Genesis Apologetics K8 Student Zone Dinosaurs (6-8 Grade)

Genesis Apologetics

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Well, hello and welcome to The Zone. I'm your host, Big Wave Dave. So today we're going to talk about dinosaurs.

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You know, dinosaurs were some of the coolest creatures that ever roamed the earth. They're amazing.

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But you know, people have different ideas about dinosaurs. For example, evolutionists believe that dinosaurs evolved over millions of years.

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They believe that they lived and died millions of years before humans appeared on the earth.

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They also believe that most dinosaurs were wiped out by some event, perhaps an asteroid hit in the earth.

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They also believe that some dinosaurs evolved into birds. You know, as a

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Christian, I have a totally different view on dinosaurs. I believe that dinosaurs were created on day six of creation week.

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Why? Because they're land animals. And that's when God created land animals. I also believe that most dinosaurs were wiped out in the global flood, and that the survivors couldn't find food and were hunted to extinction.

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Now, I got to admit, the first time I heard this view, I felt like this. It's like, dude, really?

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I mean, what a weird idea. You got any evidence for that? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.

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Let's get started. So, is the word dinosaur in the Bible? How many of you say yes?

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How many of you say no? If you said no, you're right. The word dinosaur is not in the

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Bible, and here's why. The word dinosaur is a new word. It wasn't created until hundreds of years after most versions of the

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Bible were written. However, experts believe that dinosaurs may have been called by a different name.

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Do you know what it is? If you said dragons, you're right. Here's what's really interesting.

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The Hebrew word tanyin, which can be translated dragon, is found over 20 times in the

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King James Version of the Bible. And let's not forget about this guy, the behemoth. So, just to give you a little background,

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Job is having a really bad day. He's lost his wealth, his health, he's lost his kids.

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I mean, it's just a terrible day. So, he and his friends start to question God. Now, God decides to humble

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Job by asking him a bunch of questions. Like, where were you when I created?

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And he goes through a whole bunch of different things. And when he gets to 4015, he mentions a creature called behemoth.

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So, who or what is behemoth? Now, in my

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Bible, down at the bottom, there's these little notes. They're called footnotes. And they say that behemoth was probably a hippo or an elephant.

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Now, here's something you need to keep in mind. Those notes at the bottom of the page are somebody's opinion about what scripture says.

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So, we're gonna look at actual scripture, the word of God, to see what it says, okay? Here we go.

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So, the first thing we learn, look at behemoth, which I made along with you.

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So, whatever behemoth was, he was made on the same day as humans were created. The next thing we learn is that behemoth feeds on grass like an ox.

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So, it's a vegetarian. And again, lots of animals eat grass. So, obviously, we need to keep going.

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Next thing we find out in 4015 is that he has strength he has in his loins, what power he has in the muscles of his belly.

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Boy, that's weird. What does that mean? That means that behemoth has a big belly, kind of like the one I'm working on here, right?

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Well, elephants have a big belly, right? And hippos have a big belly.

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This guy has a big belly, but I can tell you this, I guarantee you that guy is not behemoth.

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What about this guy? He's got a huge belly. Why, you and your friends could hang out all night inside that belly.

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Good thing he eats plants. Let's keep going. This is perhaps the most important clue.

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God said that behemoth has a tail that sways like a cedar tree. Have you ever been camping and seen cedar trees?

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They're big, beautiful trees. So, let's keep going here, let's see. Do elephants have tails like cedars?

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I don't think so. What about hippo? Does he have a tail like a cedar tree?

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Are you kidding me? Look at that. Hippos and elephants do not have tails like cedar trees.

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Therefore, we know right now that whatever behemoth was, it was not a hippo or an elephant.

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What about this guy? He's got a huge tail. If you didn't get out of the way of that thing, it could knock you into next week.

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So, God goes on to say in 4018 that behemoth has bones like tubes of bronze and his limbs are like rods of iron.

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Whatever behemoth is, he's got really big bones. So, I'd like to show you a couple of my favorite fossils.

