Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1072: Dinosaurs, the Bible, and the Age of the Earth: Dr. Jordan Mallon

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Dr. Mallon is the head of Palaeobiology and Research Scientist at Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada. He specializes in dinosaur ecology and systematics. He recieved his Ph.D. from University of Calgary and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Ontario. In this conversation, we talk about the history of research on dinasaurs, what we used to know, what we know now, how our previous assumptions and knowledge has changed, how we go about daiting dinasaur fossils, how dinasaurs (which went extinct around 66 million years ago) relates to the age of the earth, and what do we do with "death" (among dinasaurs) happening long before the sin of Adam. https://nature.ca/en/our-science/science-experts/jordan-mallon/ Twitter Handle @Jordan_Mallon

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Jordan Mallon, who is a paleontologist who specializes in research on dinosaurs, specifically dinosaur ecology, and heontologists who specialize in research on dinosaurs. Jordan is also a Christian. So we spend the bulk of our time understanding the history of research about dinosaurs, what we know, what we don't know, what we used to think we knew, and now where our knowledge has been corrected. We talk about dating dinosaurs, not like romantic dating, but figuring out how old these dinosaurs were. And then once we start mentioning dates and years and ages, then that's going to get into more theological questions about the age of the earth and how our understanding of dinosaurs contributes to how we can date the age of the earth, specifically whether it's a young earth or an old earth. So we get into all that

and much more. So please welcome to the show, the one and only Jordan Mallon. All right. Hey, friends. I'm here with Dr. Jordan Mallon, the first paleontologist I've ever had on the show. So I've recorded over a thousand episodes. So thanks for breaking some new ground with us. Happy to do it. Yeah, there's, you know, there aren't a ton of paleontologists in the world. So I'm not surprised to hear I might be the first on your show. I'm curious, like a rough estimate.

Are we talking like a few hundred, a few thousand, a few dozen? Oh, probably. You're talking in the hundreds. It really depends. I'm a vertebrate paleontologist, right? And so I work on animals with backbones, effectively. And there's an international society called the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. We meet every year and there's upwards of you know 800 people there maybe not everyone shows up to it so i'm sure

we're over a thousand but um we're not in the the many thousands of people that's for certain interesting so i have to ask how did you get into this to give us your backstory i mean it's such a niche field. You love learning about dinosaurs as a kid or something? Or was there something more to it than that? Yeah, I was a pretty typical kid. I like dinosaurs. Every kid likes dinosaurs. And I just say I never outgrew them. At some point, most people outgrow them for one reason or another. We can't all be paleontologists. There just aren't that many jobs to fill but uh yeah it's been a passion of mine ever since i was a kid i grew up in ottawa uh which was which is where i'm at now in ottawa and canada and uh there are fossils around here no dinosaur fossils mind you but okay you know i found my first fossils as a kid, which sort of, you know, inspired me.

I saw Jurassic Park in theaters when I was 13 years or I was 11 years old, actually. And, you know, that that had an influence on me, as I'm sure it did many other paleontologists my age. I grew up going to the Canadian Museum of Nature, which is actually where I work now. I grew up going to the Canadian Museum of Nature, which is actually where I work now. And so I grew up, you know, looking at dinosaurs in the museum. And all these sort of little things kept me on the straight and narrow. And, you know, I knew when I was quite young that I wanted to be a paleontologist. And you do specialize now in dinosaurs, right? Is that – or all vertebrates?

No, I specialize in dinosaurs at the museum. I was specifically hired to work on dinosaurs. I do work on other things. I, you know, I publish on fossil turtles sometimes. I publish on marine reptiles, but, you know, my bread and butter is dinosaurs. Okay. So can you give us a brief history of dinosaur research? Like how far back does it go? When did we first discover something that we were like, hey, this is something we've

never seen before. And it might be a dinosaur. Like what's the history of research? And then I'm going to ask you kind of like what's changed in our knowledge of dinosaurs throughout that history? Oh boy. That's a big question. You know, the first scientific discoveries of dinosaurs go back to really the Victorian era, if not maybe a little before. But, you know, I'm certain that people were finding dinosaurs long before then. You know, we have stories of, you know, First Nations folks here in Canada, at least, referring to, you know, the bones of the grandfather of the buffalo. You know, so they did have stories for dinosaurs, you know, that predate the sort of modern scientific era. But they obviously interpreted them in a very different way. But they obviously interpreted them in a very different way. And it really wasn't until the Victorian era, you know, the early to mid 1800s that we actually came up with the word dinosaur. It wasn't even, you know, a word before then. So, you know, the first finds were made in places like England, in the Western the western world really the first scientifically documented finds

england and in new jersey and the united states you know hadrosaurus which was one of the first named dinosaurs at least in north america uh came out of new jersey um and you know the first finds were very what's the word i'm looking for very scrappy i suppose in nature it was a tooth here piece of a jaw there you know a toe bone here a leg bone there um and uh actually it was the finding of of hadrosaurus in new jersey where we we came to realize that these dinosaurs were were big sort of bipedal in some cases uh animals that we had a hard time fathoming before then. I already have a bunch of questions, but I'll just ask it now just so I don't forget. But I've often, like, you go to these museums and you see these massive, you know,

skeletons fully put together, dinosaur, and the pictures in the background of what it looked like. And then you look closely and there's like an odd colored you know half of a kneecap and like and this is the actual bone we found you know i mean because you mentioned in passing that you know sometimes a tooth here a job on there are we reconstructing this massive dinosaur out of like tiny tiny pieces and i'm gonna assume that it's not just you know when you see something doesn't make sense to you it's like well how do we know it look like this you know but i'm going to assume that it's not just you know when you see something doesn't make sense to you it's like well how do we know it look like this you know but i'm going to assume there's more to it than than that but is that are we reconstructing huge replicas out of small

pieces are we finding are how we found a lot more now over the years well we we found a ton now what you're saying this sort of scenario that you're setting up was true in the early days of looking for these animals, right? So again, back in the Victorian era, you know, there was one of the first dinosaurs named was Megalosaurus, and it was named on the basis of a partial jaw fragment. And when paleontologists were trying to reconstruct what they thought the animal looked like. You know, they knew it was effectively a big carnivorous reptile of some kind, and that's all they could say. And so they reconstructed the animal as being this big quadrupedal beast, maybe for lack of a better word. It looked like a big lumbering dragon, I suppose.

