Where Did All the Dinosaurs Go? Answers in Genesis and the Problem of the Missing Evidence

A few years ago I posted a short video on my YouTube channel in my Critiquing Creationism series asking a question that has nagged at me for as long as I have been reading young-earth literature: if the dinosaurs walked down the ramp of Noah’s Ark only 4350 ago and then lived, however briefly, in a world already full of people, where did they all go, and why have they left us no physical evidence of their presence? That video was prompted by a clip of Dr. Dan Biddle of Genesis Apologetics, but the same question presses with equal force against a much more polished production from Answers in Genesis just last week, in which Brian Osborne and Avery Foley walk viewers through what they title the truth about dinosaurs.

Their video is, in many ways, a model specimen of YEC thought. It gathers nearly the entire young-age creationist dinosaur package into one tidy conversation: creation on Day Six, a vegetarian pre-Fall world, the Flood as the maker of the fossil record, juvenile dinosaurs aboard the Ark, post-Flood extinction, dragon legends as living memory, the soft-tissue argument, Behemoth as a sauropod, and the claim that birds could never have descended from dinosaurs. Because it is so comprehensive, I thought this would be a good time to provide a response to all of these points in one place.

I should say at the outset, as I always do, that I am not an outsider throwing stones at the faith, and I have no interest in the tired science-versus-religion framing that the New Atheists and the young-earth apologists, oddly enough, both find so useful. I am an insider, and a troubled one. My issue with Answers in Genesis is not that they take Genesis seriously. It is that they have built an elaborate scientific edifice on top of one particular twentieth-century reading of Genesis, and then told a generation of Christian children that the edifice and the gospel rise or fall together. I believe that is bad science. I believe, and this troubles me far more, that it is also bad theology.

But, let’s get to the dinosaurs!

“Were You There?” and the Trouble with the Worldview Argument

The whole Osborne and Foley conversation is organized around one idea, repeated at every turn: that “millions of years” is not an observation but an interpretation, that it rests on faith in fallible human reason, and that the only real question is whether you trust God’s word or man’s. Osborne recalls asking children whether any scientist was there at the beginning, whether any scientist knows everything, whether scientists make mistakes—and then contrasts their answers with God, who was there, who knows everything, and who never errs. It is a memorable classroom move, and I understand its appeal.

I’ve talked and written about this so many time but it bears repeating here again.  Osborn’s argument proves far too much, and the people making it do not actually live by it. We were not there when a crime was committed either, yet we convict on fingerprints, footprints, and DNA, because the present effects of past events are themselves a kind of testimony. The historical sciences are not guessing; they make predictions about what we should and should not find, and those predictions are tested against the rocks every day. When Avery Foley argues that dinosaurs went extinct after the Flood, she is reconstructing a past nobody witnessed from clues in the present. When Brian Osborne reads a sauropod into the tail of Behemoth, he is interpreting evidence through a framework. The young-earth position is not observation untouched by interpretation. It is a rival interpretation. The honest debate is not faith against fact. It is which reading of the evidence has the greater explanatory power. On that question, I would argue, the young-age model is in serious trouble, and nowhere more so than in the matter of where the dinosaurs went.

Two of Every Kind, and Then Nothing

Let us take the Answers in Genesis account of the extinction exactly as the speakers give it, in their own words and on their own terms. Two of every land-dwelling, air-breathing “kind” rode out the Flood on the Ark, dinosaurs included, brought aboard as juveniles to save space and food. They disembarked into a wrecked world—cracked crust, volcanoes, tsunamis, a coming ice age, and a climate utterly unlike the one they had known. Osborne lists the culprits without much hesitation: massive climate change, the loss of plant species that had been their food, and human hunting, since God had now put the fear of man into the beasts. He imagines a herd of sauropods trampling a post-Flood wheat field and asks, reasonably enough from inside his framework, what self-respecting man would not want a T. rex head on his wall. The documentary version of this same argument, from Dan Biddle, adds genetic entropy to the list, the idea that the animals’ genomes were simply decaying toward collapse.

Taken one at a time, each of these explanations sounds plausible. Animals do go extinct from habitat loss, lost food sources, and over-hunting; that much is simply true, and I will not pretend otherwise. The problem is not any single mechanism. The problem is that all of them together still cannot account for the one thing the model most needs to explain, which is the complete and total absence of physical evidence.

