How do Jehovah’s Witnesses explain the dinosaurs?

[The Librarian]

How do Jehovah’s Witnesses explain the dinosaurs?

SM - Dallas, TX

[Jim Seward]

The 1990 February 8 Awake! had a cover story explaining them. 

[Joan Kennedy]

Please refer to the February 8, 1990 Awake for an excellent discussion on the subject. 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

It is a well known fact that the word "Rapture" is not found in the Bible.  The word actually used originally meant "Raptor", and referred to Saurians, which we know today as Dinosaur(ians).

The Dinosaurs had many of the same problems as humans, and add to that, their arms were so short they could not floss, and got gum disease, and went extinct for their sins.

The only surviving dinosaur was for centuries the Thesaurus, which use to hide in peoples' homes, often forgotten behind a sofa, but with the rise of Google, has also become extinct. We used to talk incessantly about "types" and "antitypes", but always being wrong after a hundred years got boring and tiresome, like a tire with a slow leak ...especially with that damned Google rising to ascendancy.

The "Great Dragon" in Revelation was actually a type of Dinosaur, that made it all the way to the Flood of Noah's day, but he and his and her Brethren and Sistern were on Ark No. 2, and did not make it, because they got into  a feeding frenzy, and capsized the boat. 

The only Dragons that survived were the reptiles, such as the salt and fresh water crocodiles, and of course the Komodo Dragon, known for its pacifism and extremely bad breath.

Anytime you can ignore a hundred million years of History, supported by a hundred million tons of hard evidence, one theory is as good as another ... just ignore all facts.

 

 

[Jack Ryan]

 

[Noble Berean]

Well, Jehovah's Witnesses are not young earth creationists. JWs believe that animals could have lived on the earth for millions of years before humans ever came onto the scene. It is entirely possible that humans and dinosaurs never coexisted and weren't meant to coexist by the Creator. Dinosaurs performed a necessary function in keeping the ecosystem stable when the earth was tropical and covered in plants. We benefit now from that era of tropical plant cover with oil deposits in the earth.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

We hope for the "New System" ... all the Dinosaurs

could ever hope for was to come back as WD-40.

[Queen Esther]

They  came  and  before  the  humans  coming,  these  giant  animals  had  to  go  again !  I  hope  and  not  believe,  the  Dinosaurs  living  together  with  us !   We  will  see,  how  Jehovah  decided.   Now  its  all  only  conjectures,  not  more.   HUMAN - THINKING

[Tonny Blom-Konings]

Gen. 1:20-25.

 

[Jim Seward]

Hot off the press:
What Does the Bible Say About Dinosaurs?

https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/dinosaurs-in-the-bible/

[AlanF]

JWs do not in any reasonable sense "explain the dinosaurs". The Feb. 8, 1990 Awake! article is the only 'substantive' material the WTS has ever written about dinosaurs, but it was written nearly 30 years ago, and on a level for young middle-school children. Nothing substantive has been written since then. Furthermore, a huge number of discoveries in the last 30 years has revolutionized the understanding of most aspects of the dinosaurs' existence.

Dinosaurs were not reptiles -- they were their own 'kind' of creature. They seem to have been partially or fully warm-blooded, many had feathers for insulation and display, they had breathing systems like those of modern birds rather than mammals or reptiles, some incubated their eggs like birds, and so forth. The small theropod dinosaur Coelophysis (~160 ma (million years ago)) was very like a modern road runner in its skeleton, except that it had teeth, a tail and shorter arms. The bird-like creature Archaeopteryx was much like Coelophysis but had longer arms and flight feathers. Eleven specimens have been found to date. Several specimens were misidentified as small dinosaurs and languished in museum drawers for a century before being brought to light. Today, biologists consider birds to be modern dinosaurs.

Radiometric dating has put the origin of dinosaurs at about 240 ma. They seem to have developed from stem animals that were mostly wiped out in the great Permian Extinction about 250 million years ago. These stem animals also gave rise to mammals.

Dinosaurs disappeared about 65.5 million years ago, apparently in connection with a massive asteroid strike in the Yucatan near the town of Chicxulub, which left a crater 100 miles across and seems to have started fires around the globe and created a 'nuclear winter'. It left a global layer of clay enriched 100 times in iridium, a global layer of microscopic glass particles, soot, etc. Paleontologists call this the KT boundary layer (Cretaceous-Tertiary). About the same time there occurred massive volcanic eruptions in what is now India, leaving huge basalt deposits called the Deccan Trapps, which covered tens of thousands of square miles. Quite possibly, the volcanic gases emitted, along with the effects of the Chicxulub asteroid strike, wiped out the dinosaurs, and at least 75% of the species on earth.

Dinosaurs do not in any way fit in with the Genesis creation account. That account states that God created all flying creatures on the 5th day, before any land animals -- including dinosaurs -- were created on the 6th day. The Watch Tower Society traditionally assigned 7,000 years to each creative day, but geology proves that macroscopic life has existed for some 600 million years, dinosaurs for some 240 million years, and flying creatures from insects to pterosaurs to dinosaurs to birds have originated at various times during the past 400 million years.

The simple fact is that paleontology and biology show that life has evolved over at least 3.5 billion years. Whether that evolution was due to Creation by some god, or by fully natural means, is arguable. If the God of the Bible was really the Creator of all this life, then he was very different from the God portrayed in the New Testament.

AlanF