But in the intervening 150 years, we've found many, many, many dinosaur skeletons that are complete and articulated. And we have dozens of examples. The animals that you see in the museums today are quite accurate. In many cases, we have the entire skeleton. In some cases, you know, the fossil record is incomplete more often than not. And in some cases, we only have half a skeleton, or maybe a quarter of a skeleton. And if we were to make a reconstruction of a dinosaur in a museum, we would have to fill in the blanks with other closely related animals. Right. And, you know, we can do that with a with a pretty good degree of confidence, given what we know about the dinosaur fossil record now. So, yes, it is true that way back when we were we were you know,, we necessarily had to guess what these animals look like. And in hindsight, we were horribly wrong. But that's the nature of science, right? It's an ever-changing thing. But now, you know, we have a, I would say we have a pretty good

understanding of the basic build of these things. Okay, that's helpful. I didn't know we had so much now. So what did we think we knew about dinosaurs, say, 50, 100 years ago? And what do we know now? How has our knowledge shifted and grown over the years and changed and been corrected in general? I'm sure you can probably do a whole dissertation on that question. You could, absolutely. absolutely well one thing that springs immediately to mind our our first ideas about what dinosaurs were you know stem from the fact that they have the the shapes they're they're basically built on the same body plan as uh as reptiles that we see today you know they have the same almost amorphous long bones. If you look at a mammal bone, they're very chiseled and very distinctive, whereas reptile bones are not.

And dinosaurs are very reptilian in the way that their bones are structured. And so, you know, their teeth likewise are very reptilian as opposed to very mammalian, right? Dinosaurs didn't have, uh, molars in the way that, that mammals do in the way that you and I do. And so there was an early understanding that, that dinosaurs, uh, uh, were reptiles. And so they were reconstructed as being just overgrown reptiles you know and the thinking was that they were cold-blooded and and slow to move about and they dragged their tails on the ground a lot like a

reptile and it really wasn't uh until the 1960s 70s 80, in that sort of window there that the idea really caught on amongst paleontologists that dinosaurs probably weren't just reptiles. They were, in some cases, possibly warm-blooded. We certainly know they didn't drag their tails on the ground because we have dinosaur trackways that don't show tail dragging marks, right? And of course, this is also the time when it became widely accepted among paleontologists that dinosaurs gave rise to birds. And in fact, some are quite closely related to birds. In fact, nowadays, we know that some groups of dinosaurs had feathers just like birds do. And so maybe we were mistaken in thinking they were merely reptiles. Some of them may have been more birdlike and had faster metabolisms that went along with that.

So that's really one big way in which our thinking on dinosaurs has changed. on dinosaurs has changed as we've gone from thinking we've gone from thinking of all of them as just these big lumbering reptilian beasts to being more fleet-footed animals capable of you know quickly chasing down their prey some of them showed parental uh behaviors some of them traveled in in packs and in you know large groups which lizards typically do not do today. So yeah, there's been a revolution really in our thinking about dinosaurs over the last, oh, 50 years now or so. So are you saying some would be kind of more reptilian and others not? Or they all as a class would not be reptilian or yeah well the thing i think that many

people fail to appreciate is the fact that you know dinosaurs are that we're talking about a big group of animals right you know when i say dinosaur it's a very generalized term in the same way that mammal is a generalized term. If you think mammals today, right? Well, there are whales in the sea. You know, these are the biggest animals that ever lived. You know, the blue whale is the biggest animal that we know of, past and present. The biggest animal on Earth today or of that ever lived on Earth is the blue whale. And it's here with us now.

We've also got things like mice scurrying about today right uh mice of course are mammals as well so between mice and blue whales you run the gamut from big and small animals and and terrestrial and sea-going animals and the same broadly speaking is true of dinosaurs in the sense that there were big dinosaurs, there were little dinosaurs, there were probably dinosaurs that were more warm-blooded than cold-blooded, and there were probably dinosaurs that were more cold-blooded than warm-blooded. Mammals have very different rates of metabolism, too. I'm thinking of things like echidnas or duck-billed platypus. They have relatively slow reptilian metabolisms compared to the, you know, placental mammals, you know, animals like mammals like you and I, you know, we're

mammals too. And we have relatively high metabolism. So I, you know, we're mammals too. And we have relatively high metabolism. So dinosaurs, you know, ran the gamut as far as all those differences are concerned as well. Okay. You mentioned feathers because I heard recently that we now know dinosaurs had feathers, but you said maybe certain kinds. What do we know about? Is it just the bird like the ones that fly or is it even like the land dinosaurs also had feathers? And how do we know that based on a skeleton? Yeah. Well, we don't know that based on the skeleton.

Well, I should say that. I can think of an exception to that. But it was realized many years ago. Actually, you know, the turn of the last century, the first paleontologists were having their suspicions that dinosaurs and birds share a lot in common. And, you know, skeletally, as far as their skeletal structure is concerned. And some paleontologists even had some suspicions that maybe dinosaurs had feathers, but we had no fossil evidence to that effect. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, which I remember very well, that paleontologists started

discovering the first feathered dinosaurs in China, in places like Lujitun province in China, where we started finding these really poorly explored, you know, set of deposits before then. But in the 90s, paleontologists started finding feathered dinosaurs there. And these were, by and large, small animals, you know, they were what we would call theropods, or broadly speaking, the meat-eating dinosaurs. The feathered ones appear to be small meat-eating dinosaurs, but we've since found larger meat-eating dinosaurs, including early tyrannosaur relatives that had feathers as well. Real quick, real quick, Jordan, are we actually finding the fossil of the feather? We are finding, yeah, we're not finding the original feathers per se.

Those don't really fossilize, but we are finding the feather impressions in the rock. So surrounding the skeleton, the intact skeleton, we often find impressions of the feathers. And they're unmistakable, right? You can see the sort of central barb or rachis and coming off that, you get the barbs and the barbules that come off that central rachis. So they're unmistakable, those feathers. You know, if you saw them, if you saw that thing today you would say oh yeah that's a feather no doubt about it so yes it's it's mainly out of china that we've been finding these small feathered dinosaurs and in in some cases larger feathered dinosaurs in the last 30 years or so but um even long before we found those feathered animals, we found scaly dinosaurs as well, you know, duck-billed dinosaurs, the hadrosaurs we find very commonly here in Canada, find in the United States as well, very common animals.

