Dinosaurs in Rock Art

From SkepticWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Bernifal Cave 3 The Doheny Dinosaur 4 Related Articles

[edit] Introduction

Creationists sometimes claim that dinosaurs are represented in rock art to bolster their belief in living or recently living non-avian dinosaurs.

[edit] Bernifal Cave

One favorite example of a dinosaur in rock art is based on a photograph taken by Jack Cuozzo in the Bernifal cave. The photograph is reproduced opposite. Mr Cuozzo writes:

To be very forthright, it must be stated that this is a dinosaur, period. [1]

For those who cannot see the dinosaur, it is, according to Mr Cuozzo, fighting a mamoth; and, it would seem, lying on its enormous, corpulent belly in order to do so. Those who still can't see it had better visit his website.

It would appear from Cuozzo's account that he himself was unable to see the dinosaur when he was in Bernifal cave, and that it only became apparent to him when the photograph was developed:

One of the amazing things that happened inside the Bemifal Cave was that in the process of shooting pictures in all directions, I took a picture of an actual dinosaur carving. [2]

We feel that his identification of this as a cave painting of a dinosaur --- or of anything else, for that matter --- goes beyond ordinary pareidolia into the realms of wishful thinking.

[edit] The Doheny Dinosaur

Another example often cited is the glyph found in the Hava Supai Canyon by the Doheny expedition, led by one Samuel Hubbard in the late nineteeth century. Again, we reproduce the picture, because a mere description hardly does the thing justice. Of this glyph, one creationist writes:

Dr. Hubbard and his team of archaeologists discovered dinosaur tracks preserved in strata identified as Triassic—alleged by evolutionists to be more than 165 million years old. Question: How could Indians have known how to draw such a perfect picture of an animal (the dinosaur) that they never had seen? [3] --- emphasis added by SkepticWiki.

The website which is the source of this startling quotation actually reproduces this "perfect" picture, so they cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for falsely claiming that the picture is perfect. They know very well that it is not a perfect picture of a dinosaur. It is a squiggle which few people would identify unprompted as any kind of animal, let alone a dinosaur.

Dr Hubbard himself wrote of his find:

The fact that the animal is upright and balanced on its tail would seem to indicate that the prehistoric artist must have seen it alive.

Unconscious of irony, Creationist websites illustrate this claim with pictures of dinosaurs standing on their hind legs and balancing on their tails, painted by twentieth-century artists who had certainly never seen a living dinosaur [4][5].

[edit] Related Articles

• Living Dinosaurs
• Pareidolia
• Creationist Arguments
• Dinosaurs