Dinosaurs and dragons: Stamping on the legends
Dinosaurs are loose in Britain! They come in the form of five postage stamps depicting an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, a Protoceratops and a Triceratops.1 The stamps were released by the Royal Mail on August 20, 1991, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first use of the term ‘dinosauria’ (from the Greek δεινός deinos ‘terrible’ + σαύρος sauros ‘lizard’) by famous British anatomist and palaeontologist, Sir Richard Owen. He used the term at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Plymouth, in 1841.
Sir Richard Owen was Britain’s foremost expert in comparative anatomy and was the first person to realize that these creatures were a distinctive group of previously unknown reptiles. While everyone now accepts this conclusion, it is less well known today that Owen opposed Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution on scientific grounds.2
Since their discovery, dinosaurs have been depicted on at least 280 stamps, representing 70 sets from some 50 countries, including such diverse places as Russia, Morocco, Yemen, Nicaragua, China, Mongolia, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and British Antarctic Territory. Surprisingly, the non-existent Brontosaurus is depicted and named on two stamps—a USA 25¢, showing a pair of the animals, and a Central African Republic SOF, showing a herd.3 There have been more stamp issues depicting Tyrannosaurus than the total number of fossils of this dinosaur found—only three complete skeletons to date.4 Evolutionists believe that the dinosaurs evolved, while creationists believe that they were some of the ‘beasts of the earth’ created by God, along with the other land-dwelling animals on Day Six of Creation Week (Genesis 1:24–31).5 Who is right?
Evolutionist Expectation
If evolution is true, we should expect that:
- There would be fossil evidence indicating the ancestor of all the dinosaurs.
- There would be fossil evidence of intermediate forms showing many stages in the formation of such diverse characteristics as the plates and spikes of the armoured dinosaurs (stegosaurs), the one-to-seven horns of the horned dinosaurs (ceratopian), the distinctive beaks of the duckbilled dinosaurs (hadrosaurs), the thick skulls of the boneheaded dinosaurs (pachycephalosaurs), and also the wings of the flying reptiles (pterosaurs), the distinctive features of the various marine reptiles, and so on.
In fact, all dinosaurs appear fully formed in the fossil record, without trace of an ancestor, and there is not one single dinosaur fossil that can be called an intermediate form between any of the types known.
Creationist Expectations
On the other hand, if creation is true, and the dinosaurs were created on Day Six of Creation Week, we should expect that:
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