Living Dinosaurs
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[edit] Introduction
[edit] Discussion
The strangest thing about this claim is that it is totally irrelevant to creationist aims. Just because a statement about biology is absurd and untrue does not necessarily mean that it contradicts the theory of evolution or supports the book of Genesis, and this is a case in point. The fact that dinosaurs (other than birds) are extinct, is based not on the theory of evolution but on the fact that no-one can find any living dinosaurs. Nor has the extinct status of dinosaurs ever been offered as proof of the theory of evolution; and the discovery, tomorrow, of the entire Lost World of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would not affect the theory of evolution in the slightest.
There are, after all, many orders of animal which have survived since the "age of the dinosaurs", from crocodilians to coelacanths: it just happens that dinosaurs themselves did not.
[edit] Origins of the error
We cannot say for certain what makes creationists suppose that living dinosaurs would refute evolution: perhaps the origin of the error is that they have repeatedly been challenged to refute evolution by producing evidence of humans in fossils from the age of dinosaurs, and have come to suppose that evidence of dinosaurs contemporary with humans in any epoch would be equally good.
Possibly creationists believe that the existence of living dinosaurs would refute the fossil record, which shows dinosaurs going extinct 65 million years ago: but a little thought would show them that if dinosaurs have clung on only in some hidden corners of the world, then it is only in those locations that we would expect to find more recent fossils. If creationists will undertake to produce the Lost World, paleontologists will be happy to search it for more recent fossils: until then, the point is moot.
Another possibility is that creationists suppose that anything which makes scientists laugh at them must be an argument for creationism. This would be the fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: just because scientists find all creationist arguments ridiculous does not mean that all statements ridiculed by scientists are arguments for creationism.
[edit] Arguments for living dinosaurs
To support their belief in living dinosaurs, creationists cannot, of course, produce any actual dinosaurs, or photographs, or film footage, or recent dinosaur remains.
Instead, they fall back on crude hoaxes such as the Ica stones, fairy stories about dragons, and anecdotes such as those about the Loch Ness Monster (which, if it existed, would not be a dinosaur: dinosaurs are land animals).
One common claim, made of the Ica stones and other artifacts, is that pictures of dinosaurs prove that the people who made the pictures must have seen living dinosaurs. This is obviously untrue: thousands of people have produced pictures of dinosaurs without ever having seen a living one: for example, every illustrator of every illustrated book about dinosaurs.
