Dragons were dinosaurs

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Contents

Claim

YECs have reasons to believe that there are evidence of dinosaurs living alongside of man by showing off examples of dragon legends and monster folkloric stories they believe to be hard core evidence of human encounters with living dinosaurs. For example, in a legend of St. George, the saint is said to have killed a dragon to save a beautiful princess from being devoured by it. YECs believe that the dragon he slew was a Baryonyx, a dinosaur whose remains have been discovered in England in 1982. Another example is the story of Beowulf, a brave king whom in his youth killed a murderous monster called Grendel.YECs believed Grendel to be a Tyrannosaurus rex. Beowulf is said to have killed the monster by pulling off its arm, causing Grendel to bleed to death. Then, Beowulf killed Grendel's mother whom YECs also believe to be a Tyrannosaurus rex. YECs believed that this monster, Grendel, had small arms just like the Tyrannosaur, making it easy for Beowulf to tear it off assuming that the arms of the monster were very weak and feeble.

Source

Responses

  1. This does not explain why there are no remains of dinosaurs found among those of humans.
  2. If the mere existence of widespread tales of fantastical beasts forces us to conclude that they actually existed in human history, then what do we make of fairies, goblins, cyclopses, unicorns, and other mythical beasts (like centaurs, chimaerae or sphinxes), which appear nowhere in the fossil record or in the Bible for that matter?
  3. The "dragons" of supposedly ancient myth that creationists want to equate with dinosaurs are actually a rather modern creation (late middle ages) with a traceable development as popular myth. Dragons, like all folklore, evolved over time, only entering a relatively fixed form when stories began to be written down. Going back to ancient Greece, dragons are recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History records dragons as very large snakes. Indeed, the word dragon derives from a greek epithet meaning 'snake'. Over time, the image of dragons in myth changes. They adopt more lizard-like features, add bat-wings (which dinosaurs never had), develop first venomous bites, then the ability to spit or drool venom, then steaming venom, then fire. The shift in the image over time, only later becoming something which resembles a Hollywood caricature of dinosaurs, clearly reflects a myth, and its origin as snakes denies creationist claims that they record actual contact with dinosaurs.
  4. The stories of dragons and monsters YECs promote is a prime example of how the YECs would take selective dragon and monster myths out of context and distort, twist, and fabricate them to make them the way they, the YECs themselves wanted them to be; in an effort to fit them in their own views about it.
  5. The dragon St. George has killed was actually a Heraldic Dragon that did not looked like Baryonyx at all. The Heraldic dragon is a classic example of what the dragon looks like with large bat wings, 4 legs, a barbed tail and tougue, row of rigid or crested spines, and an arrowed head with dog-like ears. Baryonyx was a Spinosaurid with none of those features of a Heraldic dragon that lived during the early Cretaceous Period about 120 million years ago. The image of Baryonyx created by the YECs in Ken Ham's book The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! on page 29 and in Duane Gish's book Dinosaurs by Design on page 81 is nothing more than a direct fabricated distortion of Baryonyx exploitingly made up to deceive the layman into becoming converts. Furthermore, YECs fail to realize that Baryonyx was indigenous to England, while St. George slew the dragon in Libya, Africa.
  6. Grendel, the monster Beowulf slew was actually an ogre, stated in the story to be a direct descendent of Cain, the first son of Adam in the Bible. This ogre hated parties and crashes them with the intent of killing and or devouring as many of the party-goers as possible. Beowulf confronted the ogre at a party and wrestled with him only knowing that the ogre is protected from the swords and spears by a magic spell. He eventually tears off Grendel's arm. The ogre, racked with pain and bleeding, broke off from the fight and staggered into the cave where he and his mother lived and died there. That some YEC's interpret the fact that Beowulf ripped of Grendel's arm to mean that Grendel was a Tyrannosaurus rex, on account of this dinosaur having comparatively small arms flies in the face of other facts, such as Grendel being described as an ogre, and not a dragon-like or lizard-like creature. Furthermore, YEC's seem to be unable to explain why Cain's descendants would be T. rexes.
  7. Nothing in the text of Beowulf suggests Grendel had small arms. The creationists are pretending that the fact that Beowulf tore the arm off means Grendel had feeble arms, nevermind that Grendel was described tearing his victims apart barehanded, when the text is clearly implying that Beowulf was very strong. Furthermore, muscle-scars on the forearms of T. rexes strongly suggest that their arms were anything but feeble, also.
  8. The tales St. George and Beowulf are legends with little historical substance. Beowulf is full of magic and other supernatural elements, and many historians are unsure whether St. George referred to a Roman soldier or a Roman governor of ancient Cappadocia (a province in what is now Turkey). To claim them as references, one would have to believe that ancient myth's supporting fairies and pantheons of gods was equally valid.
  9. The tales St. George and Beowulf take place after the fall of the Roman empire. If genuine dinosaurs had existed in the age where St. George and Beowulf supposedly lived, they must have existed earlier as well. How could the Romans have missed them? The Romans ruled over large portions of the ancient world and their trade relations and spy networks went even further. They were a sober-minded people who left extensive records of their age and the world they lived in, but mentioned no dragons.
  10. If huge, carnivorous dinosaurs had really existed, it would have taken far more than a single hero to defeat them. Beowulf would have been dinosaur fodder in no time, and St. George's horse would have thrown him off at the first sight of a huge predator like a Baryonyx. The only way for the people of the early middle ages to kill a huge dinosaur would have been either to poison it, lure it into a huge pit trap (with sharp spikes at the bottom) or shoot it full of arrows or crossbow bolts at a safe distance (and the archers would have to be skilled, numerous, brave and incredibly disciplined).

Fallacies contained in this claim

  • Just So Story (myths are reinterpreted to bolster YEC, but don't actually make any sense)
  • Suppressed Evidence (the fact that the dinosaurs in those particular myths are not indigenous to the regions where the myths originated from is omitted)

References

  1. Erdoes, Richard and Alfonso Ortiz, 1984. American Indian Myths and Legends, Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 220-222.
  2. Grinnell, George Bird, 1961. Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1961, pp. 355-356; reprinted from Forest and Stream Publishing Company, New York, 1889.
  3. Mayor, Adrienne, 2000. The First Fossil Hunters, Princeton University Press.
  4. Cooper's Pseudo-History of Dinosaurs
  5. The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible Part 3
  6. Beowulf

Further Reading

  • Jones, David E., 2000. An Instinct for Dragons. New York: Routledge.

Related claims

External Links

Acknowledgments

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