Consider the scale of what is being claimed. Answers in Genesis puts roughly eighty-five dinosaur “kinds” on the Ark at the level of the family. Add to that something on the order of forty-some pterosaur kinds, and then add the synapsids—that strange assemblage of large, often bear-sized to far larger non-mammalian vertebrates—at perhaps sixty-seven kinds more. Begin adding these up and we are looking at roughly two hundred distinct groups of large land vertebrates, every one of them now extinct, but every one of them supposedly alive and reproducing across the whole earth as recently as forty-three hundred years ago. That is a staggering claim, and it carries a staggering evidentiary burden.

Here is where the comparison that I cannot get out of my mind comes in. We know what it looks like when humans live alongside, hunt, and drive large animals to extinction, because it happened, and it left mountains of evidence. Mammoths and mastodons, woolly rhinos, cave bears, dire wolves, ground sloths, Irish elk—the megafauna of the Ice Age are gone, and on the young-earth timescale these are all descendants of pairs that stepped off the Ark. Yet they are everywhere. We have their bones by the thousands. We have kill sites with stone tools lying among the ribs. We have butchery marks scored into the bone by those very tools. We have mammoth ivory carved into art and shaped into dwellings. And in case after case we now have their ancient DNA, sequenced from horses, rhinos, cave bears, and dire wolves that died, on the creationist reckoning, no longer ago than the dinosaurs supposedly did.

Now run the young-earth numbers honestly, and keep the estimates conservative, because a conservative estimate makes the difficulty more, not less, robust. Suppose a theropod or pterosaur kind persisted across several continents for even just two or three thousand years after the Flood—which is precisely what some young-earth advocates propose when they reach for medieval dragon legends. A large vertebrate cannot persist for three thousand years across multiple continents as a handful of individuals; it requires sustained breeding populations numbering at the very least in the hundreds, and realistically in the thousands, at any given moment. Over three thousand years, the total number of such animals that lived and died is not in the hundreds or the thousands but in the hundreds of thousands, and very plausibly in the millions. Multiply even the low end of that across two hundred kinds, and the post-Flood world should be littered with tens of millions of large reptilian and synapsid carcasses, settling into the same sediments, caves, tar seeps, and floodplains that so faithfully preserved the mammoths.

And not one of them is there. Not a single tooth in a pack-ratmidden. Not a single femur fashioned into a tool. Not a serrated theropod tooth saved for its obvious usefulness as a blade, not a Velociraptor claw kept as the trophy any hunter would treasure, not a hadrosaur skull or a crested pterosaur head mounted on anyone’s wall. We have found, quite literally, billions of fossils in the layers that young-earth geology must assign to the post-Flood world. We have found the rhinos and the horses and the tapirs and the cave bears. Somehow every last one of two hundred kinds of the most charismatic animals that ever lived slipped through that net entirely, and left behind not a fragment.

Notice, too, that the medieval-survival idea does not rescue the model; it makes the wound deeper. If theropods and pterosaurs were still being sighted in the Middle Ages, then they were not promptly finished off by a changed climate or a failed food supply or genetic entropy at all. They flourished for three millennia. So whatever the explanation for their disappearance, it was neither swift nor early, and the longer they lived the more remains they were obligated to leave. The genetic-entropy explanation fares no better. If decaying genomes doomed the dinosaurs, the same decay should have doomed the mammals, who carry genomes no more robust; yet the mammalian lineages came through in glorious abundance while every reptilian and synapsid group, we are told, vanished without a trace. Genetic entropy cannot explain a selective extinction that spared one group and erased another.

So I will end this section where I ended my original video, with a constructive challenge rather than a complaint. If young-earth creationists truly believe these animals were alive within the last few thousand years—some of them within the last several hundred—then they should make a bold and testable prediction. They should predict that recoverable dinosaur and pterosaur tissue and DNA will eventually be found, exactly as it has been found for Ice Age horses and rhinos and cave bears that are, on their own timescale, no older. They should be actively searching for it. The mainstream paleontologist does not expect to sequence a dinosaur, because on a timescale of tens of millions of years the molecules are long gone. The young-earth creationist, by his own chronology, has every reason to expect success. I would genuinely welcome the attempt, and I think the silence of the major ministries on this obvious prediction is telling.

