip everything off. Like God said, he wiped, you know, mankind off the earth.

He literally wiped them off the continents right down to the crust.

Wow. So the way that they would live here is like pre-flood. Dinosaurs lived kind of in the Zuni zone, the Absaroka zone. So Adam and Eve would be more so in the uplands.

That's where the rocks were found in today. That's kind of the rocks they found. This is where you find the rocks today. Most of the common mammals and stuff are found in rocks on top of the dinosaurs because they weren't buried until after the dinosaurs were already kind of wiped out.

So we'll get into extinction later. But the reason for those extinction events is because you're going up these ecological zones. You wipe out a whole ecological zone and suddenly all the plants and animals in that zone are gone.

So it looks like a whole new type of animal suddenly show up all at once, fully formed, ready to go. Every time you go up these ecological zones, you get your whole ecosystems, plants and animals included, and you go the next one, the next one, the next one.

It's the same general pattern on every continent.

That's the amazing thing.

I guess my brain is going to say, like, if you're just a couple hundred feet of elevation away from a T-Rex, wouldn't they have seen the humans, Adam, Eve, Kane, and Abe? All the kids have been like, there's food.

I'm going to climb up this mountain. Wouldn't there, like, what was that separation that just, to me

I don't know if, you know, humans trying to build a bigger wall. I don't know, but I think a lot of the problem comes down to the animals were created to eat certain plants. You know, God talks about, even the dinosaurs ate plants early.

The original creation, because the animal death was a shedding of blood. That was death. There was no death early on, according to the Bible, until after Adam and Eve sinned. And so early on, these animals were all given certain foods to eat.

T-Rex had something that it used those teeth to eat. Whether it was hard, crunchy, you know, had to crush its vegetation or whatever it was. But animals aren't going to sway too far from their food source.

If this is their food that God gave them to eat, they're going to stay near their food. So I think they stayed in those tiered areas because those are the plants that they wanted to eat. So even today, they dissect alligators and they're finding that about one third of their diet is still plants.

And so they're still eating plants. It's a supplement. Because they were originally designed to do that. And so that surprised the biologists. That was about 10 years ago. They did a study and they dissected them and they're eating all these plants.

So what's the deal? But if you're designed to eat cycads, for example, you're going to stay near the cycads. If God gave you this plant to eat, a different plant to eat, you're going to stay near that.

And so I think that kept these animals.

In their zones,.

Even though they started eating each other. There wasn't a lot of cross communication because you see a very orderly fossil record. We don't really see big mammals anyway. We see beaver-like animals and squirrel-like animals in with dinosaurs.

We see birds in with dinosaurs. We see all these things mixed in together, but we don't, certain animals we don't see mixed together at all. You know, we don't see it. It's the fossil record. It really is very, there's a really good pattern to it.

And it's, I think it's based on ecological zones, but the animals stayed near their food sources. I think that's what kept them in that spot. Why, you know, if this is your food, you're not going to leave them somewhere else.

But, okay.

So are you saying then once Adam and Eve sinned, then they started eating each other?

I believe so.

Because we have evidence in the fossils, in the bones, we actually have, you know, teeth marks and bites. You have teeth, even identify a very distinctive T-Rex tooth that's broke off into a duck-billed dinosaur.

That healed.

And so it was trying to bite it while it was alive, broke a piece of his tooth off and it healed. So we do have several examples where we have teeth, you know, bite marks in dinosaurs. But actually in that case, they could tell it was a T-Rex.

And it took a bite out of it, but it didn't die. It got away. And so the bone kind of healed like a tree when you cut into it, it kind of heals over over the years.

Right.

And I guess, and again,.

These are like surface level questions. If Adam and Eve had already sinned,.

At this point,.

Dinosaurs are eating each other. They're not just staying within this vegetation. Then by the time Noah's flood came and they had to take two of every kind, wasn't there a predatory risk on board?

Well, you know, people are going to argue that to me, but I think, you know, the Lord had to have some special miraculous provision. He brought the animals to the ark. And so he brought all these animals.

They just somehow communicate to animals. These two tyrannosaurs of some sort had to go to the ark. These two, again, it wasn't every species,.

But each kind.

And so there were two of every kind here to go.

And they were probably juveniles.

You know, it's likely they weren't the big 131 foot long sauropods that we find animals might've been hundreds of years old. And there's been some recent research on that my colleague here at ICRJ, Kiebert's working on, looking at papers, recent papers have shown that some of these sauropods might not have matured until after a hundred years of age.

And so these big animals were big because they were living hundreds of year lives, just like humans were.

Got it.

According to the Bible in the pre-flood world. But I think they lived in separate areas for the most part, you know, even though Adam might've named them all. I think they went back to their locations where that was their food source.

And so there was kind of a, it might've been a thousand feet or a couple of thousand feet difference, but it was completely different. You know, you're not going to leave your food source if this is your plants, even though you're occasionally.

