What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?

BEHEMOTH, A GREAT LAND ANIMAL (vv.15-24)

Speaking of greatness and power, God draws attention now to a huge animal of great strength, which he calls "behemoth." Some have thought this refers to a hippopotamus, but that animal has a small tail, while behemoth "moves his tail like a cedar" (v.17). Perhaps this animal has now become extinct, for its tail seems to resemble that of a dinosaur. Some think the dinosaurs were destroyed in the flood, others, that some continued after the flood, and later became extinct.

But though behemoth ate grass, like an ox (v.15), his strength was greater than that of the lion, which feeds on meat of other animals. In behemoth every part of his anatomy contributed to his exceptional strength (vv.16-18), his loins, his body, legs and bones and even his tail. Strikingly, we are told, "he is the first of the ways of God" (v.19). God has created him as an object lesson for us of resistless strength. Only the God who made him can bring him down to nothing, symbolically to subject him to the judgment of the sword.

That a great catastrophe wrecked this world of ours is confirmed by geology. The story of the rocks, the immense convulsions, table lands and mountains thrown down, and valleys and plains elevated—all tell a tale. Palaeontology confirms this too. There are fossil remains of gigantic carnivorous animals, of which the world, as we know it today, contains no living specimens. There were dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, pterodactyles, etc., etc., extinct animals of immense size, which have passed away, leaving no descendants. An idea of their size is given when the skeleton fossil of a dinosaur’s thigh bone was found to measure six feet; the wing of a pterodactyle measured eighteen feet from tip to tip. No fossil of human remains is found in this period.

As regards death in creation before man's fall, I must remark that probably the question only refers to death in this earth's state as it is since Adam's creation. Since man's creation, I am quite satisfied that death never took place till his fall. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Now here the apostle is occupied with sin's effect upon man; still he states that death entered by sin. Hence I conclude that death was not in the creation of which man was the head until his fall. But of what may have happened between the creation of the heavens and the earth (bara) and the forming the present world out of chaos, scripture says nothing, but leaves us to gather rather that the state of the world, the tohu bohu ["without form and void"], was the ruin of some previous state; for I hardly think that the state in which God would create it, and make all the sons of God shout for joy. Hence if geologists find Megalotheria, and Plesiosauri as many as they please, they do not touch the statements of scripture one way or another, for scripture makes none as to it: only into the creation connected with man, death entered by man's sin. That scripture states, though it does not touch on its consequences for beasts; but Genesis 1:30 confirms, for it gives the green grass to the beasts of the earth. I know not whether - is aware of the discoveries of geologists and the use made by infidels of it on the point in question. Scripture decides as to the present state of the world in which man is found, and says nothing as to what preceded it.

The word "day" is not infrequently used in Scripture as signifying quite lengthy periods, hence we are not surprised that many have assigned that meaning to it in Genesis 1. Such an interpretation, however, lands us at once into serious difficulties.

As usual the hypothesis when considered seriously betrays its inherent unreality. The huge Saurians of the Mesozoic were not marine only, as they ought to be if the record spoke of them; many of them were Pterosaurs of the land, some species even winged, though we cannot count Pterodactyls as birds. The inspired text therefore conclusively puts them all out of consideration. Here we read solely of the creatures with which the waters swarmed, of every living creature that moved there, each according to its species, as well as of those justly designated "the great" among the multitudes of smaller sea-creatures; as also of "every winged bird" after its kind. The natural force and true aim of the revelation was to make known God's work in that lower part of the animal kingdom, which is none the less the object of His care; and if one portion be of vast bulk, none the less was it His creature. The Adam family were called to own His hand and goodness in the whole.

The evident intention was to impress, on all that heed the written word, that the fifth day's work embraced the entire circle of aquatic animals as well as all bird life known to mankind; not at all to acquaint them with a bygone system of animated nature, which sustained at the close of the Cretaceous period one of the most complete exterminations of species confessed by geologists. In fact too it is only in the Quaternary that Teliost Fishes as well as Birds find their culmination; of all allusion to which, though nearly affecting man, the mis-interpretation entirely deprives us. If on the contrary the inspired writer speak of what concerns man practically, with this agrees the expressed blessing of God, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." It also derives impressive confirmation from vers. 26, 28, where dominion over the fish of the sea is given to man, no less than over birds of the air, and beast and cattle and all that creep on the earth. The only detail in fact is in setting forth the origin of what was actually put under man's rule; which certainly does not apply to Paleozoic, or Mesozoic, or Tertiary times.