And it's not uncommon that we find them with scale impressions. They almost certainly didn't have feathers. We found scales all over the body. And you can go to the American Museum of Natural History now and see one of these so-called dinosaur mummies there with, you know, it's a mummy is a misnomer because the actual skin itself isn't preserved, but we do find the impressions of the skin preserved. And, you know, there's an Edmontosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History that has an entirely scaly body. So all that is to say dinosaurs had, some dinosaurs had feathers and some dinosaurs had scales, no doubt about it. What's the function? What does that tell us about the habitat? And if I, I'm not a,

I know nothing about this field. So if I ask, if my question is so intrinsically stupid, just let me know. I'm not offended. So what, yeah. So scales versus feathers. What does that tell us about the habitat? Is it a weather thing? Is it something else? Well, yeah, that's a, that's a good question. And I think it ties up to the question of why do we think you know scales evolved in the first or rather feathers why did feathers evolve in the first place feathers today you know we find feathers strictly in birds today and they're used for a variety of purposes they're used for insulation they're used for you know display, display. Think of the peacock, right? Peacock's got a big fan of tail feathers that it uses to attract a mate. We think of feathers probably first and

foremost as being used for flying. And we know with good certainty that, you know, the first dinosaurs that we find in the fossil record were not capable of flying because they just didn't they didn't have wings. And so almost certainly feathers were used for something else. Insulation seems like a good answer in that the first feathers you can actually trace as you go through the fossil record, you can actually trace the evolution of feathers. So the first feathers that we find in the fossil record are very simple structures. They kind of look like hair. You know, they're not highly branched like you see in a feather today. They're very hair-like.

And those were not very aerodynamic. They're very hair-like, and those were not very aerodynamic. They were probably not great for display in the sense that, you know, you couldn't fan them out the way a peacock can. So probably the first feathers were used for some kind of insulation, They were co-opted for be it display or for flying as they grew more complex. You know, and again, you can trace that complexity through the fossil record. As you look at younger and younger dinosaurs and birds in the fossil record, you can see the feathers. The feathers really evolved through time, you know, but they almost certainly didn't come about as a way of means of flying. They were probably a way of insulating these small, small meat eating dinosaurs. You know, when you're small, you lose body heat to the environment very quickly.

quickly and especially if these small meeting dinosaurs were were warm-blooded they would want to find a way of keeping that heat you know within themselves not losing the heat to their environment so maybe that was uh maybe it was an adaptation to living in sort of cool environments particularly if these were warm-blooded animals hopefully that gets at your question i never thought about like the difference because i where my non-scientific brain is going is like, well, why not fur? Isn't fur better than feathers? I always think, yeah, feathers is for aviation. I think it's lighter.

If I saw a dog flying – well, I don't know. I would imagine a bird would do better with feathers than a bunch of fur. But I never even thought about the difference between a feather and a fur in terms of function. Yeah, why not fur? Well, fur is a strictly mammalian thing, right? We do not see fur anywhere else but in mammals. It has a very strict definition. Now, the first feathers were very fur-like, but they weren't exactly the same in the way that these things develop. But they can serve the same purpose. You know, the fur that we see in mammals is by and large, again, a means of insulation. And the downy feathers that we see in birds again downy feathers if you were to you know look at the breast of a chicken it's covered in down

and um it doesn't that that that down isn't very useful for flying uh it it's it serves better as a way of insulating the animal and maybe stuffing your pillows, I suppose. But although those downy feathers are not fur per se, they still serve the same function. So, yeah, hopefully that gets at your question. Feathers and fur, not the same thing, but they can serve the same function. And they do a good job of it in both cases. I got a lot of questions actually on Twitter on dating. What's our method? I guess, how old would you put dinosaurs? What era did they live and how accurate and how do we know that and how accurate is our knowledge of dating dinosaurs? So when it comes to dating, you know, our best sort of estimates right now,

dinosaurs, the first dinosaurs that we find are on the order of, you know, 230, 235 million years, thereabouts. Those are the first ones that we find in the fossil record. That's not to say that there weren't dinosaurs that predated that. But as I say, the fossil record is incomplete by its very nature. And so it might be that the very first dinosaurs predate that by, you know, millions of years, and we just haven't found them yet. And we think that the current best estimate for their extinction was about 66 million years ago. So, you know, dinosaurs are around for, you know, greater than 150 million years, 160 million years. And how do we know that?

date dinosaur bones directly in the way that we date, say, the bones of ancient humans that we might find in the fossil record or the bones of mammoths or something like that. But for those more recent animals, again, humans, mammoths, things that have died in the last, I don't know, 10,000 years, 50 50 000 years um we use carbon dating for that but but carbon dating only has a window uh you know it it's only useful uh as a dating method for something on the order of uh tens of thousands of years we cannot carbon date dinosaur bones by and large because there's no carbon left in the bones dinosaur bones are by and large you know they're they're they're rock by and large much if not all of the organic content in the bone has been replaced by mineral uh you know if you pick up a dinosaur bone it's

heavy it's heavy like a rock if you were to pick up a dinosaur bone, let's say it's a dinosaur bone that has the length of a human leg bone, a thigh bone, the femur. The dinosaur bone is noticeably heavier. And the reason is that all the organic content has been replaced with mineral content. It's become a rock. But we don't date those dinosaur bones. What we do is we date the rocks that we find them in. So I do a lot of my work, for example, in Alberta here in Canada. for example, in Alberta here in Canada. And if I find a dinosaur in the rock record, if I want to determine how old it is, I will want to study the ash deposits that are found in and around the rocks where I found the dinosaur. So we're able to date volcanic ash using radiometric dating

methods. It's those ashes, those ash layers, at least where I work in Alberta, that we date. And if I'm able to date an ash layer radiometrically, and I should put a caveat on this, I don't actually do that dating. leave that to to the geologists we it's a collaborative project paleontology is but by dating those ashes we're able to say well that you know this one volcanic ash which occurs you know five meters below our dinosaur fossil it dates to 71 and a half million years and the next volcanic ash that we find of the dinosaur fossil dates to 71.9 million years. Therefore, we're able to say that the dinosaur is somewhere in between those ages, right? That makes sense. How accurate is that dating when you date the ash? Is that pretty accurate? It's pretty accurate and it's becoming more and more accurate.

You know, and so I mentioned the lugitune fossils in China where we find these feathered dinosaurs very often. The dating of those beds is to within tens of thousands to I think think, hundreds of thousands of years, which sounds like a lot. But when you step back and you consider the fact that these beds are, I think it's 125 millions of years, that range of error is relatively quite small. I was going to say, if it's within five to, like, five to ten million, give or take five to ten million years, that would be pretty impressive. You're saying, oh, it's way more precise than that.

Like, we're not, they're not off by 50 million years or something. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. It's, you know, it's orders and orders and orders of magnitude smaller than, you know, those, the ages that we put on these things. So yeah, it's quite accurate. So I spent a little bit of time in Israel and I did some archaeological, well, that sounds sexier than it is, archaeological digs.