Chasing around,.

Eat another animal. You know, we don't know from looking at the bones exactly what did the T-Rex eat? We do know it was taking some bites out of some animals. We do see that, you know, evidence in the teeth, the bite marks, but it was probably still eating a lot of plants too.

And so it's,.

I think most of these animals were designed to eat plants and they stayed near their food source because they always had that plant if they couldn't get anything else to eat.

Got it.

It wasn't quite the world.

That they teach people.

Right. But that's the pre-flood world. In the post-flood world, I think one of the most memorable moments in my discussion with Dr. Marcus Ross was the habitat and vegetation required to support dinosaurs no longer existed.

We just flooded the world. The ecosystem has now changed and the food sources for these arguably apex predators is no more. So that cripples their entire food chain. Would you agree?

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Yeah, I agree with that because if you look at the plants that are found buried with the dinosaur bones, they're mostly non flowering plants. There's some flowering plants or some grasses they find.

Why does that matter?

And that matters a lot because today the world is dominated by flowering plants. And so you don't have these big cycads. You don't have these big areas with all these ferns and those are only certain environments where you have a lot of non flowering plants available.

So if you're just certain plants even seem to go extinct, like these lycopod trees, huge lycopod trees and all these things are massive trees you find in some of the early rocks in there, like Pennsylvania rocks, whatever they call them, part of that Absarica megasequence or Absaroka megasequence.

You start to see the first plants show up.

As coal seams.

You get these plants that don't exist today. So there's a lot of plants apparently couldn't recover. If they recovered, they're very small. Some of these lycopods are tiny little things today. And so the plants change dramatically and you're left with mostly the high level plants.

And that maybe has to do with the amount of CO2.

In the atmosphere.

That I think also changed during the flood from the pre-flood to the post-flood and the amount of oxygen might have changed as well. That might have caused some of the plants to not proliferate as well.

So today the world is dominated really by flowering plants versus much of the pre-flood world. It was where the dinosaurs were living anyway, dominated by non flowering plants. I think that they couldn't get access, kind of like taking away the food source for a panda bear.

And you take away the food source, they're going to die. And so I think over the thousands of years after the flood, long enough for Job to see a couple of these animals, Leviathan, Abema, and others.

But we do see lots and lots of carvings and paintings and drawings of what appear to be dinosaurs. But they're, of course, scoffed at by the secular community, scoffed at even by some Christians who don't want to believe dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

Yeah, you did send me a couple of images of that. Let's look at some of those.

I sent a couple of those. I think two of them, but there's a whole lot more.

OK, get this out.

Named Vance Nelson, wrote a whole book on these and went around the world, took pictures of many, many. So this is the Mesopotamian cylinder that is rolled out. And you can see these long necked animals with intertwined necks and tails look just like a sauropod.

Again, this is thousands of years ago and it's in the Louvre today. But how did they know the legs came straight down? You know, that was the big discovery of what a dinosaur was in 1841. It was a reptile that walked erect.

And so the legs came straight down. Every reptile today sprawls. Crocodiles' legs come out, they're dragging their bellies. You know, they're kind of walking along. Where dinosaurs, the legs came straight down.

Is that the distinction there? Is that they're a reptile, but their legs come straight down?

That's what makes a dinosaur. They're reptiles.

Versus like this is clearly not a giraffe or a horse.

Correct. Well, horses and giraffes walk erect too. But yeah, but these long necks and long tails, it looks like a sauropod dinosaur.

And this was dated to what year?

I'm not sure the years. May have been like 2500 BC.

I don't know.

This is really old. This is pretty old. I have to go back and double check. I'm sorry.

I don't remember.

This one's a little more recent.

This one's, I think,.

The 11th or 12th century. This is from a column in a temple in Cambodia. And above it and below it are real animals, like a lion, a monkey, water buffalo.

All these real animals.

Also, there's this one, which looks a lot like a stegosaur. And the legs are coming straight down again. So many of these renditions of what many of us think are dinosaurs.

Really do match.

I mean, how would they know the legs came straight down on these things? And so to me, you add all this circumstantial evidence up, it's fairly compelling. It's in Egyptian cultures. It goes back to some of the oldest carvings, like the Mesopotamian cylinder that really shows it.

So to me, there's a lot more. I just didn't want to overwhelm you with a lot of them, but there's that cylinder before you roll it out. And so that the first time we talked about the Mesopotamian cylinder.

But to me, it's,.

How did they know the legs came straight down? And we've got a whole wall here at the Institute for Creation Research of a lot of these different paintings from all around the world. You know, the dragons, they talked about killing dragons.

I was just about to say, how are we skipping over the fact that these look like dragons?

Is that?

They do. And many of them, that's what I believe, like St. George and the dragon, that's that legend is based on, you know, St. George killing a, what was probably a dinosaur. They call them dragons.