There are some voices in the Christian spheres that make use of the fossil record in their talks. Some I will not name, as this isn't about bashing anyone. This is about clarifying details about a field I am extremely well versed in from both study, education, and work experience (Museum). Along with the fact Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom boasts about showing real dinosaurs when, sadly, it's accuracy is decades out of date; means I feel compelled to clear the air. So, if you got a question, fire away.

Here is a quick speed run-

Q: Are there dinosaurs in the Bible like Behemoth or Dragons?
A: No. Behemoth is almost certainly an elephant and dragons are mistranslated crocodiles and snakes (tannin). If any Biblical authors saw a dinosaur or fossil, they didn't mention it. All animals spoken of in the Bible are extant, living species.

Q: Can one believe in dinosaurs with an Old Earth and be Christian?
A: Certainly, a very notable example is a super-star in the field! One of the greatest Paleontologists of all time and heavily responsible for the modern view of dinosaurs as active and advanced animals is a man named Dr. Robert R. Bakker. Bakker also happens to be an ordained minister.

Q: Could T.rex see if you stopped moving?
A: Quite well actually. Studies on Tyrannosaurus vision acuity based on brain size and shape along with features of the eyes like position and size all indicate Tyrannosaurus rex had superb vision, even better than a human or predatory bird. You could be four football fields away standing still and it could still see you just fine.

Q: Where some dinosaurs feathered?
A: I'll get more into this in a future post but 100% yes. Not all mind you, but one particular family called Coelurosauridae almost certainly had feathers as a trait indicative of the whole family as every single member with significant skin impressions show feathers or a combination of feathers and scales. Your typical 'raptor' basically looked like a big hawk with teeth and a long tail.

Q: Did man ever live with dinosaurs?
A: Yes, but not in the way one might think. Birds are, verifiable, living dinosaurs. More specifically they are members of the above mentioned Coelurosauridae and first arose in the Jurassic Period. It's not that dinosaurs turned into birds, it's that birds never stopped being dinosaurs. Every single feature one might use to distinguish early birds is found in closely related Coelurosauridae members, so much so there are multiple genera in the fossil record or the line between the two is so blurry they might as well not even have a line. All distinguishing traits ascribed to dinosaurs and vindicated through study of their behavior and skeletons persists in birds as a whole. No part of a bird skeleton is uniquely avian, especially when one accounts for more primitive birds that had traits such as teeth and un-fused "wishbones".

Now if one means a big, flightless, land predator there was possibly one. Often called "Terror Birds", a group of large flightless birds one existed across North and South America, trading flight for sheer size and power. Some of these predators could be over two meters tall and weigh over 200 kilograms, with spiked beaks longer than horse heads and claws over six centimeters long on legs powerful enough to snap bones with a kick. These were terrestrial apex predators that could run down a horse and eat it. Newer evidence suggests some Terror Birds persisted until the 15,000 year mark, and would have run across the first humans migrating to the Americas.

What dinosaur was the biggest? (I'm not an eight year old, I swear.)

6509168
No shame in that ;)

Which dinosaur was the absolute largest is a bit vague outside of family. It certainly was one of the Sauropods (the "Long necks") but which one exactly is hard to pin down. You see when we find a dinosaur skeleton, it is often dis-articulated (meaning "jumbled up" in layman's terms) and we don't find most of the body because the process of fossilization requires specific conditions. Things like erosion, acidic soils, and scavengers can interrupt the process and destroy most of the body. We know enough now through enough complete specimens to know which animal group the specimen belongs to and which components are which, but determining absolute size based off only a few body parts is difficult even if a much more complete close relative is known.

For instance, a lion, jaguar, and leopard are all members of the same genus. If you knew how a leopard skeleton is built, and you found a couple bones of a lion and a jaguar, you could figure out quite a bit about those two based on what you know about the leopard. For instance, lions and leopards are very similar proportionally so if you find a lion bone that is 50% bigger than the bone of a leopard who was 7 feet long in life, you can very reasonably assume the lion was 50% bigger than 7 feet, ergo about 10.5 feet long. A problem however can arise when you have animals that have slightly different proportions. Jaguars are smaller than lions on average, but proportionally they have a bigger head and more robust skull. So if you found only the teeth of a lion and jaguar who were very close to the same in overall body size in life, you might assume the jaguar was the bigger of the two because it has bigger teeth and a more robust jaw.