I hauled buckets of dirt out of Hezekiah's tunnel and learned, listened to archaeologists give talks and everything. Anyway, it's very similar there. Like when you determine that when was the city destroyed, there's always a burn layer. And then you look at all this stuff that's in that same burn layer. And then, you know, from kind of cross-checking, like this kind of pottery was popular in the 12th century, you know, this kind of, you know, wall structure or whatever. So, I mean, you, you, you don't, and I guess that, I mean, you do do carbon dating then because it's within a couple

thousand years or whatever, but like you also look at all the other stuff that's in that same burn layer. So it sounds like it's kind of similar that looking at things that you can date that are next to those bones, that makes. Yes, it's exactly the same. There's a lot of, there are many parallels between paleontology and archaeology. fact so many that the two are confused for one another all the time i'm often asked if you know if i do archaeology um which you know isn't true but many of the approaches and the methods are the same just because we're dealing with with ancient history you know we can't go out and see a living you know tyr, Tyrannosaurus today. And so we need to answer the questions we might have using methods and approaches that are similar to what we would use in archaeology,

because you, you know, you can't go back and ask the ancient Egyptians how they did things. Right, right. So you, I mean, there is, I guess, you opened up an elephant, a dinosaur in the room here with, you know, saying it's millions and millions of years old. So that, I guess, you opened up an elephant, a dinosaur in the room here with saying it's millions and millions of years old. So that would – I mean, I have to ask a question about dating the age of the Earth because some people would say young Earth, 6,000 to 10,000, 20,000 years old. Old Earth is millions of years old. You fall in the old Earth camp. I would say the majority of my audience is probably there. I think that's obvious by now. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your knowledge of dinosaurs and when they live, would you say that that is simply incompatible with an young earth? Or if you were to, if you were to steal man, the young earth view, like what's the best kind of counter argument? Did they say like, no, Jordan, your dating's all wrong. it can't be 60 to 150 million years old these dinosaurs must have lived a few thousand years ago and their scientific arguments to back that up right what would be the counter argument how would a young earther respond to what you're saying if again if you could put their best foot forward if you even know i mean i don't know if you interact with like younger scientists well i was you know i was raised to believe in a young earth not not actively i didn't have this

drilled into my head but this was sort of the the paradigm in which you know my church worked growing up so um you know the idea is not foreign to me you You know, the young earth paradigm and young earthers will tell you this. Their belief in a young earth doesn't come from science. It comes from their interpretation of the Bible, right? And so if the working assumption from the get-go a priori is that the Bible tells us that the earth is young, then science be damned, right? The thinking is we will only accept the science if it agrees with our preconception of what the Bible tells us, right? I have some misgivings about that because, you know, I don't agree that the Bible necessarily teaches a young earth. I think that's I think that's putting too fine a point on on what the Bible is actually trying to tell us.

I don't think the Bible I don't take that what we call a concordance perspective. I don't think the Bible, I don't take that what we call a Concordance perspective. I don't think the Bible is trying to teach us about, you know, the history of the earth. There's a famous saying, right? The Bible was written to teach us how to get to heaven, not how the heavens go. You know, there's another one, too, that's very similar, which is escaping my mind. The Bible was written to teach us about the rock of ages, not the ages of the rocks, right? You know, if you take that interpretation that the Bible was written to teach us about the ages of the rocks, then you're sort of forcing yourself to work within that Concordance paradigm and to try to draw some kind of interpretation from the Bible,

some kind of meaning that speaks to the age of the earth. But I think if the Bible were trying to do that, I think it could have done so much more clearly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess, I mean, I was always taught in, again, yeah, I didn't study these things. It just kind of absorbed, it was kind of just in the air, you know, but I dabbled a little bit with Answers in Genesis and other thinkers on this. And it seemed like the, and again, I might be, this is going back 35 plus years now,

but I, like God created the earth with the appearance of age. And it seems like that's kind of punted to whenever we see something that seems to be scientifically like, no, this is millions of years old. It's like, well, no, God created the world 10,000 years ago. And he put, you know, dinosaur bones in the earth that look like they're millions of years old or maybe aren't, you know, but like, it's, it's, it kind of like the light from the stars, you know,

it takes millions of years to get here. Well, God created it immediately that way. It's not like it, he had to wait for the light from the stars you know takes millions of years to get here well god created it immediately that way it's not like it he had to wait for the light to get there it's like he created the appearance of age yes i hope i'm not butchering that that argument but i've been i've encountered that argument before too uh including from my own uh grandmother-in-law right she you know she's a very devout christian and we've not had any in-depth conversations about it, but I've got wind from her that she thinks dinosaurs were not real living animals, but they were, they were, God put them in the fossil record maybe as a way to test our

faith or, or I don't know. When I lived back in Calgary, I went to graduate school. I got my PhD in Calgary here in Canada. And I remember our neighbor at the time, too, in our apartment, didn't think dinosaurs were real. And he knew that I was studying to be a paleontologist. And he came back from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller one day. And he said, you know, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller one day. And he said, you know, Jordan, he said, before now, I didn't think that the dinosaurs were real, but I went to the museum and I saw the bones and I could put my hand on them. And he said, I think maybe they are real now. I said, well, you know, welcome to the club. But, you know, if if they weren't real, if God put them in the ground almost as a way of deceiving us, I don't know that that's a God that that I would want to worship, you know, a God that would mislead us like that.

I find that, you know, theologically problematic, let's say. And, you know, it's not just the bones themselves. you know, we can look at the isotopes in the bone and those isotopes in the bone can tell us something about what the dinosaurs were eating and how they were traveling from one place to another. We can look at their teeth under the microscope and see microscopic pits and scratches on the teeth that reflect how they use their jaws like we're talking about microscopic details uh that would have to be created as well and for what purpose right like right? Like it, it just, to me, it just boggles the mind to think that these fossils, which scream us, scream to us to the fact that these, these animals were once, once living, breathing creatures to say that they were just, you know, put there to test our faith.