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This is the toe bone of a brachiosaurus. The toe bone, wow, these creatures were huge.

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Now, this one here is a vertebrae or a backbone of a large plant -eating dinosaur called a

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Camarasaurus. Now, just to give you an idea, a little reference point, our vertebrae are probably about that big.

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You can see from the size of this just how massive these creatures were. So, you know, the

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Bible doesn't tell us what behemoth was, but if you look at the rest of scriptures, it sure seems to be describing what we would call a large sauropod dinosaur.

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Okay, so we've covered the Bible. Let's talk about history. So, remember when

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I told you that some experts believe that dinosaurs were called dragons? I wanna show you one of my favorite fossils.

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Now, this is a replica, but it's really cool. Here's what we're gonna do. When I uncover this,

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I want you to yell out the first word that comes into your mind, okay? Are you ready? Here we go.

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Wow. Now, I don't know about you, but when I first saw this, I thought dragon.

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This guy so looks like a dragon, even down to the sharp teeth. So, what kind of dinosaur was this?

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I'm glad you asked. Check this out. So, this one was found in South Dakota, and some experts believe that it was a juvenile

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Pachycephalosaur. But regardless, I think we could agree that this guy looks like a dinosaur.

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So, let's talk about history. Are there any historical references to dragons? You know, dinosaurs were amazing, and if people lived alongside of them, it would make sense that they would talk about them or write about them or make drawings or something, right?

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Or did they? They did. Check this out. St. George is famous for slaying a dragon.

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Now, what's really interesting is we can tell from the fossils that this particular one was probably a

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Knothosaurus. Wow, you talk about a scary creature. And speaking of scary,

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Alexander the Great and his men were scared by the dragons living in caves. So, let's think about this.

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These men were tough soldiers and fighters. What could scare them? Well, I think a dinosaur could do it.

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This Roman mosaic shows two long -necked dragons. And did you know that on the

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Grand Canyon there are pictographs of dinosaurs? Now, what's really interesting is we can tell by the shape and size of this one that it was probably a

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Demontosaurus. Here's another one in Canada. These are all over the world.

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This one here is my absolute favorite. Can you see what it is? It appears to be a sauropod surrounded by nine hunters.

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Incredible. So, I have a question for you. If no human has ever seen a dinosaur, then why do we have dragon legends from all over the world?

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Why do we have paintings and carvings and drawings and statues of what we would call dinosaurs?

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And why do we have writings which seem to describe encounters between humans and dinosaurs?

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Well, I think the answer is quite simple. People lived with dinosaurs, just like the

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Bible said. So, did dinosaurs evolve into birds? I mean, we hear that all the time, right?

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So, if you're gonna become a bird, I think the first thing you need to think about is, okay, I need feathers. Here's the thing.

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Feathers are incredibly complicated. They show design. When you look at them under the microscope, you see all kinds of really cool features.

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For example, these barbs that help hold the different parts of the feather together, well, there's a corresponding part on a bird beak.

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He uses that to realign the feathers so that they don't get ruffled. It helps him fly.

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So, if evolution's true, which evolved first, the barbs in the feather or the tool on the beak?

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Obviously, that wouldn't make much sense, right? Obviously, somebody really smart made those birds.

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And feathers are just the beginning. If dinosaurs and birds are completely different creatures, they have different lungs and different circulation systems, different skeletons, everything.

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The problem is evolution can't do that. Now, we're gonna talk more about that on our episode on evolution.

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I really hope you join us. Okay, well, what about this? I'm sure a lot of you have heard about Archaeopteryx.

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Supposedly, he is a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds. But you know what?

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Even evolutionists say that he was nothing more than a bird. Okay, then, what happened to the dinosaurs?

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How did they go extinct? Cigarettes. Don't smoke anything.

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Okay, seriously now, what does the Bible say happened? So, we learn in Genesis that after Adam and Eve sinned, the world became a very dark place.

