| The newly opened Creation Museum in Kentucky has a lot to show its visitors. It tries to reconstruct the steps of creation in life size models of the characters from the Bible. One of the gems of this exhibition is Noah's Ark, which features the famous ship, Noah himself, animals in pairs, and surprisingly full sized models of dinosaurs. The creationists believe God created the world in six days about six thousand years ago, and that dinosaurs were just other animals which co-existed with humans. While many may argue with the scientific foundations of such claim, the state of the art exhibit is certainly very popular among Kentucky residents and many out of state tourists.
Since the news of the "dinosaurs in the Ark" broke, the Creation
Museum was featured in many magazines and online news articles, including numerous blogs. Now, many international visitors come to Kentucky especially to see the dinosaurs in Noah's Ark. Protestors of this concept however say that the museum wrongfully portrays the evolution process and confuses many children who come to see it.
An airplane flying with the banner "Thou Shalt Not Lie" was seen over the museum on its opening day. Conventional science says the universe is 14 billion years old and there are millions of years separating dinosaurs and humans in evolution history. People were lucky to find dinosaur fossils, let alone meet live dinosaurs even in the ancient times.
Dinosaurs (Latin – Dinosauria) – these are extinct animals, consisting of multiple super orders of the reptilian class, lived on the planet during the period from 225 to 65 million years before (in Mesozoic era).
The superorder of Dinosaurs is related to the subclass Archosauria and divided into the Saurischia and Ornithischia orders.
Apparently, only the findings of the fossil remains of Dinosaurs served as a base for the creation of the Myth on dragons.
The term “Dinosaur”:
The word “Dinosaur” is formed from two words: from the Greek deinos - terrible, almighty, and strange and saura – “lizard”. The term was coined in 1842 by an English biologist Richard Owen.
Origin:
The appearance of the first Dinosaurs – Archosauria, in the course of nature, was commemorated by a massive (but not totally) extinction of the therapsid, superior forms of which are according to their organization very near to single pass mammals and to some assumptions they had mammary glands and fur.
Behavior:
Some of the dinosaurs acquired social behavior. At the present moment most of the earlier dinosaurs are Psittacosaurus, which lived 130 – 100 million years ago. The discoveries permitted to make a conclusion, that already for the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period a parental instinct existed.
Extinction:
According to one of the hypothesis, dinosaurs were extinct because of a global cataclysm, which possibly was presented itself as the falling of huge meteorites.
The latest and more accurate discovery, however, denied the given hypothesis. According to the new statistics, this catastrophe took place after that, as the dinosaurs died, and their death was subjected to high the volcanic activity of the planets, as a result of which in those days there was a high content of arsenic in the air.
Probably not any other living beings which lived on the Earth quickened the imagination more than dinosaurs. In the duration of around 150 million years they dominated on the land and were the biggest vertebrates in the ecological niche, developing in a wide range of forms, and inhabited in every continent.
Possibly because of which they frequently had freakish forms possibly because of which they sometimes had grown to such huge sizes, and possibly because of which after long ruling the Earth they suddenly disappeared, apparently, with out traces, all these added to the attraction of scientists as well as to the public to the group of Dinosauria.
Such as the wonderful dinosaurs, even the facts must be qualified. It’s true that many of the dinosaurs actually had fairly strange forms, but were there among them at least some unidentified according to the exterior, of let us say, the giraffe or elephant? It’s true that most of them really had grown to extremely sizes (and even enormous sizes), but there wasn’t even one dinosaur, which could even compete with the size of a small baleen whale. Actually it would not be possible physiologically for an animal on land to be more than 100 tons (The legs would be so massive touching each other without leaving any space between them for the body!). Mostly dinosaurs were living beings of a medium size, equivalent to the size of a big mammal of the present days. Finally regarding the extinction with out traces, it is again a mistake. According to the believers and some paleontologists, some small insectivorous or carnivorous dinosaurs really survived the big Mesozoic extinction and still are with us today. They are called Birds.
In some ecological niches dinosaurs did not invade. They never established in the lower terrestrial and subterranean vertebral niche, which was already engaged by mammals and lizards, but not (contrary to the popular theory) in the marine or aquatic habitat. They were not there in the air too; however, if birds are their descendents, then they acclimated to air and to such a success, that its descendents are still the most numerous and various out of all quadruped animals even for today.
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Creation Museum in Kentucky shows full size
dinosaurs models on Noah's Ark and claims they coexisted with humans. Children ask many question at this exhibition. Their first one is usually "Were there dinosaurs when you were a kid, Dad?"