Just, it doesn't seem right. These were living animals. This episode is sponsored by World Concern. World Concern is a Christian humanitarian organization that is addressing some of the most significant needs in the world today. For instance, there's been a devastating drought that's hit Somalia. I don't know if you've heard about this, but it's become one of the largest humanitarian crises

in the world today. Four relentless years of drought have destroyed the country of Somalia. I don't know if you've heard about this, but it's become one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world today. Four relentless years of drought have destroyed the country of Somalia. In 2022 alone, over 40,000 people have been killed from the drought and children and families continue to have ongoing needs and the basic necessities of life, food, water, and of course, ultimately the love of Christ. So for instance, a young mom named Saifia had over 50 sheep prior to the drought. And now after the drought, she only has one sheep, which means she basically has no income and no way to feed her children. And yet this is one of many stories we could tell about the horrific effects of the drought in Somalia. So through World Concern, you can provide urgently needed food, water, and emergency supplies to families

in need. 12 bucks can feed a family for a whole month. That's crazy. 12 bucks feeds a family for a whole month. So I invite you to pray. We should always pray. And I invite you to take action. Please consider giving a gift of 12 bucks. No, let's say 24 bucks. Let's help two families. Consider giving a gift of 12, 24 or more dollars to help families survive this hunger crisis. You can give today at worldconcern.org forward slash theology. That's worldconcern.org forward slash theology to embody the love of Christ

toward family and children in need. This episode is sponsored by Biola University. Biola is consistently ranked as one of the nation's leading Christian universities. Biola has over 300 academic programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, which are available both in Southern California and online. With leading academic programs like business, film, science, and more, Biola's biblically integrated curriculum helps students grow closer to God and gain a deeper understanding of Scripture. In fact, I was just at the Biola campus a few weeks ago.

I toured the campus and talked with several deans and professors, and every single one I talked to was so passionate about making Christ first in all things. I mean, Biola's quality of academics is well-documented. There's no doubt about that. But I was most impressed with how utterly Christ-centered the school is. So at Biola, students become equipped for a thriving life and career. They'll learn how to articulate their Christian beliefs. And most of all, they'll be prepared to serve as God's instrument in their community and around the world. Now through June 1st, 2023, you can use the promo code Preston to waive the application fee for any Biola program.

Okay. The deadline used to be May 1st. They actually extended it for our audience to June 1st. So get your application in before June 1st, put in the code, pressed in, and get your application fee waived. Some restrictions may apply. Just visit www.biola.edu for more information. I'm just not putting this together because I haven't cared about this question in forever. So from a Young Earth perspective, and I don't mean any disrespect to young earthers. I do like to test ideas. So I'm not after any person or trying to demean anybody. I just want to wrestle with the idea. It seems that from a young earth perspective, you either have to say

these bones were put here with the appearance of age, and they weren't real. They didn't actually live and breathe. God put old looking bones in the earth, but dinosaurs actually never lived and breathed and existed. That's one response. Or you have to say that the dating is just completely off. No, dinosaurs did live. They were real, but they lived 8,000 don't, what's the other option? I don't, it seems like those are... I don't know that there are, I don't know that there is another option. In my experience, it's not a common view, even among young earth creationists, that dinosaurs didn't exist. You know, if you look at, you know, various young earth ministries, you know, answers in Genesis being probably the, the prime most one, uh, Institute, I think of creation research is another one. They don't believe, I don't think they don't believe that dinosaurs were, were there put there to test our faith. They, they take the latter view that dinosaurs were real animals, but they think that effectively are scientific dating and, and, uh, not just paleontology, but, you know, physics and all of science really is, is wrong.

And, and, and that, uh, their paradigm is, is the right one. So that's the more common view, I think, at least among young earth creationists. And again, I was one. I know where that view comes from. And again, in my limited reading, I think you hit the nail on the head that all of it comes from a 100% absolute commitment that the Bible teaches that the earth is young. I remember reading an article, it was like a back and forth between a young earth, old earth, and that was the young earther. Maybe it was a podcast, a debate or something. The young earther basically kept saying, I mean,

his presupposition is his opponent, who's an evangelical believer, his starting point is you're denying the Bible. So you don't even believe in the Bible because the Bible clearly teaches young earth. Now let's have a discussion about the science. And it's like, well, that, yeah, if you start there, then there's really no discussion to be had. And yeah, in just in case my audience is wondering, I mean, I would say the majority, overwhelming majority of evangelical Old Testament scholars would agree with what you said. That's an over-reading of the Bible. Genesis 1-11 in particular is just not trying to give us this kind of age of the earth. And there's all kinds of genre questions, even Genesis 1-3. three and, and yeah. Um, how much is the Bible kind of absorbing certain myths around, around in the world that time and playing with them and rebuking them? I mean, it's, it's Genesis 1 to 11

in particular is, is profoundly theological, um, trying to teach us about God, not trying to give us kind of a step-by-step layout of how the world's, you know, came, came to be or whatever. But, um, that, that's what did it for me, really, is because I'm so exegetically wired, I did need to see, you know, why I can appreciate, you know, like, yeah, if the Bible is committed to it, if the Bible itself is teaching a young earth, then I want to take that seriously. But then as I kind of really did a lot of study and research in Genesis 1 to 11, like, I just don't see that as like the necessary or even really the best reading of the actual text of Scripture. And once you do that, I mean, the science itself seems

overwhelming to me. Yeah, I agree with all that, Preston. I think what the Bible is trying to do is very different from what science is trying to do. Science was built by humans as a means of figuring out the natural world and only the natural world, you know, whereas the Bible was written to teach us about our fallen nature and our need for redemption. You know, there's certainly places where, you know, those two sort of realms might overlap. But by and large, I think the overlap is relatively minimal. And yeah, I agree with you. You know, I know you had Tremper Longman on your podcast and John Walton. And I think, you know, I think their interpretations of, you know, the Adam and Eve story and the creation account and all those early stories that we're familiar with from the opening chapters of Genesis are very reasonable. You know, and I don't think they conflict with science whatsoever because they do not consider the same questions. I like that you said reasonable.

I don't even need to say they're 100% correct because even Walton and Longman would have slightly different ways of approaching Genesis 2-3. But they're very credible accounts of Scripture. They're reasonable. They're not just forcing into the text something like, oh, the science says this, we're going to begin with science and therefore thrust that into the text and make the Bibles agree with it. It's like, no, these are credible, very credible. I would say the most more reasonable readings of scripture. There is one theological question though, that comes up in my head. And actually some people on Twitter were asking it too. I'm assuming dinosaurs predate humans from a scientific perspective. Is that correct? And if so, does that mean we have death

before humans? And what does that mean? And you said, I'm not a theologian. So if you're like, hey, I don't really have a good answer to this, that's fine. But would that create a theological question slash problem that we would have death predating Adam's sin or whatever, you know? Yeah, it would create a problem for some, I suppose. You're not wrong to say that, you know, dinosaurs predate humans in the fossil record. We never find dinosaurs and humans together, ever. Oh, really? Okay. There have been some some claims to the contrary you know like some creationist organizations have argued that we find you know human footprints with dinosaur footprints in the fossil record but you know lo and behold what we thought were

