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Are Dinosaurs alive today?

Where Jurassic Park went wrong

By Robert Doolan
First published in: Creation Ex Nihilo 15(4):12–15 September–November 1993

WHILE movie mogul Steven Spielberg prepared for the premiere of his US $50 million blockbuster dinosaur film Jurassic Park in early 1993, equally spectacular dinosaur-type news was flowing in from around the world.

From China there were claims that more than 1,000 people had seen a dinosaur-like monster in two sightings around Sayram Lake in Xinjiang.¹

From Scotland came the latest Loch Ness monster sighting: Mrs Edna MacInnes reported on June 24 that she had seen a 15-metre-long creature with a neck like a giraffe in Loch Ness.²

From Canada, Professor P. LeBlond of the University of British Columbia told a meeting of zoologists about the many sightings of 'Caddy'—short for Cadborosaurus — around the British Columbia coast and as far south as Oregon. The remains of a three-metre juvenile 'Caddy' have actually been found in the stomach of a whale.³

It's been a big year for monsters. Russian scientists were startled to find remains of dwarf mammoths on Wrangel Island, off the Siberian coast, which they said were living only 3,700 years ago⁴ And British explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell returned from an isolated Nepalese valley in March with photos of living creatures which looked something like mammoths or extinct stegodons.⁵

Whether it's Spielberg or stegodons, 'Nessie' or 'Caddy'-dinosaurs and such creatures are on news reports and in conversations everywhere. And because most people have heard only the evolutionary viewpoint about these creatures, it is important that Christians know how to respond to the evolutionary comments.

Take Jurassic Park for instance The plot revolves around a quirky billionaire who sets out to recreate dinosaurs from DNA extracted from a blood. sucking insect which had dined on dinosaur and had then been trapped in amber (fossilized tree resin).

Dinosaurs are then genetically recreated for the tycoon's dinosaur theme park. But the dinosaurs break out of control, escape from the park, and start feasting on passing vehicles. People around the world have been asking if scientists could really resurrect these robust reptiles from DNA extracted from a preserved insect allegedly more than 100 million years old.

The answer is No!

Despite the hype, Jurassic Park is fiction. Scientists have not yet found dinosaur DNA in any amber-preserved insects. But if they did, even evolutionists admit that the DNA, a notoriously unstable molecule, would be too degraded to carry a complete dinosaur genetic blueprint.⁶

In fact, Oxford molecular biologist Bryan Sykes admitted in the journal Nature that the rate at which DNA breaks down in the laboratory is such that 'no DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years.'⁷

That is enough to kill the theory. But, in addition, reconstructing the genetic blueprint of an extinct creature poses seemingly insurmountable problems. Molecular geneticist Russell Higuchi compares the task to 'finding an encyclopaedia ripped into shreds and written in a language you barely comprehend, and having to reassemble it in the dark, without using your hands.'⁸
About four million fragments would have to be linked in the correct order- without knowing what that order was!

So, despite what you hear about multi-million-year-old insects being found, DNA in them means the insect can be only thousands of years old at most. And how to bring the creature back to life is something science today has no idea how to do-a fact overlooked in Jurassic Park.

Dinosaur Sightings

But could real dinosaurs be living today? What about all the reported sightings? If dinosaurs died out more than 60 million years ago, as evolutionists propose, then there can't be any convincing evidence for their living today, or even in recent times.

Yet fresh, unfossilized dinosaur bones have been found. In 1987, a young Inuit (Canadian Eskimo), working with scientist from Memorial University, Newfoundland (Canada), on Bylot Island, found a bone which was identified as part of a lower jaw of a duckbill dinosaurs.

In 1981, scientists identified dinosaur bones which had been found in Alaska 20 years earlier. The bones had been so fresh (relatively speaking) that the geologist who had found them thought at first they must have been bison bones. They have now been identified as belonging to horned dinosaurs, duckbill dinosaurs, and small carnivorous dinosaurs.'

Bones, of course, don't stay fresh very long-certainly not for millions of years. These discoveries clearly indicate that dinosaurs were around recently.

American Indians have stories of creatures they call 'thunderbirds', the description of which resembles that of a pterosaur. It is possible that the reason they can describe and draw these creatures is because their ancestors saw them.

Less conclusive perhaps, but not necessarily to be dismissed, are modern claims of sightings of dinosaur-type creatures. Yet even among these there seem credible eyewitnesses. Some scientific attempts to verify the existence of dinosaurs today have centred around the remote jungles of the Republic of the Congo, in central western Africa.

