For years we have been told and our children have been taught in our schools that dinosaurs have been extinct for around 65,000,000 years. I have to wonder then, why there is no consideration given to the huge body of evidence that says otherwise. I would like to highly recommend to you, the book, The Dinosaur Delusion, by Eric Lyons and Kyle Butt, from which most of the following information has been taken.

Consider that nearly every human culture has legends of great lizard-like creatures we now call “dragons“. It is not as though a few of these stories exist in a few places near each other. The reality is that China, Japan, North America, South America, Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia, Russia, India, Europe, specifically France, England, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Greece and Switzerland all have legends of great creatures that were seen by humans.

The accounts of these beasts are not written as fairy tales. Rather, they are as specific and matter-of-fact as any other scientific or historical records of the times. Nor are they authored by obscure attention seekers, but by scholars, historians, explorers, even kings. Why is it that accounts offered as objective records of the human observation of dinosaur-like animals are so ubiquitous and similar in nature?

What of the extant evidence of carvings and drawings of dinosaurs?

Around 1200 AD, King Jayavarman VII commissioned the building of the Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia. The temple was decorated with carvings of various animals, plants, gods and people. One of the carvings seems very clearly to be a stegosaurus. We have to ask, “How would they know what a stegosaurus looked like unless they had seen one?”

At the Kachina Bridge in Natural Bridge Monument in Utah are a number of carvings believed to have been made by the Anasazi people somewhere between 500 and 1500 years ago. One of these carvings is clearly a sauropod, or a dinosaur like an Apatosaurus (which used to be called “Brontosaurus“). When we see an aboriginal carving of a goat or a deer, we assume that this is because the artist had seen these creatures. Why do we not make the same assumption when we see a dinosaur? Sauropod fossil remains have obviously been found in the area. We know that this is an area where they lived at one time. Why do we not at least consider this evidence?

Not far from Natural Bridge Monument in Utah is the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. One area of the greater canyon is the Havasupai canyon. Here have been found more carvings of ibex and mammoths. This is not considered strange, since fossil remains of these animals are also found in the area. What is strange, is another carving that is easily seen to represent a creature much like an edmontosaurus. Fossilized tracks of these animals have also been found in the area. Why do we not make the same assumptions about the natives having seen an edmontosaurus that we make about ibex and mammoths?

(More next week, Lord willing)