The Fossil Record Does Not Look Like a Flood

That brings me to the second claim I want to examine from a straightforwardly paleontological angle, and it is one Osborne states almost in passing. We find dinosaurs fairly high in the fossil record, he explains, because the floodwaters took time to rise and bury the land creatures, and the overall order of the column is, in his words, a rough order caused by the flood rising and burying different ecosystems in turn. This is the standard appeal to hydrodynamic sorting and ecological zonation, and it is doing enormous work in the young-earth system.

The trouble is that the fossil record is not a rough order. It is an extraordinarily fine, consistent, and globally repeatable order, and it sorts by features that have nothing to do with how an animal would behave in a flood. A single rising flood cannot explain why flowering plants appear abruptly partway up the column and never below it, while ferns and conifers appear far lower. It cannot explain why we never find a single rabbit, or a horse, or a whale, in the same beds as a non-avian dinosaur, anywhere on earth, despite excavating these rocks for two centuries on every continent. A drowning rabbit and a drowning Triceratops are not sorted by water into separate global layers a hundred feet apart with perfect fidelity. Density, mobility, and habitat simply do not predict the order we actually see; a nimble, lightweight pterosaur and a heavy, slow ankylosaur are found in the same Mesozoic rocks, while small, slow mammals that share their world are mixed right in with them rather than sorted out by size or speed.

Worse still for the flood-sorting picture are the things that cannot form in a single catastrophic year of churning water at all. We find dinosaur trackways—long sequences of footprints pressed into mud that then dried, hardened, and was buried, recording living animals walking across stable ground. We find nests with eggs laid in careful arrangements, some with embryos inside, and we find them at multiple distinct levels in the column, which would require the same kind of dinosaur to calmly return to dry land and nest, repeatedly, in the middle of a year-long global deluge. We find burrows, root systems, ancient soils, and the tracks of animals walking over the desiccated, salt-cracked surfaces of evaporated seas.

These are not the signatures of a single flood. They are the signatures of ordinary life and death playing out, episode after episode, over a very long time. The order in the rocks lines up not with how fast something could run from rising water but with independent radiometric dates, and that agreement is exactly what the conventional account predicts and exactly what a one-year flood does not.

The more careful young-earth scientists know this is a hard problem. Kurt Wise, who trained under Stephen Jay Gould and is as honest a young-earth scientist as one could ask for, has openly acknowledged that the fossil sequence has a real and orderly structure that his model must account for and has not yet fully explained. Todd Wood has said plainly that the evidence for evolution is substantial and that pretending otherwise does no one any favors. I have great respect for that candor. It is precisely the candor missing from a video that tells children the order in the rocks is just a rough flood effect and leaves it there.

On Feathers, and Whether Birds Are Dinosaurs

The third claim is the one where the video is, I think, furthest from the actual fossils. Osborne and Foley reject the idea that birds are dinosaurs, and they offer a memorable test: if a fossil is covered in feathers, with barbs and barbules, then it is simply a bird, and if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it is not a dinosaur in disguise. The fuzzy filaments found on some genuine dinosaurs—the so-called dino-fuzz—they dismiss as ordinary structures that evolutionists only call feathers because their worldview requires a feather to be evolving.

Set the worldview talk aside and look at what has actually come out of the ground over the last thirty years, because it is genuinely one of the great fossil stories of our lifetime.

Paleontologists no longer have a tidy gap with unambiguous birds on one side and scaly reptiles on the other. They have an every growing and richly populated continuum. Sinosauropteryx, a small theropod, is covered in simple hair-like filaments. Other theropods show downy tufts, then filaments that branch, then filaments with a central shaft, then true vaned, asymmetrical feathers of the kind a flying bird uses—each stage preserved on animals that are anatomically dinosaurs by every other bone in their body. Yutyrannus, a tyrannosauroid the size of a small car, wore a coat of filaments; no one is mistaking that for a duck. Velociraptor, the very animal the speakers invoke, preserves quill knobs on its forearm, the bony anchor points for feathers, on a creature with teeth and a killing claw and a long bony tail.