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People and animals were running around, fighting and killing each other. It was awful. In fact, it was so bad that God decided to send a global flood to wipe everything out.

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Only Noah and his family and the land animals that were on the Ark survived. What this means, that according to the

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Bible, most of the dinosaurs were wiped out in the global flood. So, okay, if that's true, well, wouldn't that mean that there were some dinosaurs on the

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Ark? Well, here's what God said. God said that he would send two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground to Noah to be kept alive on the

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Ark. So, yes, according to the Bible, there were some dinosaurs on the

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Ark. Wait a minute, how in the world would they fit?

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We just got done talking about how big the Brachiosaurus and some of the other ones were. There is an answer.

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Let's take a closer look. I'm sure many of you have seen a cute little bathtub

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Ark like this. And, you know, it's cute. All the animals are smiling and so on. And somebody's got some pretty good talent, good at drawing.

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Here's the problem. This Ark looks nothing like the real one. The real

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Ark was absolutely huge. It was 510 feet long, 84 feet wide, and as tall as a four -story building.

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Now, this picture was taken at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. If you ever get a chance, you have got to go see this.

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They have a full -size replica of the Ark. And just to give you an idea how big this is, you see that circle down on the right -hand side, those two little dots?

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Those are people. The real Ark was huge. There was plenty of room for the animals, including the dinosaurs on board.

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And here's another thing to think about. There were only about 80 kinds of dinosaurs. And most of them were no bigger than a pony when they were full -grown.

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So again, no problem putting them on that huge Ark. What about the big ones, like the

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Brachiosaurus? There's an answer. So we know from the fossil record, from different things that we found, that even the huge dinosaurs started out small.

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We have found Brachiosaurus eggs, and they're about no bigger than a football or so. Besides, it would make a lot of sense to take babies on board.

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They're smaller, they weigh less, they eat less, they sleep more, they're tougher. And who would you rather clean up after, junior or grandpa?

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You'd need a bulldozer to clean up after grandpa. Yuck! You know, after dinosaurs got off the

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Ark, it was really hard for them to find food. So many of them starved to death and went extinct.

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A lot of the other ones got into fights with people, and that's where all the different dragon legends and the artifacts came from.

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Okay, so we've covered the Bible. We've talked about historical references. Let's talk about the fossil evidence.

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So what is the fossil record? The fossil record is billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water all over the world.

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We have found massive graveyards that have, guess what? Dinosaur fossils in them.

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Now this one here in Utah has over 2 ,000 bones, 11 different kinds of dinosaurs.

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And they're all in this jumbled mess mixed in with crocodiles, turtles, lizards, frogs, and get this, clams.

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Now wait a minute, don't clams live in the water? They do. Here's another one to think about.

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Up in Hilda, Canada, you can go see this dinosaur park. They have thousands of buried centrosaurs.

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These are big, powerful creatures, thousands of them. Now even the evolutionists admit that these guys drowned, but they say it was a river overflowing.

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But does that make sense to you? Thousands of these creatures, these big, powerful creatures, drowned by a river?

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Hmm, I think something else did that. In fact, if you go to different dinosaur parks all throughout

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North America and you read the signs, it's amazing how many times you'll see that they were killed in a flood, and or they were buried with shark teeth, or clams, or different types of marine fossils.

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What could do that? Well, a global flood. Another clue is when we do find intact skeletons of dinosaurs, a lot of them look like they drowned.

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They have their neck and their head arched back like this one. In fact, scientists call this the death pose.

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Even the mighty T -Rex drowned. Now let's think about this. What could drown something as big and powerful as a

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T -Rex? Well, I think you know. We even have dinosaurs buried together with fish.

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We have millions of sea creatures and millions of land creatures all buried together. What could do that?

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Well, a global flood, just like the Bible teaches. So, you know, if you go to a museum, you'll see signs that say that, you know, the fossil record proves that dinosaurs evolved and died out millions of years ago.