sandal marks are actually just incompletely preserved dinosaur footprints oh really okay you can see actually they're yeah they're just sort of dinosaur footprints with three toes that have the mud has collapsed into the toes and so you're left with a heel mark that kind of looks superficially like a human footprint but really is not so we we, just as plainly as I can say it, dinosaurs and humans do not occur in the fossil record together. Dinosaurs are always found in the lower layers and the humans are always found in the upper or younger layers. So I suppose that means inevitably that, yes, dinosaurs lived and died before human sin. But I'm not convinced that the Bible teaches that that wasn't the case, right? You know, look at the story of the Garden of Eden. God creates two trees, one of which was the tree of life. And what was the purpose of the tree of life? Well, you eat of it and you

live forever. If there was no animal death prior to Adam and Eve having eaten of the tree, then what was the purpose of that tree? It doesn't make sense to have that tree if humans were made to live forever from the get-go, right? If Adam and Eve were created by God as immortal, then what would be the purpose of the tree of life? There would have been no purpose. So, you know, just trying to stick to the logical consistency of the story, it doesn't make sense that Adam and Eve were created immortal. You know, the Bible also says God told Eve that, you know, in the day that you eat of this tree, you will surely die. Well, guess what?

They ate of the tree and they did not drop down dead, right? That suggests to me that probably the death that's being spoken of is a spiritual death as opposed to, you know, a physical death. So that's the way, you know, that's the way that I would interpret that. And again, you know, I'm not a theologian and I'm sure people have much better answers than that. But this is a this is sort of an interpretation that I've that I find completely reasonable and sits well with me and I think makes sense of, you know, what's written in the Bible, in the creation story itself. So I'm very happy with that. And I mean, we're really dealing with Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and maybe a couple other passages. And they're the life-death contrast. I mean, again, I wasn't really prepared to think through this on the podcast, so I am thinking out loud.

I mean, I've read Romans before, okay? But it does seem to be that the – I mean, I think, again, it's a reasonable view that the death and life contrast is referring to people who bear god's image like romans 5 18 says you know in in as in adam all died therefore in christ all will be made alive i don't know if he's thinking of the resurrection of cats there you know or um sure you know trees being i don't know like it does seem to be more narrowly focused on humans that's animal death that you're speaking about and dinosaurs are animals and so if you know if if it doesn't apply to cats then it doesn't apply to dinosaurs and you know dinosaurs living and dying before humans were around is not an issue then on that interpretation are i'm curious are to your knowledge are there any paleontologists who you know attend like i don't know like who have a degree in paleo who there any paleontologists who have a degree, who are actual paleontologists, that are young earthers? Is that a thing, to your knowledge?

Yeah, it is a thing. I can't deny it. There are veryist ministries who have a degree in paleontology in some cases who work for these ministries. But, you know, very often they get their degrees and then they never publish another scientific article after that, you know, just because they don't do science. They do, you know, creation they they they don't do science they they they do you know creationist outreach i suppose so um it had it yeah it does happen um but i would say they're they're in a small minority and i would say probably even amongst paleontologists christian paleontologists are in a small minority too well maybe i maybe that's going too far i i suspect there are many more christian paleontologists out there than most people realize really because i because i know many of them

but um you know we do exist we're in a minority and among christian paleontologists the young earthers are are in an even greater or smaller minority i I suppose. Let's go back to the dinosaurs. You said they, if I remember correctly, they went extinct 66 million years ago. Why did they go extinct? Do we know that? We have a pretty good idea now. Yeah, 50 years ago, we really didn't have much of a clue why dinosaurs went extinct. You know, there have been probably a hundred, if not more, sort of guesses as to why that might have been, but we had no evidence to support any of those

different ideas. But now I think it's safe to say that the best supported idea was this idea of a meteor hitting the earth 66 million years ago and i mean it's not an idea anymore we actually found the crater where the meteor hit that dates to the exact time of the extinction of the dinosaurs it's in the yucatan peninsula near mexico um really and yeah you can you can see the crater there today it's it's underground it's underwater i should say you know you can't just see it with the naked eye but we can use uh you know ground penetrating radar and sonar to actually trace the the margins of this crater and the crater dates to the end of the age of the dinosaurs. So the paleontologists and geologists are quite certain that that's probably what did the dinosaurs in. Wait, is that that there's like off the coast, there's that big blue, like huge circle that it's kind of it looks like a crater underwater. Is that can you see it like from a camera like from from a like a satellite view or

off of mexico you cannot see it in satellite view no you because again it's underwater it's underwater but it's in um yeah in the gulf of mexico uh the yucatan peninsula is is where this crater is and again it's underwater now okay uh it was probably well i don't know it was probably underwater back then too but we're talking about a a meteor that was you know tens of kilometers wide hitting the earth you know faster than the speed of sound and you know this would have just absolutely devastated the earth it would have created tsunamis there's recently been a report of uh an ancient tsunami um deposit that dates to the end of the age of the dinosaurs uh we find fishes in that deposit with um basically beads of glass that were trapped within the gills of these animals

that would have rained down from the skies wow after the impact of this this uh this meteor um it's a it's a very impressive site and it was only announced a few years ago uh the the scientific findings are still coming out of this site. It's called the Tannis site. But they're fairly impressive findings so far. And this appears to be one of these deposits created as a result of this asteroid impact. That's fascinating. Wow.

What would have survived that? I mean... Not much. Wow. What would have survived that? I mean... Not much. Were there animals that... Were dinosaurs like one of the only kind of dinosaurs? As you said, we're not talking about like a kind of specific species like a monkey. I mean, dinosaurs are a broad category, but would you say most, if not all, animals kind of died at that time?

Yeah. By best estimates, about three quarters of life on land died at that time. And there were animals that made it through, obviously. You know, birds made it through. Birds had evolved well before the extinction of the dinosaurs. So birds made it through. We have them around today. You know, crocodiles made it through. We have them around today. You know, crocodiles made it through. We have them around today. As far as what didn't make it through, most of what we think of as being dinosaurs, you know, I would argue that birds are dinosaurs, but that the non-bird dinosaurs, triceratops and T-Rex and, you know, ontosaurus, a lot of these things that you can see in museums today. They obviously died. Marine reptiles died. There are different lineages of turtles and, you know, lizards that died. Ammonites died. These were sea-going invertebrate creatures. They don't make it past the extinction.