And these are not just look-alikes called feathers by fiat. The filaments have been examined under electron microscopes, and they preserve melanosomes—the tiny pigment-bearing structures whose size and shape let researchers reconstruct color—of exactly the kinds found in the feathers of living birds, and not the kinds found in the collagen fibers that creationists sometimes propose as an alternative. Meanwhile the list of features shared between birds and theropod dinosaurs has grown until it is almost embarrassing: the wishbone, hollow air-filled bones, the three-fingered hand, the backward-pointing pubis, brooding postures captured in fossil parents sitting atop their nests, and the same medullary bone that egg-laying female birds lay down today. This is not a worldview painting feathers onto a reptile. This is anatomy, histology, and microscopy converging on a single answer.

Foley’s deeper objection is that turning a dinosaur into a bird would require adding brand new genetic information, and that mutation and natural selection only shuffle, duplicate, or lose information, never add it. This is a claim I have addressed many times, so I will be brief. The premise is simply not correct as a matter of observed genetics. Gene duplication followed by divergence is a documented, ongoing process by which a genome acquires a new gene that can take on a new function while the original keeps doing its old job, and we have watched novel functions arise this way in real time, in the laboratory and in the wild. The bald assertion that information can only be lost is not a finding of genetics; it is a definition crafted to be unfalsifiable, and it collapses the moment one asks what is actually meant by information and how it is measured.

The Soft-Tissue Argument Proves Less Than It Promises

The fourth claim is the soft-tissue argument, and here I want to begin by giving the underlying science its full due, because the critics of young-earth creationism sometimes get this wrong. The discovery, largely by Mary Schweitzer and her colleagues, that pliable vessel-like structures, cell-like microstructures, and fragments of proteins such as collagen can survive inside dinosaur bone is real, it is remarkable, and it overturned a longstanding assumption that nothing organic could last that long. Schweitzer did careful, courageous work, and she has had to defend it against skeptics in her own field. None of that is in dispute, and anyone who dismisses the finding as a fraud or a contamination artifact has not kept up with the literature.

What is in dispute is the leap from “surprising organic remnants survive” to “therefore the bones are only thousands of years old.” Notice first how the video inflates the evidence. Osborne describes real soft tissue that is stretchy and pliable, made mostly of water like our own flesh, that should not last more than hundreds of years. That is not what was found. What was found are degraded, mineral-associated remnants and trace peptides—collagen happens to be one of the most stable and durable proteins known, which is exactly why fragments of it, rather than fresh muscle, are what endure. No one has pulled juicy, water-filled tissue out of a Tyrannosaurus.

Second, and decisively, the leading explanation for how these remnants survived comes from Schweitzer’s own laboratory, and it is not a young earth. She and her colleagues showed that iron liberated from the animal’s blood can act as a powerful natural preservative, with iron-derived free radicals cross-linking the proteins into a tougher, longer-lasting form—essentially a natural version of the fixative a museum uses to preserve a specimen. Schweitzer herself is an evangelical Christian, and she has said as plainly as anyone could wish that her findings do not point to young bones. The argument that this discovery overturns the age of the earth depends on ignoring the very scientist who made it. A model that has to set aside the conclusions of the researcher whose data it borrows is not following the evidence; it is mining it.

Final questions..

Here is what I would ask my fellow believers to consider. If the case for the faith has been wired to a particular reading of geology, what happens to a young person’s faith when she grows up, takes a paleontology course, and walks through a quarry where the order in the rocks is plainly not a rough flood effect? What happens when she learns that the dinosaurs left no medieval bones, that the feathers are really feathers, that the soft tissue points to chemistry and not to a young earth? If she has been told that Genesis and these facts cannot both be true, we have handed her a false choice, and we have made her faith hostage to the next gap that science fills. A faith built on the shrinking margins of what we cannot yet explain is a fragile thing. A faith that can look honestly at God’s second book and find no quarrel with his first is not.

So where did the dinosaurs go? The honest answer is the one written in the rocks, the same answer that explains why the mammoths left their bones and the dinosaurs did not, why the feathers grade into one another, and why the molecules in the bone obey ordinary chemistry rather than a four-thousand-year clock. They lived and died across an immensity of time we are only beginning to comprehend, and the God who made them is no less their Creator, and no less ours, for having taken his time. To say so is not to doubt his Word. It is to take both of his books at their word, and to trust that their single Author has not deceived us in either.

Blessings,

Joel