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Well, check this out. In 2005, scientists announced that they had found something amazing inside of a

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T -Rex thigh bone. They found soft tissue, blood vessels, blood cells.

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How could that be still there if these fossils were truly 70 million years old?

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And this wasn't just something that was in the science magazines. It actually made it on the mainstream TV. Check this video out.

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Hello, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a host for NOVA Science Now. For the last decade, the

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African island has offered Ray and Christy Rogers a spectacular excavation site. They work in an area of remote grasslands where dinosaur bones literally cover the ground, an ancient graveyard where an unusually large number of dinosaurs died and were entombed by mud flows that preserve their bones.

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The preservation is unbelievable. The quality of the material is exceptional. This is a piece of bone from the

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Madagascar locality. It, in many regards, doesn't even look like a fossil.

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This is typical of the Madagascar material. It is not heavily stained. It's not been invested with iron, with manganese.

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It doesn't look like a typical fossil. If you didn't know, you might think you're picking up a cow bone today, a bleached cow bone.

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I was looking at this thing thinking, this is really interesting. It was the inside of the

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T -Rex bone that fascinated Schweitzer, who made thin sections out of it. And in these cross sections of fossilized bone, she saw something that she and everyone else had thought was impossible, round structures that looked like red blood cells, dinosaur blood cells.

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Inside those channels where the blood vessels would have run were these little round red structures that were all kind of lined up like a train and they were bright red and translucent.

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Nobody else had seen anything like that before. The very idea of blood cells in a 70 million year old bone was more than unconventional.

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It was radical. Nobody was imagining that dinosaurs might have had preserved soft tissues.

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Derek Briggs is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Peabody Museum at Yale University.

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So along comes Mary Schweitzer and she's starting to look inside dinosaur bones and has made this startling discovery about the presence of red blood cells.

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What was your initial reaction to that? Oh, I think the same reaction as everybody's, that this was totally improbable.

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She perhaps misinterpreted the evidence or was exaggerating the potential for what she was seeing.

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So skeptical at first. Oh yeah, definitely. Why do you think it didn't occur to anybody? Because we have this clear understanding that part of all biological cycles involves decay.

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I mean, nature is set up to break down that material and recycle it. So it's just improbable that those kinds of very delicate structures would survive, particularly for millions of years.

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When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone.

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It should be degraded completely. This is not possible. Do it again. We got another piece of bone.

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We put it in the solution. We waited two or three or four weeks, looked again, more blood vessels.

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We must have repeated that with probably 17 or 18 different fragments of bone.

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Welcome back. You know, that wasn't the only place that they found soft tissue. In fact, when they went back and started looking at fossils that they already had, they found a lot of different examples of soft tissues, even things like collagen and other things that couldn't possibly be there if these fossils were truly millions of years old.

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So let's wrap up. Here's what the Bible says about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were created on day six of creation week.

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Dinosaurs did not evolve into birds because they are different types of creatures. Most dinosaurs were wiped out by the flood.

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Now the ones that came off the ark went extinct because they couldn't find enough food or they got into fights with people.

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That's where all those dragon legends came from. So you may be wondering why do topics like dinosaurs even matter?

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I mean, isn't it all about Jesus Christ? Well, you're right. It is about Jesus. But here's the problem.

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When people don't believe the Bible, they usually don't believe in Jesus either. And here's what's really sad.

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The Bible tells us that one day Jesus Christ is gonna come back and he's gonna take all the people that love him to an amazing place called heaven.

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People that don't believe in him will not get to go. That's why it's so important that we do our homework and learn how to talk to people about things like dinosaurs and that the

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Bible is true. That's why in The Zone, we're gonna be covering 24 topics over the next few years.

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In the meantime, I highly recommend that you download our Genesis Apologetics app. Check this out.

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Looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the

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Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.

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Welcome back. I'd just like to take a moment to acknowledge all these amazing ministries that help provide content for our time together.

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In fact, they have created some awesome resources. You really need to get ahold of these things.

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You're gonna learn so much. Well, that's all the time that we have together. My name is