Several scientific expeditions have taken place there, with the help and sponsorship of the Congolese Government, in an effort to verify reports of previously unidentified animals. One of these animals, known to the local natives as Mokele-mbembe, fits the description of a small plant-eating dinosaur.

Biologist Dr Roy P. Mackal, from the University of Chicago, has led some of these trips through the harsh, humid, swampy environment of the Congo. He has written a book about his excursions, which includes summaries from other researchers who have been on expeditions to the Congo's Likouala region."

New Species Identified

Mackal says that a giant turtle and a monkey-eating bird have been identified with some certainty as living in the Likouala swamps. An unknown species of large crocodile also seems to inhabit the area.

If this is where things were left, there would be general agreement that these are exciting discoveries for science, and that more research would be worthwhile. But Dr Mackal also reports sightings of other unidentified creatures, including Mokele-mbembe, which he is fairly convinced is a small sauropod dinosaur.

This is where less open-minded scientists switch off. But Mackal has support from other scientists and researchers who say they have seen evidence of Mokele-mbembe on their expeditions. Some have been on these nerve-racking dinosaur hunts several times. As Mackal says, he would 'not endure extreme hardship and danger, even risk my life, to pursue a dream with no basis in reality.'

Biologist Marcellin Agnagna is another trained scientist who officially reported seeing Mokele-mbembe. He said that on May I, 1983, he and members of his party came across a Mokele-mbembe in the Congo's remote Lake Tele.12 It had a wide back, a long neck, and a small head. The front of it was brown, and its back appeared black. It was in the shallow water of the lake, and the length visible above the waterline was about five metres (16 feet). Agnagna said, 'It can be said with certainty that the animal we saw was Mokele-mbembe, that it was quite alive, and, furthermore, that it is known to many inhabitants of the Likouala region.'

It is therefore possible that at least one type of dinosaur may be living today. If it is indisputably accepted after further investigation, it would not be the first time that creatures which evolutionists had thought had died out millions of years ago have actually been found alive.

But it is important to distinguish between fantasy, feasibility, and fact.

Jurassic Park, though seemingly based on high-tech real science, is fantasy. Tests show that DNA would not last much more than 10,000 years, certainly not millions; reconstructing the genetic blueprint of such long-gone creatures is overwhelmingly complex and is probably impossible; and getting life back into those molecules or cells is something which science today has no idea how to do.

The feasibility of the idea that some dinosaurs may still be alive has a little more support, although at this time we would have to say it is not conclusive.

The fact, however, is that creationists are in a better position than evolutionists on these matters. Whether you consider the DNA aspect or the fresh dinosaur bones aspect, the evolutionary idea of millions of years does not look credible.

And when you consider the complexity involved in the genetic code-and that the fossil record shows no dinosaur evolution-the God-honouring conviction that dinosaurs and all other life came about through supernatural creation looks very convincing indeed.

And British explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell returned from an isolated Nepalese valley in March with photos of living creatures which looked something like mammoths or extinct stegodons.5

But weren't, apparently...
MAMMOTH TALES
Back in Blather 1.52, mention was made of having seen and heard retired Royal Engineer Colonel John Blashford-Snell at UnCon98, speaking about his 'Mammoth Hunt' to Nepal.
Back then, Blather promised to bring you a discussion of the book *Mammoth Hunt -- In Search of the Giant Elephants of Nepal*, co-written by Blashford-Snell with actress Rula Lenska. Well, finally perused, and finally closed a matter of hours ago, *Mammoth Hunt* is one of those rare books that can only be described as a Damned Good Read.

