It's your 70 millionth!!
Let's take the creationist view for a moment and suppose that dinosaurs were nothing more than giant lizards in the garden of Eden and that they lived with Adam and Eve. They were big lizards, and lizards never stop growing. This brings us up to the flood. If they were in the garden of Eden, the first 1,600 years of man�s life on earth, what happened to them?
Dinosaurs on the Ark?
Did Noah have dinosaurs on the ark? Well, let's suppose that he did. The Bible says that he had seven of every "clean" kind, two of every "common" kind. The ark was pretty big. Let me give you some facts about the size of the ark. The ark measured approximately 450 feet long, about 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. The deck would have measured 97,700 square feet. This is verifiable in the Bible. No other ship was as large as this one until the Italian vessel, Eturia, built in 1884. The ark was about half the length of the 1,018 foot Queen Mary. The ark had the capacity of 520 modern railroad stock cars. America�s leading systematic taxonomists list the number of species to be 3,500 mammals, 8,600 birds, 5,500 reptiles and amphibians, and 25,500 worms, for a total of 43,100 different animals and insects. The overall average size of the animals was about the size of a sheep. They would easily fit into 150 box cars; so you see, they had plenty of room.
Dinosaurs on the ark? But they were so big. Noah was pretty smart. Noah was 600 years old, and he was probably smart enough to figure out that you do not have to bring the biggest ones you find. Bring babies. I would say that there are a lot of reasons for this:
1.) They were smaller and took up much less space.
2.) They would sleep a lot more.
3.) They would eat a lot less; which means they would have to bring a lot less food.
4.) After the flood was over, they would live longer to produce more offspring. That is why they brought them in the beginning.
Furthermore, he only had to bring two of each kind, not two of each specie or variety. The definition of kind in the Bible is more like our classification system of family. Two from each family of animals, which greatly reduces the number. I would say that the basic dog kind diversified after the flood into the Wolf, the Coyote, the Hyena, the Chihuahua, the Great Dane, the Doberman, and so on. These are all variations, not evolution! They are still the same "kind" of animal -- a dog.
Where is the Ark today?
People say, "If that big boat sailed around and landed on Mt. Ararat, why can�t we find it?" There is a lot of controversy about that. Maybe it has been found. There are two competing schools among creationists that are looking for the ark. One group says the ark is on Mt. Ararat. There was a good CBS special on about that. There is another group that says Noah�s ark is not even on Mt. Ararat, that it is twelve miles away in the valley called, The Valley of Eight. Nobody seems to know why it is called The Valley of Eight. There is also a village there called The Village of Eight, and nobody seems to know why it is called The Village of Eight. There were eight people that got off the ark; that is an interesting thought. Mt. Ararat is located right near the corner of Iran, Turkey, and Russia, just twelve miles from the Russian border. Twelve miles from Mt. Ararat, in another one of the mountains of Ararat, is a strange boat-shaped structure. The Bible says that the ark landed on the mountains of Ararat (plural) so it might be on a different mountain or valley. There is a strange boat-shaped structure pictured in a book by Ron Wyatt. Mr. Wyatt says that the boat-shaped object is Noah�s ark. It is 515 feet long, which is 300 Egyptian royal cubits. Assuming that this is the ark, it is obvious that the ark has collapsed in on itself and folded out to the sides, leaving what is now visible as a tear-dropped shape. It would have been there for quite a while, and the ark is no longer navigable! Mr. Wyatt drilled all through the area and found all sorts of petrified animal dung, which is what you might expect after being in the ark for a year. The Turkish government believes that this is Noah�s ark, and to prove it built a visitors� center near the structure. Huge anchor stones have been found all around the area. These are 9,000 pound rocks, about 3 or 4 miles away from the sight itself.
What Happened to the Dinosaurs?