So there were many, many groups that died, but a few of them kind of squeaked through, and they're here with us today. I was going to ask about birds being dinosaurs, or I was going to ask more generally, like, are there dinosaurs around today? And what defines a dinosaur being around today? Because I guess that's more the bigger question. Because it's almost a misnomer to say dinosaurs around the day, like birds, like pigeons, like dinosaurs. Like, well, dinosaur just means something that existed as a species prior to, I guess, 66 million BC. Well, no, no. A lot of people, when a lot of lay people hear the word dinosaur they just think oh

well that's just an animal that lived a long time ago but when paleontologists use the word dinosaur we mean something very specific we're talking about a specific branch on the tree of life and there were many animals that lived alongside the dinosaurs you know 66 plus million years ago that were not themselves dinosaurs i mentioned i mentioned crocodiles were around back then uh there were turtles around back then you would say crocodiles not a we shouldn't say they're a dinosaur they are not a dinosaur they're they're closely related to dinosaurs but they are not themselves dinosaurs. However, I would argue that birds are dinosaurs because they are descended from dinosaurs, right? In the same way that, I don't know, a monkey is a mammal because it shares features with all other mammals and it's

descended from mammals. I would say that birds are dinosaurs because they share many features in common with dinosaurs. And I could name some of those off if you wanted to. And because they are descended from dinosaurs. So in the way that paleontologists think about the relationships of these animals, you can never outgrow your ancestry, right? There will never be a time at which, you know, monkeys stop being mammals or stop being vertebrates because they have fur like a mammal. They have lactation like a mammal. They have a backbone like a vertebrate. They will never stop being vertebrates. The eventual descendants of monkeys, for whatever reason, could conceivably stop lactating. But just because you lose that ability to lactate doesn't mean you're no longer a mammal. You evolved from mammals. And those same arguments apply to birds and dinosaurs. Birds will always be dinosaurs because they are descendants from that dinosaur branch of the tree of life.

Are there any other species around today that would fit that bill or is it just just birds? As far as descendants of dinosaurs, are there other descendants of dinosaurs? No, there are many different types of dinosaurs. But the only type that survives today are birds, crocodilians, youilians, crocs and alligators and gharials, they are not dinosaurs. They have a common ancestor with dinosaurs to the exclusion of most other forms of life, but they are not dinosaurs themselves because they branched off the tree of life before the dinosaurs even evolved so interesting okay and is that pretty widely agreed upon are you are you saying this is my kind of my

theory or is this among paleontologists it's pretty standard in yeah in paleontology it's the sort of the the common parlance so to say yeah got a ton i just glanced at twitter and i got a ton of questions here what's interesting is i think we've already answered most of them a lot of the questions came up the same ones we wrestled with about you know death and extinction here's a question obviously the most important question is what's your favorite jurassic park movie oh boy um well i've seen them all at this stage whether i like it or not i can tell you my least favorite one was the last one okay and my favorite one i i mentioned to you earlier preston i was 11 years old when i saw the first jurassic park movie in theaters and that was that you know that had an

effect on me so uh i i you know from a subjective point of view it would be that one and i think from a more objective point of view it would be that one too because it was just the better uh better written of all the movies i think most people would agree yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't think i've only i've never seen a jurassic park movie from beginning to end i've only seen parts and i don't know why i haven't finished it is that crazy it's worth seeing the first one and that's about it okay that's pretty common among except for the rocky movies i i think creed 2 is just absolutely incredible on so many levels i mean then most of the raw i mean rocky 5 and 6 were eh but um yeah anyway oh, is the T-Rex the Nephilim? I don't know if that's a serious question or not.

So T-Rex, is that what we know about from the storybooks and as kids and everything? Like, should I transfer all my knowledge about Tyrannosaurus Rex into real life? Like, is that true? This dinosaur with kind of short arms, meat eating, the most ferocious of all the dinosaurs. Is that true? It's probably safe to say, yeah. We know of, you know, we've got dozens of T. rex skeletons now. We're able to reconstruct the entire animal with a great degree of confidence. We've got every bone just about in the skeleton from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail.

out in the skeleton from the you know the tip of the snout to the end of the tail so yeah what you know what you see in museums is is really what you get a big 40 foot long fearsome animal short front limbs why we don't really know that i would say no way there's a little t-rex arms like what's the function i don't know why we ideas as to why, you know, if you're, you know, what's so impressive about T-Rex is that huge skull with the big maw full of teeth. You know, all of its, you know, fearsome predatory power is located in the skull. And if you're front loading the head like that, you probably don't want big arms to go on top of it. Otherwise, you're going to tip forward, right? The center of balance on a T-Rex was over the hips. And so probably the most common thinking right now among paleontologists is that

the reason for the reduced arms is because all of the weight was being put into the skull. And if the animal had large arms as well, then it would have tipped forward. It wouldn't have been able to keep its balance on its hind legs. So if you're going to add weight one place, you've got to remove it from another place. And in T. rex's case, it was the arms, which were probably not of great use. Interesting. And what about so brontosaurus that long neck and small head um is that accurate and if so does that like to get to kind of like a giraffe to eat off trees and stuff or yeah well brontosaurus is a type of dinosaur

we call a sauropod and there are many many sauropods so these are the long neck dinosaurs that you mentioned we know dozens and dozens and dozens of species of sauropods but they are all built on the same basic body plan where they've got you know long tails long necks they vary quite widely in size although they were all generally quite large uh some of some of them were probably up to you know 80 tons we're talking about big big animals the biggest animals to ever uh wander uh the earth and i i mean on land right i'm i'm ignoring the blue whale that i mentioned earlier yeah but but yeah we've discovered um complete skeletons of those as well. They're probably more incomplete ones than complete ones, but we have quite a good

understanding of the build of these animals. And yeah, the sauropod skeletons that you see in museums today, I would say they're quite accurate. Wow. You would appreciate this. You keep mentioning the blue whale. I came within six feet from the face of a humpback whale. It was the most surreal moment. I mean, the marriage to my wife, the birth of my four kids, coming face to face with a humpback whale underwater as this thing's staring. It was one of – I mean it's a close like I guess third of those. I mean it was like – It's a different sense of awe. It was heart-stopping. And these creatures are very – so brilliant and playful. But it was afterward when we had a guide that took us out to make sure we didn't kill ourselves or whatever.