This is the problem with trying to find which dinosaur was the absolute largest as there are several genera (plural for genus) that all belong to the same family know from only small amounts of remains. The remains are substantial enough we can find a range on how big they were, but the range is of each have a large amount of overlap so finding out for certain who was the biggest is vague.

The largest dinosaur known is probably Argentinosaurus, who has a mass estimate pushing up to 80+ tons

But several others like this Sauroposeidon do rival it in mass.

6509231
That's cool. Thanks for the response.

6509267
My pleasure! Got another? Ain't never a weird question as I've always heard sillier in my line of work

6508768
What's your favorite story that has dinosaurs in it? (Mine is the original Land Before Time movie made by Don Bluth)

6509285
Many actually. Land Before Time is a classic fantasy story with a prehistoric backdrop and good moral lessons, Walking with Dinosaurs the Movie has spectacular realism if you turn off the dubbing (Cretaceous Cut or no dice), among others. For sheer appeal with special effects, writing, and sets, it's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Inaccurate yes, but still a fun movie and the only one of the JP films that tried to update the science aside from JP3.

6509300
Are you familiar with James Gurney's Dinotopia books?

6509302
Indeed I am. Own several. It's nice to see the designs updating to keep up with new discoveries and even the old ones are keen to keep the animals very vibrant and colorful. Few things more annoying to me than everything being dull browns and lizard greens.

6509314
And besides the picture books, Gurney collaborated with several other authors on making short novels for children, and also let Alan Dean Foster write two adult fantasy books for the series: Dinotopia Lost and The Hand of Dinotopia.

I know that a lot of animals changed over the years, what were horses like in that time period? Or the closest approximation to them?

6509639
True equines didn't appear until the Cenozoic era, with the earliest definite ancestor of odd-toed ungulates (horses, rhinos, and tapirs) appearing in the early Paleocene about 60 million years ago. These were the Phenacodontidae which were roughly house cat size on average.

Horses, rhinos, and tapirs are relatives, as verifiable by genetic testing and shared skeleton characteristics. One of the earliest distinguishable ancestors of horses alone was the appropriately named Eohippus ("Dawn Horse") which lived 52 million years ago and was the size of a medium size dog.

Over time, they adapted to the changing world of North America. Originally they were well adapted to living in dense forests, being small to hide in the foliage. But over time the forests became looser and in some cases turned to grassland. This opened up a bounty of food in the form of shrubs and grasses, but left them more exposed to predators. To adapt to this, equines grew larger, their legs lengthened, and their gradually lost all but one toe to form a springy, hoofed limb that excels at running.

This diversity of mammals was only possible with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Across the Mesozoic past the downfall of the mammals and proto-mammals in the Triassic when they were "overthrown" by the Archosaurs (Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs, and Crocodilians), mammals were largely forced into occupying small niches similar to modern shrews. When most other Archosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous (birds and crocodilians as sole survivors for the most part), mammals got their chance to diversify. God ain't no fool, knowing exactly what kind of animals fit best in the environment at that particular time. Modern mammals wouldn't survive in the Mesozoic and vice versa very well.

This isn't to say their wasn't some horse equivalents however. Convergence is a case where different life forms might adapt the same characteristics due to similar environments and roles. A good example is how dolphins (mammals) and sharks (fish) resemble one another, but they aren't related much at all. However they resemble each other because that body shape is ideal for swimming quickly through water. In the Mesozoic, the role equines now occupy was occupied by dinosaurs called Hadrosaurs.

Often called "duck bills" as a nickname, Hadrosaurs were a very diverse group of dinosaurs ranging from the size of a small deer all the way up to bigger than an elephant. Just like horses they had hoof-like toes, powerful legs for running (which they could do on their hindlegs or on all fours), and long, powerful jaws for chewing with a beak at the end to snip up plants just like how horses use their front teeth. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so when the Hadrosaurs went extinct, ungulates like horses took up the mantle.

6509650
Really cool stuff man, the Lord has a job for all of us, I think you've found yours!

6509662
My thanks, very gracious of you

And to chime in one common one-

Q: How do we date how old a dinosaur or other prehistoric animal is?
A: Three things. Index fossils, association, and dating methods.
So the first is index fossils. Index fossils are a very particular animal or plant that

1. Readily fossilizes, meaning at least part of the organism is hard, indigestible so scavengers won't eat it, and preserves well without decaying in enough time for it to mineralize and fossilize. Shells, teeth, tree cords, seed shells, and exoskeletons work. And we find a lot of them, hundreds if not thousands of them.

