What Happened to the Dinosaurs?

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety. 

Bobby Conway: I am with Jason Jimenez, who is an author, speaker, and apologist. Good to have you on the program bro.

Jason: Glad you had me.

Bobby: Jason, one of the things I’ve observed during my existence is that I have not seen a T-Rex roaming the earth. So, this begs the question. What has happened to the dinosaurs.

Jason: I haven’t seen dinosaurs either, though maybe in my dreams. That actually is a great question. As we were saying earlier there are two different views that people hold. There are the old-earthers and the young-earthers. Typically, Old-earthers would say that 65-million years ago a meteor hit the earth and killed them off. Where young-earthers would say that they were made when God was making the other animals. The great creatures of the sea in Genesis 1:21, there is a reference to that. So many of them think they were on the ark, and then after the ark and after the Ice Age, continental drifting, and the different changes of climate and disease, they couldn’t survive. They suffered through different things, hunters or whatever, eventually they became extinct.

If somebody holds to an old-earth they do not have to believe that dinosaurs were on the ark because they died before hand. But for those who believe that dinosaurs existed during creation, they were among humans, and on the ark would say that eventually they became extinct because they failed to adapt to their environment.

I also think it is also helpful to understand, often I’ll get the question why isn’t the term “dragon” or “dinosaur” used in Scripture. That is actually a good question. Because often time you see that the word dinosaur isn’t used therefore the dinosaurs were already gone and maybe that is the case and maybe they died off millions of years ago. What people need to understand is that in our English translations we have the Geneva and the King James, 16^th and 17^th century, and that is where we tend to get our English translations from. Sir Richard was the one who applied the term dinosaur, terrible lizard, in about 1841. So, the term itself wasn’t necessarily used. But when you do look at Scripture, I think the argument can be made that a term like dragon, or behemoth, or Leviathan (in Job 40:21). There is this great dragon that Ezekiel talks about in his book. There are references that look like these are mentioning of dinosaurs. If that is the case then dinosaurs are there even as civilization was thriving.

But what happened to them? Some thought a meteor hit. But here is what I have to say to that. If the meteor was that impactful millions of years ago, I don’t think the earth would have ever recovered. Plus, it would have annihilated all the millions of fossils that we have of dinosaurs to begin with. So I tend to think the dinosaurs lived on the ark and then eventually became extinct of natural causes.

Jason: I appreciate you sharing that. I also think its helpful for people to understand these weren’t full grown dinosaurs getting on the ark. They were a lot smaller and everything.

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