For many years it has been appreciated by many Christians that the geological record is very largely one of the cataclysmic global flood as described in Genesis and referred to elsewhere in the Scriptures e.g. 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 2:5; 2 Peter 3:3-6. (Men do not oppose long ages or a pre-creation view as such, they oppose any idea of 'God' and of 'judgment' as in Noah's flood.) Clearly such a flood would have left the remains of all types of life sorted by type in sediments soon hardened into rock. The earth in Genesis 1:1 was 'unformed and unfilled' — it is not necessary to understand it as 'wrecked'. These pre-creation ideas introduce even greater theological difficulties such as death before sin, and death operating where God had stated that all that He had made was very good. The fact that fossil creatures are either identical to modern creatures, including apes and men, or of a similar nature, point to the first creation pre-flood scene. It should also be mentioned that a long ages world view introduces more scientific difficulties than it seeks to solve, e.g. features of the universe which could not be as we now see them if there had been the long ages which are mooted. This is not the place to expand on this, but there is much literature available on the subject, both scriptural and scientific. Ed. STEM.]

There are mysterious things to account for, such as the disappearance of the mammoth, and of other pre-historic animals, who have left no descendants on the earth. Did they disappear between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2? We think this is so. Also, how comes it that in the arctic regions of Hudson’s Bay Territory there are fossils of gigantic ferns and palms, which show that in these arctic regions there was once a climate more tropical than anything we know now? These things should make men propound their theories, as to how creation took place in ages before man existed, with at least some measure of reserve and diffidence.

Chapter 12. "If the reader remembers what was stated as to the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether marine or freshwater, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by millions of human beings, he will be prepared for the general dearth of human memorials in glacial formations. It is natural therefore to encounter a gap in the regular sequence of geological monuments bearing on the past history of Man, wherever we have proofs of glacial action having prevailed with intensity." Now there is no reason why there should be any stoppage of the human remains by the glacial period, more than of animal remains. The abundance of reptile remains in the reptile age shows preservation of fragile fossils, or with Elephas meridionalis.

On the one hand the facts point to changes in earth and sea, and these repeatedly varied too with fresh water; to rocks igneous and stratified and metamorphosed, and (during the periods thus implied, and with a corresponding environment of temperature and constitution) to organised natures, vegetable and animal, from lower orders to high, short of man and those animals which accompany his appearance on the earth; to whole groups of these organisms in vast abundance coming to an end, and others quite distinct succeeding and extinguished in their turn. Would it not be a harsh supposition that God, in the fossils of the rocks, made a mere appearance of what once lived? that these petrified creatures never had animate existence here below? On the other hand, the principle and the fact of creation we see not more plainly revealed in ver. 1 than of disruption in ver. 2; and both before the actual preparation of the earth for Adam as described in the six days.

To my mind it is rather a precarious affirmation, the exact number on a point so delicate and difficult to ascertain with precision. Nevertheless, the general outline I cannot but hold to be as sure a series of facts as any other in geological science, that God was pleased to form successive deposits, and after each, or at any rate at intervals, violently to break up the surface that He formed. And so far from this being without a worthy purpose, it was the evidently wise course of things, if He destined the earth, after these vast geological eras, to become the home of man, or at least the sphere for man's activity and responsibility in such a world as this. How else would man have reached what lay in the bowels of the earth? How else could he have availed himself, for instance, of the buried coal measures? How else could he have turned to account the minerals deposited in its depths? How else could he have quarried the lime, the marbles, and other stones concealed there? On the one hand, all this chain of successive convulsions was requisite for man, when formed on the earth; but, on the other hand, it was entirely incompatible with man, or indeed any other being, when living on the face of the earth; because these violent disruptions, of course, would have been fatal, as they were when various genera and species of living creatures did exist at each epoch when the crash took place; and consequently the tale is told by the vast beds of fossilized objects, as we all know — when God laid down not merely unstratified formations, but strata with an ascending scale of organic being, before the Adamic earth.