2. Already has been dated to have lived in a very particular time.

Thus if we find an index fossil in the same layer, close to the unknown aged fossil we can assume that the unknown fossil is roughly the same age as the index fossil until we check for certain.

The next way is via association. If someone has someone else's tooth stuck in them, that means they must have been contemporaries regardless of if the biter bit the bitten when they were alive or already a carcass. For instance if we found a shark tooth stuck in a whale bone, we can infer that particular species of shark and particular species of whale were alive at the same time frame as it makes no sense for a shark to go chomping on a fossil. The exact context of the bite in this case may not be known, but it did happen. So if we already knew how old the whale was, we can tell the shark's time has to overlap it. This exact thing has happened in dating the teeth of Carcharodon megalodon, a giant extinct shark that actually ate whales as evidence by finding broken off teeth and gash marks in whale bones matching C. megalodon's teeth.

Another method of association is fossil trackways. Fossil footprints in trackways must've been laid down within a day or two of each other given the mud or ash they were made in would have hardened to eventually become stone after it was covered up. So for instance at the Paluxy riverbed in Texas, tracks of a large Sauropod ("Long neck") dinosaur are in the same layer and intersect with the tracks of a large theropod, probably Acrocanthosaurus, indicating the two were contemporary one another.

The second method is by radiometric dating. All fossils are found in sedimentary rock, which is stone that was formed by layers of loose sediments piling on top of each other and eventually hardening into a single matrix. Sandstone, slate, and limestone are such examples and barely down typically by gentle currents near islands, riverbeds, or from ash in volcanic eruptions. When the sediments pile on top of animal or plant material, there is a chance that material will absorb some of the minerals over time and become a fossil encased in the rock. Alongside the fossil in the sediments will be minute traces of certain elements and isotopes. These isotopes are unstable after they are buried in such a way, and to compensate for this they begin shedding particles the change into a stable isotope or morph into a different element. How long this process can take can be reliably calculated in a laboratory, and such testing can test to see if different conditions might throw off the results and effect how long the radioactive decay will take. To make a very long story short, there are 12 very reliable isotopes that can be tested for which do not change no matter what environmental condition is occurring around it. By seeing how far gone they are in the change, one can calculate how long the complete change would take to occur using mathematics and physics; something that is very concrete and verifiable. Numbers, God's infallible law.

You might have heard of a version of radiometric dating called carbon dating. Now carbon dating is a wonderful tool, however it can only be used in a specific number of circumstances. If you try to use it on anything older than about 10,000 years, the results start getting so random they can't be reliable. This is because carbon's radioactive decay cycle is much much shorter and can't be used to estimate vast differences in time. It be like trying to use a standard 12 hour clock to measure a year. Not a good tool.

But by using elements and isotopes that do have a long enough cycle to be accurately measurable for long distances of time and by checking all 12 of these isotopes against one another, the margin of error becomes negligible. In a nutshell using physics and chemistry to figure out how long something has been buried by turning the elements into a gigantic stopwatch.

And very importantly, the results are consistent. Surprises do happen of course, but almost every time the results confirm what had already been speculated by association and index fossils. For instance we know Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops had to of been contemporary because we have found teeth marks from Tyrannosaurus in the bones of Triceratops that show healing, meaning the Trike was alive when it got bit and managed to escape or fight it attacker off to live and die years later of unrelated causes. We have not found Tyrannosaurus teeth marks in Stegosaurus or a Woolly Mammoth, despite either of those two being within the possible prey range for Ol' Rexy. Index fossils and association indicate Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops were contemporary 70-65 Million Years Ago, where as Stegosaurus predates them at around 150 Million Years Ago and Mammoths postdate them at as recently as 5,000 Years Ago. Sure enough, every single radiometric dating conducted on those four genus confirm T.rex and Trike were contemporary, Stego lived before them, and the Mammoth lived after them.

If the results were drastically different on all accounts and we got different results for every individual of such species tested (so for instance if we tested four Tyrannosaurus specimens and got 150 MYA, 65 MYA, 23 MYA, and 0.5 MYA for the results), then we would know the dating method cannot be accurate as they cannot replicate its own results nor be consistent with itself. We do not see this, thus vindicating it as accurate.