Around 1987, Blashford-Snell (hitherto referred to as JBS) was made aware of rumours concerning 'giant mammoths' which were pillaging villages in remote areas of Nepal. JBS, who has been leading expeditions to remote regions for many years -- with Operation Raleigh, Discovery Expeditions and the Scientific Exploration Society -- decided that Nepal was a good place to bring the *clients* of Discovery Expeditions. In all, some seven separate expeditions were executed between 1991 and 1997, the first team containing many tired and listless executives in need of a good shaking up, as well as one Mark O'Shea, described as being a 'mad Irish snake expert'.
While *Mammoth Hunt* isn't the kind of book usually discussed in Blather, i.e. it doesn't deal with phenomenalism, at least not in any deliberate sense, *Mammoth Hunt* would be of definite interest to everyone from the armchair-adventurer, those interested in travelling to more *exotic* locations, and to readers with even just a passing interest in cryptozoology.
Not that these expeditions were of a consciously cryptozoological nature -- the word doesn't appear in the book -- but it does illustrate how rumours of apparently impossibly animals, such as live mammoths, rubbished by many, did in fact have some element of 'truth' to them.
The entire seven year adventure holds tales of rafting down the Karnali river, drives along precarious cliff-top roads and horrendous bus crashes, remote tribes who shun agriculture, army anti-poaching squads who live in the woods, lost Babylonic citadels in the jungle, whitewater rafting, encounters with tigers, rhino, leeches and savage sloths. . . and the elephants, both wild and domesticated.
When scouting for the 'Beasts of Bardia' -- Bardia being the forest where the giant elephants had been seen -- JBS and his teams of Europeans, Nepalese naturalists, rafters, mahouts and phanits (both classes of elephant drivers), quite rightly decided to travel on tame elephants. And so we are introduced to these intelligent animals and their engaging personalities. Most of us are unaware that some elephants can respond to between thirty and sixty different verbal commands, or that, in Lenska's words 'they can be mischievous and cheeky, sad and depressed, volatile and bad tempered, lazy and frisky, sulky and cuddly and happy. They also cry with fear and pain and emotional hurt.'
After much searching. the expeditions found two large temperamental and peculiar-looking bull elephants wandering about the woods, the larger one becoming known as *Raja Gaj* - meaning King Elephant, while the smaller was known as *Kancha* -- Youngest. The elephants were much larger than the average Indian elephant, with a shoulder height of over 11ft (3.35m) for Raja Gaj, and they had a strange sloping back, protuberant forehead, and a thick tail.
Finding such huge volatile playboys lolling about the jungle seems to have brought its own problems, as these elephants were possibly exiles from a herd, led by a *bigger* bull. One particular encounter with Raja Gaj was even more hair-raising than normal, as he was in *musth* - male heat, with irritating yellow fluid seeping from behind his eye. Not only was the King in search of lurve, he was angry too, and I'm sure that even sitting in a *howdah* (seat on an elephants back) of even the fiercest of matriarchal elephants can't have felt too safe. In fact, Madu Mala Kali (Honey Blossom), the aforementioned matriarch saw fit, in the middle of night, to briefly elope with Raja Gaj -- he snapped her chains effortlessly, but she was reclaimed (the word 'recapture' seems inappropriate here) without too much effort.
DNA of these huge wild creatures was recovered, from their dung, and while they don't seem to be 'mammoths' as such, they are certainly in a class of their own. Dr Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist who was on three trips to Bardia with JBS, gave the following statement in October 1995:
'Within the Asian elephants we have to compare the Nepalese beasts with populations in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Burma, to see if the Nepalese animals are genetically distinct, maybe forming grouping with nearby populations from northern India. It would not surprise me to find that the Nepalese population has genetic variability, due to a phenomenon we call "bottlenecking", a result of isolation and the small numbers in the area. This might in turn account for the unusual anatomy of the Bardia elephants.'
In this writer's opinion, and even though JBS found this news 'somewhat disappointing', these finding are no less magical than finding a prehistoric survivor. It's always intriguing to consider many of the allegations of mysterious animals, while respecting the 1938 discovery of a living coelacanth, previously only known from fossil records. But there are others -- and *Nessie* is no exception -- that seem to be continuously interpreted as living prehistoric animals, with the intimation that any other possibility, e.g. a new mammal, is somehow less interesting.
By the time you read this issue of Blather its author will be at Lake Seljord in Norway, help to ascertain facts about the existence of an alleged mysterious water animal. While we would be thrilled to find a new species, it doesn't have to be a *dinosaur*.
*Mammoth Hunt -- In Search of the Giant Elephants of Nepal*
John Blashford-Snell and Rula Lenska
Harper Collins 1997
(ISBN 0-00-638741-1)
'All profits from the sale of this book will be used by the Scientific Exploration Society for the protection of and preservation of endangered wildlife, and the Asian elephant in particular'
Dave (daev) Walsh
Written on July 23rd, 1998
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A new supspecies of the Indian elephant would certainly be an interesting discovery, and I don't discount the possibility of finding new large or lost species, even today. Just a few years ago, an new subspecies of the Javan rhinocerous was discovered in Vietnam.