Did Humans Cause Dinosaur Extinctions? - plus video - Dinosaurs - Man - Evolution and The Bible

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Like elephants and a few other animals, rhinoceroses are among the last of the large animals called "megafauna." Rhinos exist in African, Indonesian, Javan, Indian, and Sumatran varieties.¹ They are also among the rarest animals in the wild.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the Western Black Rhino officially extinct this year. The Northern White Rhino, also from Africa, may be on its way out as well, and the last Javan Rhino in Vietnam may be gone for good.²

Poachers are notorious for killing the large animals in order to harvest their highly valued horns, which some believe have medicinal properties, including use as an aphrodisiac. The horn is made of the protein keratin, the primary component of fingernails and hair.

This confirms what researchers generally observe about the extinction of species: The primary cause is interaction with humans. When mankind moves into an area, some of the first animals to face destruction are those that are the most threatening, such as the megafauna. Thus, recent centuries have seen the demise of such giants as Haast's eagle³ and the moa, a giant flightless bird.⁴

"The current extinction crisis is caused primarily by human impacts upon wild populations," according to UK biologist Rosie Woodroffe, who wrote on the declining populations of large carnivores.⁵

Rhinos are not carnivores, but in addition to being valued for their horns, they are large and can be dangerous if they are frightened or challenged. Thus, it stands to reason that if humans primarily cause the current extinctions of megafauna, then they may have caused past extinctions as well.⁶ That could help explain the plethora of legends, found in all cultures, of heroes killing dragons, which were probably dinosaurs in many cases.⁷

Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? One very likely factor—among others, such as climate changes after the Flood—is the same reason the black rhinoceros and so many other megafauna have died out: People moved in and eliminated them.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH REFERENCES

'Dinosaur Plant' Evolution Stories Conflict - plus video - Dinosaurs - Man - Evolution and The Bible

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Cycads, also called "sago palms," are cone-bearing plants with long leathery shoots that often adorn dinosaur dioramas. Though there are about 11 living cycad genera, which further divide into about 300 species, many more once existed but are now known only from fossils.1

The oldest rock layers that contain cycads are supposedly about 250 million years old. However, in a study published in Science, a group of scientists compared the similarities between cycad DNA sequences and did not find the many DNA differences that should have resulted from a quarter-billion years' worth of mutations and evolution.2

Even after applying evolutionary assumptions to make their molecular clock work, most likely including a very slow mutation rate, the researchers' results showed that almost all of today's cycads "only began diversifying 10 million years ago," the study's lead author, Nathalie Nagalingum, told LiveScience.3

So, did cycads emerge suddenly 250 million years ago, according to the evolutionary age assignment given to their first appearance as fossils, or did they suddenly diversify only 10 million years ago, according to the evolutionary age assignment given to their DNA differences? Is either story even close?

Surely this vast age discrepancy cannot be the fault of fossils or DNA, because they were the same in both studies. Instead, the assumption of vast age produces the confusion.

However, the creation model's young age explains these data with no conflicts. Rocks with dinosaur fossils also contain many fossils of animals and plants—including cycads and Wollemi pines—that are essentially the same as their living counterparts.4 They look so similar to living creatures because they were only deposited thousands of years ago after being swept up in one of a number of catastrophic watery surges associated with the year of Noah's Flood.

According to Scripture, which provides eyewitness accounts that go back to the very beginning, there is no such thing as a dinosaur age—at least, not one without people, cycads, birds, marsupials, and other "modern" creatures.5

The molecular clock-based 10-million-year-old cycad divergence described in Science may actually reflect the rapid diversification into many species of those few genera of cycads that survived the Flood and pioneered the post-Flood world only four thousand or so years ago.

Cycads are living reminders that dinosaurs and modern plants and creatures recently shared living space. And the recent cycad dating mismatch is a reminder that evolutionary dates are all based on broken clocks.

Original article with references.

Dinosaurs Ate Rice

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Just what did dinosaurs eat?

One way researchers are finding out is by studying coprolites, or fossilized dinosaur dung. And as it turns out, some dinosaurs ate rice plants. But if flowering plants like rice did not evolve until millions of years after dinosaurs lived—as evolution maintains—how could dinosaurs have eaten them?

Some coprolites contain phytoliths, which are uniquely shaped microscopic crystals manufactured by various plant tissues. Most phytoliths are made of silicon dioxide, the same chemical that comprises sand. Scientists examining these tiny grains can often discern from which plant they came.

For example, in 2005, researchers found phytoliths from grass, palm trees, conifers, and other flowering plants in (probably sauropod) dinosaur coprolites from India.1 "It was very unexpected….We will have to rewrite our understanding of its evolution….We may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums," palaeobotanist Caroline Strömberg told Nature News at the time.2

Recently, Strömberg and two of her co-authors from the 2005 study described coprolite-encased phytoliths that are so similar to those made by certain modern rice plants that those found in dinosaur rocks "can be assigned to the rice tribe, Oryzeae, of grass subfamily Ehrhartoideae."3 They collected these samples from the same Indian rock layers, the Lameta Formation, that contained their 2005 finds.

This find joins others that have shown that rice, grass, palm trees, and conifers from dinosaur rocks were essentially the same as their living counterparts. It's as though millions of years of plant evolution never occurred.

The Lameta formation includes sedimentary layers interbedded with volcanic rock layers. It is huge, covering a large area of India.4 The Flood described in the book of Genesis is the best explanation for this scale of upheaval, showing that the fossils found there resulted from the Flood.

Thus, these coprolites show that rice plants existed before the Flood. Either rice had diversified from an originally created grass that was common to many other grasses, like wheat and bamboo, or God created rice grasses separately from other grass kinds. Studies show that rice grasses do not hybridize with other grasses.5 These dinosaur-eaten phytoliths add weight to the idea that rice was a distinct creation from the beginning.

According to Scripture, God created all the grasses, plants, and grazing mammals, along with any grazing dinosaurs like sauropods, by the sixth day of the creation week. As far as what the fossils have shown, Scripture is right.

Original article with references.