After the flood, people began to kill the dinosaurs. They might have killed them off to be heroes or just because they were a threat to their lives. Who wants to live next door to a tyrannosaurus rex? For example, how many grizzly bears are in your county? Except for those in a zoo, probably none. How many were there 500 years ago? There was probably a large number. What happened to them? As the population of people increases, the population of ferocious animals decreases. They are either killed off or driven away. As the population of the world grew after the flood, the population of the dinosaurs shrank. For the first 1,000 years or so after the flood, people were killing dinosaurs. There are literally thousands of legends around the world of people slaying dragons. How did these legends start? Taking in to account that the stories have probably gotten out of proportion through the telling of them, could it be that they were based on historical fact? Beowulf slew a dragon; Prince George; Gilgamesh; and St. John all slew dragons. There are many accounts such as these. The Catholic Bible even tells, in the book of Daniel, about dragons. Could it be that Nebuchadnezzar had a dragon in captivity. Nebuchadnezzar�s seal on his ring was the god Marduke on the top of a fire-breathing dragon. That is the Babylonian symbol. Did they have dinosaurs back then? In the Catholic Bible, the book of Daniel has two extra chapters, Daniel 13 and 14. Daniel 14 tells the story of Daniel slaying a dragon that Nebuchadnezzar had in the palace.
Was There a Dinosaur in Babylon?
Did they really have a dinosaur in Babylon in 600 BC? Well, it makes sense from the Biblical account.
The Bible teaches that the flood was 4,400 years ago, which is 2,400 years before the birth of Christ. In Nebuchadnezzar�s time, 600 BC, 1,800 years had transpired since the flood. Most of the dinosaurs had been killed; however, a few were still around and if you could catch one you would be a hero. There are lots of stories like that. Saddam Hussein is spending millions of dollars reconstructing the original cities of Babylon. When the ancient walls of the city of Babylon were unearthed, they were intact, perfectly preserved. Etched into the walls are carvings of dinosaurs and lions. Dinosaurs? The Babylonian dragon? How is it possible for them to have known what a dinosaur looked like if they had not seen one? If you believe in evolution, this is impossible. Dinosaurs could not have been living with man. I know what schools teach. That is what I was taught. The Creationist's explanation is much simpler. Dinosaurs lived with man all along. The world is only six or seven thousand years old. After the flood, the climate changed which caused the dinosaurs to not grow as big and to not live as long. Another factor, is that man started hunting and killing the dinosaur. Therefore, the dinosaur became smaller and very rare. Up until the time of Nebuchadnezzar, there were still some around, even up until modern times after Christ. Two hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ a Roman Mosaic was made showing two long-necked dinosaurs fighting or kissing. What they are doing is not important. What they are is important. How could you have dinosaurs on a Roman Mosaic from the second century AD? How could they make such detailed images of these critters, unless they had seen them? Again, a creationist perspective makes perfect sense. A few dinosaurs were probably still in existence 1,800 years ago. From the evolutionary perspective, the story of dragons doesn�t make very much sense. "They all have to be mythology." Chinese have lots of stories of their emperors using dragons to pull their chariots on special occasions. Chinese dragons? Many Chinese recipes call for dragon saliva, bone, or teeth ground up for special medicines. Could it be that they were really killing off dinosaurs? It makes perfect sense to me. The Vikings even made their ships to have a dragon�s head. Why? A lot of Scandinavian legends tell about the giant dragons that lived in the sea. These dragons would devour their ships; so, they made their ships to look like the dragons.
Indications of Dinosaurs Living With Man
In 1572, an Italian scientist, Ulysses Aldravondus, documented the entire account of the killing of a dinosaur. He even had the dead body mounted for a museum. It was apparently a small tanystropheus dinosaur. There are lots of stories about dinosaurs. All over the Grand Canyon there are petroglyphs, rock carvings, scratched into the walls of the Canyon. There among the petroglyphs is a scratched, embossed, image of a dinosaur. A dinosaur? In the Grand Canyon? You mean the Indians hunted dinosaurs?
Were Seamonsters Dinosaurs?
There are literally thousands of stories of people sighting sea monsters during the days of sailing ships. Columbus had a hard time getting a crew because they were afraid of sea monsters. It doesn�t take much brain power to figure out this one. The sailing boats were pretty quiet going through the water. If there were sea monsters out there, a sailing ship could get close to one. Today, the boats have big diesel engines and steel frames. Sound travels great distances under water; therefore, the critters can hear you coming fifty miles away. They simply learn to avoid the shipping lanes. By the way, huge sections of our oceans have never been sailed. NEVER! The winds and currents are contrary and the seaweed in the Sargasso Sea is too thick. They just avoid those areas and sail around them. Could there still be dragons, dinosaurs, and sea monsters out there? Missionary Hans Egede, from Greenland, tells the story of sighting a sea monster off the coast of Greenland. He said that it stuck its head up level with the top of the ship. It had two little flippers, flappers as he calls them, on the front. A dinosaur with two flippers -- a sea monster? In 1848, Captain Peter M�Quhae of the H.M.S. Deadalus, and his crew, watched a sixty-foot sea monster swim directly under their boat. The sailors on board said, "Captain, please don�t say anything about this. Don�t write it in the log book for sure because we are going to get laughed at for the rest of our lives. If we go back to port and tell them that we saw a dinosaur, they are going to laugh at us."
Monster-Sized Octopii
There are stories of octopus pulling ships under water. There are many stories like that. Octopuses never stop growing just like reptiles. Now stop and think about it. If you were an animal that never stopped growing, it might be possible for you to reach the size where you would become big enough that you no longer had any enemies. They used to chase you, now you chase them. Now the Guinness Book of World Records states that the largest octopus in the world was 36 feet, which was caught off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska." I have also read Guinness, but they did not perform their research very well this time. There have been bigger octopuses. An octopus washed up on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida in 1896. It was 200 feet across and weighed five tons. That is not even the biggest one. A whale was caught in Seattle, Washington one time and all around the whale�s body were scars. Octopuses have suckers under their arms, and they use them to latch onto their prey. The circular scars on the whale�s body were 18 inches in diameter. They said, "What kind of octopus had a hold of this whale? Awe, it must have got caught when it was a baby, and it got loose; the whale grew, and the scars stretched." Well, maybe so, but when they cut that whale�s stomach open, they found the arm to an octopus. The whale had bitten it off and swallowed it. The arm was 150 feet long. One arm! You see, whales like to eat octopus. That�s one of their most favorite things to eat. If a whale ever gets sick from eating too much octopus, it will regurgitate. That's what they use to make perfume. Perfume, ambergris, regurgitated octopus. Not only that, there have been some giant squids found out there. A 57-foot squid washed upon the beach in Canada in 1877. Just a few years ago in the late 1980�s, an 80-foot squid washed upon the beach in Nova Scotia, Canada. Eighty-foot squid?
Dinosaurs in the Bible
Dinosaurs have always lived with man, and they are even mentioned in the Bible. In the book of Job chapter 38 there is mention of dinosaurs.
God said, "Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox."
Behemoth may have been a brontosaurus. I know that elephants and hippopatamuses eat grass. I know brontosauruses eat grass too because they're plant eaters. The description could fit either one of those animals.
Verse 16 says, "Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly."
That means the biggest, strongest part on him is his belly. I know that Elephants and hippopatamuses have a big bellies but so did a brontosaurus.
Verse 17 says, "He moveth his tail like a cedar..."
Have you ever seen an elephant�s tail? Would it remind you of a cedar tree? How about a hippopotamus? No. How about a brontosaurus tail? Yes!
Verse 18, "His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron."
This creature had big heavy-duty bones, and they do.
The biggest brontosaurus found is still half in the ground in Alberta, Canada. They�re digging it out of the ground, which is going to take years. From the bones found so far, the experts feel they are from a brachiosaurus. They estimate that from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail is 150 feet long. This would be a new world's record for the longest dinosaur. China had the record. In 1986, they found a 140 foot long dinosaur. This one is going to break it by ten feet. They estimate that it probably weighed about 100 tons. One-hundred tons are a lot. A school bus only weighs six to seven tons, so a brachiosaurus like that probably weighed as much as fourteen school buses. His bones are like bars of iron; he has big bones.
Verse 19 says, "He is the chief of the ways of God."
He�s the chief of the ways of God? The Hebrew word, resith, means that he is the principle; he�s the first; he�s the biggest; he�s the resith -- the biggest. He�s the chief of the ways of God. This would also make perfect sense from a biblical standpoint. You see, the devil is always trying to steal the glory from God. By convincing the world that dinosaurs are millions of years old, he would achieve this while causing people to doubt the creation as well.
Look at the rest of verse 19, "...he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him."
Verses 20 and 21 say, "Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens."
Now the word fens means the swamp or the mire. Behemoth lived under the trees in the swamp. That�s what the Bible says.
Dinosaurs in Africa
Did you know that there are some very large swamps in the world right now? The biggest swamp in the world is called the Likouala Swamp. It�s in the Congo of Africa. That is 55,000 square miles of swamp land. That�s a big swamp! Fifty-five thousand square miles is bigger than the entire state of Alabama, which is only 50,000 square miles. Could you imagine a swamp bigger than Alabama? That swamp is bigger than the state of Arkansas, which is 53,000 square miles. Do you know there have been many expeditions into that swamp? There have been over twenty scientific expeditions in the last fifteen years looking for dinosaurs still living today in the Likouala Swamp. In 1880, Belgium took over the Congo in Africa, which included this big swamp, known as the Belgium Congo. For many years Belgium colonized that territory. From 1880 on, they sent explorers to the Congo, and some of these explorers returned and some did not. Those that went into the swamp came back out and reported sightings of dinosaurs. They were known by several different names among the local natives. The most common name being Mokele-Mbembe (Moke-e-lay-mem-bee.) In 1948, the Saturday Evening Post published a huge article about Dinosaurs Still Living In The Congo Swamp. All along, there have been stories of dinosaur sightings in that Africa swamp. So finally, in 1980, Dr. Roy Mackal, a very famous micro biologist at the University of Chicago and a strong believer in evolution, decided that he was going to go and check it out. Dr. Mackal spent a fortune to go to the Congo swamp. He traveled around among the natives and asked them questions about the various animals that live in the swamp. He said the first thing that he noticed in the swamp was the mosquitoes. He calculated that the mosquitoes landed on them at the rate of about a 1,000 per hour the whole time that they were there. It was a relentless attack of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. In spite of all the difficulties, they stayed there for six weeks. They talked to natives that went hunting in the swamp. The natives lived mostly along the main rivers, and they would go back into the swamp very reluctantly. When they did go, they wouldn�t stay very long, maybe just a few hours, to try to find something and then they would quickly get out of the swamp. Dr. Mackal said as they traveled around, they showed the natives pictures of different animals. He showed them crocodile pictures and the natives said, "Oh yeah! We�ve got those animals here." Dr. Mackal said, "How big?" The natives paced it off on the sandbar to be fifty feet long. Dr. Mackal said, "That�s a pretty big crocodile. Are you sure they get that big?" It was on the 1984 expedition that they actually saw a fifty-foot crocodile in that swamp. See, crocodiles never stop growing either. As Dr. Mackal continued to show the natives the pictures, he had a picture book of many different animals, some that lived in the swamp and some that didn�t. He was going to test the natives to see if they were telling the truth. As they would thumb through the pages, they would say, "Oh yes, hippopotamus. Yeah, we�ve got that one." Turn the page. "Yep! Crocodiles, we have those. Grizzly bear. No, we have never seen that animal." Dr. Mackal turned the page and came to the picture of an apatosaurus, and the natives said, "Oh yes, that�s Mokele-Mbembe, he lives out in the swamp. What�s next?" You know turn the page. "What else do you want to know?" It was no big deal to them. Dr. Mackal said, "Mokele-Mbembe? You mean to tell me that you have an apatosaurus living in the swamp? Don�t you know, that�s a dinosaur? They�ve been dead for seventy million years." The natives said, "We�re sorry, we didn�t know that. We�ve never been to the University of Chicago to study evolution. All that we know is that we see one once in a while as we fish out there." Apatosauruses still alive? Now, don�t become excited. They are not one-hundred fifty feet long like they used to be. The natives claim that Mokele-Mbembe is only about twenty-five or thirty feet long. They say his body is about the size of a hippopotamus, but his neck and tail are real long. Which fits the pattern.
There have been some big creatures spotted in this world that you will never hear about. There were some expeditions in a swamp where Brazil meets Venezuela. Colonel Fawcett, I believe was the gentleman�s name, shot and killed a giant snake as it went across the river in front of them. They measured the snake, and it was seventy-six feet long. The natives said, "Colonel, you should see the big ones." They said that they get much bigger than this, as much as one-hundred thirty feet. You see; lizards and reptiles never stop growing. People don�t live to be nine-hundred years old anymore as they used to before the flood. Dragonflies don�t get to be three feet like they used to before the flood. Grasshoppers don�t get to be two feet long like they used to before the flood, and dinosaurs don�t get one-hundred-fifty feet long like they used to before the flood. The bones that we are finding today are the fossils of animals that very well may have drowned in the flood. Nearly all of the fossils were formed 4,400 years ago. How old are dinosaur bones? Four-thousand four-hundred years old. That�s how old all of the fossils are, with maybe a few rare exceptions. Things don�t fossilize unless they are quickly buried. The reasons for the layers of them is due to hydrologic sorting. Animals with similar density are buried together. Birds are frequently found on top not because birds evolved last, but because birds were the last ones to drown in the flood. Birds have hollow bones and feathers, and when they do drown they float. Therefore, it doesn�t prove an evolutionary sequence, it looks much more like a flood. It all depends on how you want to look at the evidence.
Mokele-Mbembe
The natives claimed that Mokele-Mbembe lived in the water and was very rarely seen. The natives that had lived there a lifetime may only have seen him once or twice or they may never have seen him, but they did claim to hear him from time-to-time. They claimed that he lived under the water and under the shade of the trees.
Kind of like in the book of Job, "...He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens."
That is exactly what God told Job. They said that behemoth, this animal Mokele-Mbembe, would stick his long neck out and eat plants along the side of the rivers. They said that he was active at night, which means he was not often seen in the daytime. His favorite plant was the Molombo plant.
They told Roy Mackal, "If you want to find a Mokele-Mbembe, travel around the swamp until you find a place where there are lots of Molombo growing and where there are no hippopotamuses, because Mokele-Mbembe doesn�t like hippopotamus. Matter of fact, Mokele-Mbembe doesn�t like much of anything."
They went on to say that if you were to come up behind him in a canoe, he would come up out of the water and smash your canoe with his tail and drown everybody in the canoe. They said he would not eat you, if that is any consolation; he would only kill you. They reported that he is not friendly at all. His very sensitive hearing enables him to duck under the water when he hears you coming, which makes your chances of spotting him close to zero.
Dr. Mackal went back the next year and spent one-quarter of a million dollars on a nine-week expedition and did not see the animal either time. He did gather all sorts of reports from the native from villages all up and down the swamp. These were people that had no idea that Dr. Mackal was coming, and had no idea of what he wanted. They were just simply telling him about the animals in the swamp. They found footprints of Mokele-Mbembe. The animal comes out of the water onto land, smashing plants, looking for the Molombo plant to eat. The footprints were about the size of a hippopotamus, but with five claws on them. The hippopotamus doesn�t have claws and neither does the elephant.
The natives claimed that one of their ancestors had killed one of these animals.
Dr. Mackal asked the natives, "Does Mokele-Mbembe ever die? Do you ever see a dead one?"
They said, "Oh, Mokele-Mbembe is the god of the river. He never dies."
Of course, that is an exaggeration.
He said, "Do you ever kill one to eat it?"
They said, "Oh no! Our grandfathers killed and ate one, and they all died."
A missionary named Eugene Thomas has been in the Congo swamp for over forty years. His name is Eugene Thomas. A couple of years ago he verified what the natives had been saying. He said that you can hear them at night, roaring like giant lizards. That is the testimony from a missionary that has lived there for forty years.
In 1983, an expedition lead by Marcellin Agnagna, left the Brazzaville Congo, the capital of Congo, for the Congo swamp. Marcellin and his group of scientists, traveled into the swamp. He also went with Dr. Mackal on his second expedition. Marcellin, along with several of his scientists, went in there and saw one of the animals. He grabbed his camera and snapped off several pictures before he realized that he had forgotten to take off the lens cap. When you go deer hunting, they call it buck fever. I don�t know what they call it when you go Mokele-Mbembe hunting.
He said. "I didn�t get a picture, but I�ll draw you a sketch."
Dr. Mackal traveled all over the swamp, and the story was the same, "Oh yes, Mokele-Mbembe lives up the stream." They claim that Mokele-Mbembes migrate around eating plants as they travel on to the next place; so, they are never in the same location for an extended period.
The Loch Ness Monster, a Dinosaur?
It is not just in Africa where these stories are told. There are reports of dinosaurs still living all over the world. Not millions of them, but reports in several locations. For example, have you ever heard of the Loch Ness Monster? The word loch means lake in Gaelic, the Celtic language of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland. Loch Ness is about twenty-four to twenty-five miles long, and about one mile wide. It is a long skinny lake in the mountains of Scotland, and because it is in the mountains, it is a very deep lake. It�s in between two mountain ranges and is up to 1,000 feet deep in some places. The lake is big enough and deep enough that everybody in the world could drown in Loch Ness. Five billion people could drown in Loch Ness, and no one would show above the surface. It is a big lake.
In 1933, they cut a groove along the side of the mountain to put in a road. Because it was so steep, there was no place to put a road, so they actually chiseled a groove with dynamite into the hillside and put in a roadway. The year 1933 is a very important date. Since they put the roadway in, people could drive alongside the lake and look at the lake. Before the roadway was put in, if you wanted to see Lock Ness, you had to travel up the river seven miles, and then go into Loch Ness, and then twenty-five miles by boat. Therefore, only the local people talked about the Loch Ness Monster until 1933. Outsiders then began to see it because of the highway. In 1933, driving down that brand new highway, people began to spot the Loch Ness Monster. As of the 1960�s, there were over 9,000 sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. Today, there have been over 11,000 such sightings.
If 11,000 people claim that they have seen something, I would say that there is something to what they are seeing. Some of them are probably hoaxes, frauds, or wrongly identified. Since 11,000 people claim that they have seen it, there must be something there. It is not just all wild-eyed radical people either. There have been some very reputable people that have claimed to have seen this critter. For instance, Sir Peter Scott, a British naturalist and a member of Parliament says that he has seen the Loch Ness Monster on several occasions. He thinks the Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaurus. A plesiosaurus is a long-necked swimming dinosaur. There are several different kinds of plesiosaurus, including the allosaurus, and the kronosaurus. They have different shaped heads and neck lengths, etc.
Aurthor Grant, a veterinarian student was riding his motorcycle down the road at two o�clock in the morning, coming home from studying, when he nearly ran into the Lock Ness Monster with his motorcycle. He said that it was scooting across the road in front of his motorcycle. Scooting across the road? Loch Ness Monster has been seen seventeen times out of the water, twice with a sheep in his mouth headed back for the water. Aurthor Grant, being a veterinarian student, ought to have known something about animals. He said that it scooted across the road like an animal on flippers; it moved like a seal with a jerky motion. He drew the sketch of what he saw.
He said, "It was fifteen to twenty feet long, and looked like a plesiosaurus, but I know that it couldn�t be a plesiosaurus because they have been dead for 70 million years."
That�s about what Roy Mackal said in his book.
He says, "There is no question there are still a few dinosaurs left. It is amazing that they have survived for 70 million years."
He is very convinced of his 70 million years ago theory Alexander Campbell is the water bailiff, that�s the equivalent of a conservation officer or game warden. His job is watching Loch Ness. He has been at it for forty-seven years. In that time he says that he has seen the Loch Ness Monster eighteen times. He ought to know something about it since he has seen it eighteen times. He says the creature is about thirty feet long and his head sticks about six feet out of the water. He thinks it is a plesiosaurus.
The Spicer family watched it cross the road in front of their car with a sheep in its mouth. Cages were build in the 1930�s in order to catch it. P. T. Barnham offered $50,000 for the creature, dead or alive, to display in his museum. That was a lot of money back in the 1930�s.
Mrs. Moir saw it for an hour, along with her sister and mother-in-law. She said that it was about thirty feet long. There are many pictures and stories.
Torquil Macleod lived in Scotland. He watched the creature through binoculars from across the lake. Half of the creature was on shore with his neck moving back and forth like a snake that is about to strike. He watched it for nine minutes. It put one of its flippers upon shore, pushed off, and flopped into the water. After watching it for nine minutes, he drew a sketch. Is it just a coincidence that they all come up with the same idea?
A camper took a picture in 1960, of the back and the neck sticking up. She flashed the picture, and then he ducked under the water. Greta Finlay also drew a sketch. Over and over people are coming up with the same basic idea.
In the Reader�s Digest book, Mysteries of the Unexplained, an underwater picture was shown of the flipper of the animal. It was estimated that the flipper was six feet long. They captured the photograph by placing a sonar device, cameras, and strobe lights underwater so that if anything swam in front of the camera, it would be triggered to take pictures. The water is very dirty, and visibility is zero. It is about like taking a picture in a mud puddle; the light doesn�t travel very far. Loch Ness is like a giant mud puddle 900 to 1,000 feet deep. That six-foot flipper was attached to something pretty big. There are now nearly 100 photographs of this creature, some are poor quality; some are not too bad.
People say, "If the creature is really over there, why don�t they get a good picture of it?" That is a fair question. Let me turn it around and ask a question. Have you ever seen a picture of a car wreck as it happened? You won�t either, at least not very often. There have been thousands of wrecks. It happens very fast.
Three attempts have been made with submarines to record evidence and they have been unsuccessful. The water is so dirty that they could not even see the front of their own vessels so this proved to be futile. They tried yellow subs, red subs, and white subs thinking that Nessie might be attracted to a particular color. There have been many reputable people who have claimed to have seen this creature called the Lock Ness Monster.
Dinosaurs May Be All Over the World
It is not just Lock Ness, but many other lakes in Scotland and in Ireland are reporting these creatures. There probably are some dinosaurs still alive in the world. Even in the English channels, in the North Sea, and in Sweden, there have been sightings by hundreds of witnesses. In the 1800�s, the Swedes built big traps and harpoons to try to catch one and get the critters out of the lake. In 1905, off the coast of Brazil, a dinosaur swam past a boat load of scientists. A Japanese fishing boat caught one in 1977. They caught a dinosaur? As they were dragging their net 900 feet down off the coast of New Zealand, the Japanese fishing fleet snagged a 4,000 pound, 32-foot long carcass of a rotting dinosaur. They took tissue samples, weighed it, and measured it and then they threw it back. It made big news all over the world except in America. We didn�t hear anything about it, but it happened in 1977. The Japanese even made a commemorative mail stamp out of it.
A group of scientists went to the Soviet Union and actually saw the creature in the middle of the lake. They drew a sketch of what they saw. Dinosaurs in Siberia?
A Canadian fisherman said that a dinosaur of sorts chased their boat off the coast of Nova Scotia for two miles.
He said, "I don�t know what it was. It was something with a huge jaw about eight or nine feet long."
There have been many sightings of these creatures on Lake Okanagan in Canada. Statues have been built in their parks for the children to play on them. They call him Ogopogo. Over 1,000 people claim to have seen Ogopogo in Canada. There must be something to it. When thousands upon thousands report sightings (20,000 reported sightings of dinosaurs in this century) there are just too many to discount.
In Cadboro Bay, British Columbia, a creature has been sighted called Caddy. Three to four hundred sightings of the creature have been reported in the Potomac in Washington, D.C. and in Lake Erie. The article, Erie�s Besse matches Nessie tells the story of one such sighting. A dinosaur in Lake Erie? John Craft took a picture of it. He saw the creature, along with his wife and mother-in-law and someone else that was with him, and photographed it.
He said, "I don�t know what the creature was. It looked like a dinosaur. Just when I was going to take a picture of the sunset, my wife said, �What�s that!� She said that it looked like a whole row of men swimming. I swung the camera over, but by then it had put its head back down and was swimming with just his back out of the water. That�s when I snapped the photograph."
The article California�s Nessie, appeared in the November 1989 issue of the Skin Diver magazine. In 1925 just south of San Francisco, in Monterey, California, something washed up on the beach . As it lay there on the beach and rotted away, no one thought to save any of it, at least no one that I could find. They said that it was forty feet long, and the neck was twenty feet long. Many people came to examine it like Mr. Wallace, a Santa Cruz resident, who was president of the Natural History Society of British Columbia.
He said, "My examination of the monster was quite thorough. It had no teeth. Its head was large, and its neck was fully twenty feet long. I would call it a type of plesiosaurus."
A zeuglodon or basilasaurus is a long skinny dinosaur that looks like an alligator but with only two front feet and no back feet. It has a long tail and two front flippers. There are over 300 people that claim that they have seen the White River Monster in New Port, Arkansas. The White River Monster is a creature that is said to be thirty feet long. Several people say they have seen the creature. One such interview was with Gary Addington and Lloyd Hamilton about their sightings. Today, they live in Jacksonport, Arkansas. Thirty-foot dinosaurs in Arkansas? It hasn�t been seen since 1972 when a flood came and an enormous amount of mud washed into the river. The river used to be 100 feet deep; today, it is only 50 feet deep. In between the state of Vermont and New York, there is a huge lake, Lake Champlain, named after Samuel Champlain, the French explorer that discovered it.
The Indians told Samuel Champlain, "Don�t go out on the lake. The water horse will get you."
He said, "The water horse?"
They said, "Oh, there is a big animal that lives in the lake."
The Indians were afraid of it. Lake Champlain is 120 miles long, 15 miles wide, and 500 feet deep. All along Lake Champlain there have been hundreds and hundreds of sightings of a creature called Champ. You can read more about this in the book, Champ, by Joseph W. Zarzynsky. He says that he has been collecting sighting information on Champ for seventeen years. He said that there is no question in his mind that there are still a few dinosaurs left, and we�ve got some in Lake Champlain just like the Loch Ness Monster.
He also said, "Secondly, it�s pretty surprising that they have survived for 70 million years, isn�t it?"
Sandi Massey who took the photo for the book's cover said, "My husband and I were standing at the edge of Lake Champlain on the Vermont side, and our two children were playing in the water. All of a sudden, we noticed this turbulence in the water, and then it slowly came up. It was looking around from right to left. It looked kind of nervous. We watched it for ten minutes. My husband handed me the camera. I dropped to my knees because my legs just buckled out from under me, but I snapped off one picture. We were looking at a dinosaur."
Hundreds of people have seen it. Lee Smith videotaped it for nearly a minute. He was the county road superintendent or worked on a bulldozer or something like that. He was in a lighthouse when he videotaped it for nearly a minute.
His little boy was with him and said, "It�s a shark! There is white things coming out of his mouth."
Evidently the animal was breathing out, and it was making steam-like vapor much like a whale.
Many people have seen these creatures, and they are not all lunatics. There must be something to it. The whole problem could be how we tend to look from the beginning. What is your preconception?
Pterodactls?
There might even be a few pterodactyls left. There is the story of a giant bird that came down and snatched away the Indians north of Alton, Illinois the piasa bird. It was probably a giant pterodactyl that snatched an Indian baby and the legend grew out of proportion. In 1882, two cowboys shot and killed a pterodactyl in Arizona.
They said, "Folks are not going to believe us. A thirteen-foot bird in the desert of Arizona?"
They cut the wing tips off and took them back to the local bar and said, "Fellows, we�ve just shot a thirteen-foot bird. Here is part of his wing."
There were no feathers, just skin. Leathery wings?
There are several swamps in Africa that are still reporting creatures like pterodactyls. If you draw a picture of a pterodactyl and show it to the natives, they will say, "Oh yes, that�s Kongamato. He lives out there."
Kongamato?
"Yes, he has a five- to seven-foot wing span."
They are not as big as they used to be. The fifty footers couldn�t fly in today�s atmosphere. The air is too thin, but a five- to seven-footer would have no problem.