Truth Really Matters

The discovery of thousands of dinosaur fossils over the last two centuries is often cited as evidence for evolution. Clearly, there are many kinds of creatures (including dodo birds and mastodons) that have tragically suffered extinction, but it should be noted that extinction is not evolution. The proper question for advocates of evolution is, “Where are the fossils of the dinosaurs’ ancestors?”

Tyrannosaurs, for example, must have had tens, if not hundreds of ancestral types, all incrementally changing, and changing progressively into the form that we can derive from tyrannosaur bones. It should be obvious that such a huge and unique creature didn’t evolve in one generation from some small lizard. For every tyrannosaur’s remains we find in the fossil record, there should be tens or hundreds of remains from reptiles that would have been in his ancestral lineage.

Dr. Carl Werner (see reference below) interviewed some of the world’s foremost experts on dinosaur evolution. These included Dr. Paul Sereno, University of Chicago; Dr. David Weishampel, Editor of the reference book The Dinosauria, Dr. Phillip Currie, Curator of Alberta’s Royal Tyrell Museum, and Dr. Angela Milner, Head of Vertebrate Paleontology at London’s Natural History Museum. From these interviews, museum resources, and the references below, Werner compiled a list of the number of dinosaurs discovered.

Here are the totals:

Herreresaurus . . . 6
Meat eaters such as Ceratosaurs and Ornithomimids . . . 293
Other meat eaters (Deinonychosaurs) . . . 46
Tyrannosaurs . . . 78
Sauropods . . . 287
Armored plant eaters (Stegosaurs, Anklyosaurs) . . . 242
Ceratopsians . . . 377+
Hadrosaurs . . . 413+
Other 2-legged plant eaters . . . 229
Birds (Since evolutionists believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs) . . . 200,000+

Notably, the supposed evolutionary ancestors of each of these kinds of reptiles do not appear in the fossil record. If they actually existed, it defies probability that their bones were not preserved. As an example, assume that there was a lineage of perhaps 100 different kinds of reptiles between some original small lizard and the tyrannosaur type. The next time a paleontologist happens upon a dinosaur graveyard, she should as likely discover one of those 100 ancestral types as another tyrannosaur. If only one type continually shows up, simple scientific reasoning – based on observing what is ACTUALLY there – indicates that only the one type exists.

The list above reveals that the problem isn’t just about tyrannosaurs. All of the dinosaur kinds show up in the fossil record without evidence of ancestors.

Interestingly, Werner quotes evolutionist Dr. Weishampel accordingly: “From my reading of the fossil record of dinosaurs, no direct ancestors have been discovered for any dinosaur species. Alas, my list of dinosaurian ancestors is an empty one.”

Other scientists believe that the existence of separate, unique kinds of creatures is the result of the intelligent design of a Creator. Biological creatures are far more complex in design than the most advanced computers or machines devised by man. Thus, for many scientists, it is logical to infer that a clever design must have been produced by a clever designer.

References:
Carl Werner, Evolution: The Grand Experiment, New Leaf Press, 2007.
Peter Dodson, David B. Weishampel, Halszka Osmolska, The Dinosauria, University of California Press, 1992.
Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg, editors, The Ultimate Dinosaur, Bantam, 1993.