But like afterward, he told us, oh make sure we didn't kill ourselves whatever but like afterward he told us oh yeah that you know they're they're what's the flapper whatever he's like it's it's the most powerful um i think he said the most powerful muscle of anything on earth like he said he could have if he slapped you with that he would be i mean you'd just be annihilated you know but but they're not they're not aggressive i'm they're really docile they love they love to play with you know humans or whatever but i mean six feet away from the eyeball this creature before it did its dive down to the bottom of the ocean i mean it was unbelievable my gosh um uh i there was let's see oh this question is probably already answered i'm curious if if you believe that dinosaurs are directly or indirectly mentioned in Bible, I'm going to say no, because from Genesis 127 onward,

at least, we're dealing with, you know, way later in time, dinosaurs, I guess, would be assumed in the early parts of Genesis 1, would you say? Or I mean, they're still created. They would be assumed in the sense that I would agree that, you know, they are part of God's creation. And in the sense that God references all of creation in the Bible, that would include the dinosaurs as well. So they're referenced indirectly, I would say. You know, the word dinosaur itself did not even exist, you know, back in the days when the Bible was written. So we shouldn't expect to see that word used. I guess there's some question as to whether we would expect to see that word used i guess there's some question as

to whether we would expect to see some mention of dinosaurs in the bible um indirectly um and some people have argued mainly again young earth creationist organizations have argued that you know they're mentioned in the form of uh you know, mention of the behemoth in Job. They're mentioned in the form of Leviathan in Job, and it's mentioned in the Psalms. But, you know, as a paleontologist, when I read those passages, there's nothing about them that screams dinosaur to me. You know, behemoth is described as, you know, it says it's got the tail of a cedar i think its tail sways like a cedar i think joe describes it yeah dinosaurs at least many of them had big tails but behemoth is often equated to being one of these long-necked sauropods you know

by young earth creationists. But you would think if that was the case, then there would be some mention of the giant neck, too, which is like the most impressive thing about these animals. But there's no mention about a long neck. It's also said that, you know, the behemoth lives among the reeds and lives in the water. Well, sauropods, we think, were terrestrial animals that didn't spend much lives in the water. Well, sauropods, we think were terrestrial animals that didn't spend much time in the water. You know, animals that live in the water tend to have kind of splayed toes to allow them to walk across the mud. They don't have the sort of

tight hand structure that a sauropod does, sort of columnar limbs to support its weight on land. Plus, sauropods, despite their size, were very, very lightly built. Their bones were quite hollow, especially their vertebrae. And for that reason, they probably weren't very stable in water. probably uh weren't very stable in water there's one of my colleagues at the tyro museum in in drumheller in alberta uh by the name of don henderson he he's done some computer modeling of these things and he's shown that they were quite unstable in water and would have floated probably because they were because of these air sacs in their bones. And I doubt they were able to hide under the reeds like Behemoth was apparently able to do. And, you know, Behemoth is described as eating grass like an ox.

Well, if you go back to the fossil record, there were no grasses at the time. There were early sort of ancestors of grasses that would have looked maybe something like bamboo, but there were certainly no grasslands like we see today. Really? So dinosaurs were not eating grass like an ox, you know. in Job about Leviathan and behemoth, as a paleontologist, I can say with good certainty that these were probably not dinosaurs that are being described here. What they were, I don't know. I'll leave that to the theologians to decide. But as a paleontologist, I would say, well, they're not dinosaurs. I can say that much with some certainty. Well, it wouldn't make sense just dating-wise because, I mean, even –

I mean, most people say Job was probably written 500-plus BC. I know it takes – the story kind of takes place around 2000 BC, but the book clearly was written around the time of the exile. And so for them to be referring to the details of this animal, it wouldn't make sense, you know, to be referring to it. The other thing that doesn't make sense to me is it seems to me that when the Leviathan is mentioned in the Bible or when Behemoth is mentioned in the Bible, these animals are described as though there's only one, right? The Behemoth, the Leviathan. God will come back at

the end of creation and slay the Leviathan. You know, there were hundreds and thousands of dinosaurs that lived on earth. And yet the Bible seems to be describing one of these animals. There's one behemoth and one Leviathan. So it doesn't make sense to me that it would be a dinosaur when, you know, there were probably millions of, of, uh, brontosauruses that, that ever existed. And, you know, we certainly don't know of millions of them from the fossil record, which again is incomplete, but the point is these were regular everyday animals when they were alive. And I don't know why God would begrudge one of them to slay one at the end of creation, right? If we're talking about dinosaurs, it seems to me that Leviathan and Behemoth is something more than just a dinosaur. Well, the Leviathan in particular is clearly drawing on, I mean, there's a common metaphor for evil in the ancient world. You can look at parallels between, you know, was it Job 38, 39 or Isaiah, I think it's 24 and maybe Psalm 70 something, which yeah, it's God defeating the Leviathan is drawn on ancient kind of myths about, you know,

this symbol of evil being defeated it's not really focused on giving a paleontology description of of an animal but um yeah if the leviathan were a dinosaur i don't know what's so evil about any of the dinosaurs and why why god would want to to to slay one in that way to to make a point to to israel or what have you it just yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Plus, you know, the Psalms, I think it's the Psalms describe Leviathan as having, you know, more than one head, multiple heads. I don't know of any dinosaur, you know, and we know of probably pushing, I don't know, 1300 of them now, 1300 species. Not one of them is known to have multiple

heads. So it sounds more like the dragon in Revelation 13, which is again, a symbol of, of evil, but God's going to slay all the birds is what he's really getting. It's a, I feel like that's just, yeah. Pushing the, the literalness, you know, I feel like that's just pushing the Bible too far to try and make these animals a dinosaur. This has been so fun. This is one of those conversations where my knowledge curve just went through the roof because I came into it knowing basically nothing.

So thank you so much for walking us through all this, man. How can people find you? You have a website I see here. Is that the best place for them to find you? Are you on social media? Yeah, if they Google me, I think I've got a website on our official Canadian Museum of Nature web page. So if you Google me, you'll find me there. I'm on Twitter occasionally at Jordan underscore Mallon, J-O-R-D-A-N

underscore M-A-L-L-O-N. I probably don't use that as much these days, but you can find me there. Feel free to send me an email. It's probably the best way to reach me, and that'll be on the museum's website there. Yeah, happy to reach out. You know, it's not

too often, Preston, that I get asked about dinosaurs from a Christian perspective. It's always fun to talk about them from that perspective. Awesome. I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah. Take care, Jordan. Thanks, Preston. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hey friends, have you been blessed or encouraged or challenged by Theology in the Raw? If so, would you consider joining Theology in the Raw's Patreon community?

For as little as five bucks a month, you can gain access to a diverse group of Jesus followers who are committed to thinking deeply, loving widely, and having curious conversations with thoughtful people. We have several membership tiers where you can receive premium content. For instance, silver level supporters get to ask and vote on the questions for our monthly Patreon only podcast. They also get to see like written drafts of various projects and books I'm working on. And there's other perks for that tier. Gold

level supporters get all of this and access to monthly Zoom chats where we basically blow the doors open on any topic they want to discuss. My patrons play a vital role in nurturing the mission of Theology in the Raw. And for me, just personally, interacting with my Patreon supporters has become one of the hidden blessings in this podcast ministry. So you can check out all of the info at patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. That's patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw.