Doug Velting
When my kids were young, one of their favorite animated movies was Ice Age. It’s a story of a Saber-tooth tiger, a Mastodon and their traveling friends. They meet many strange animals in their journey. Watching the movie with my kids, I always wondered what it would have been like to see all of those amazing animals that are now extinct, and we aren’t the only ones. People have always been fascinated with prehistoric animals. Whether we encounter them in movies, books, magazines, or museums, they capture our imagination.
Let’s take a moment and look at this giant animal situation from an evolutionary viewpoint. In this theory you would expect to find a greater number of species given time. But what we see is a great many animals that have gone extinct. You also see animals getting smaller and weaker, not larger and stronger as you would expect in an evolutionary world.
It is the norm for fossils to be studied through the eyes of evolution. But what these researchers don’t tell you is that what they see does not match what they say. They see a downward progression in animal life, based on the fossil finds, but what they tell us about is an upward evolutionary progress.
When we use the Bible as our starting point, we can make sense of all this.
What we see is a greater variety in the past, which includes giant species of many animals, and fewer varieties today, often with smaller, weaker counterparts,
This makes sense to the biblical creationist because we understand what sin did to all creation. When God created, He gave all animal species DNA with tremendous amounts of information to equip them to live and spread out to all ecological niches all over the world. But sin produced a major problem because it affected the genetic strength of all life, and that is what we are seeing today.
Let’s take a closer look at two animal fossils to compare what type of animals lived thousands of years ago to what the modern counterpart is like today.
Giant Turtles
Many people love turtles, and it’s exciting to realize that some turtles that lived in the past were giants. Scientists have found turtle fossils that tell us how large many turtle species were in the past. One of the largest fossil turtles is Megalochelys atlas. This giant land turtle has been discovered in Europe and Asia, measured 9 feet long, and weighed around a ton. This giant would have looked like a gigantic version of the Galapagos Tortoise.
A giant sea turtle Archelon ischyros is the largest fossil turtle on record. This sea turtle was 16 feet wide from the outer edges of its flippers, and 13 feet long. Its weight is estimated to be around 4,900 lbs. Based on the deposits where this fossil was found, we can be certain that it lived in the pre-flood world and was buried during the flood of Noah’s time.
Giant Beaver
The fossil record tells us that some extinct beavers were quite large. Casoroides ohioensis grew to be 8 feet long and weighed 220 lbs. This beaver had more tubular-shaped teeth, so there is no way of knowing if it cut down trees or built dams. Its tail was longer and more narrow than today’s species. These distinctive differences highlight the reality that earth has lost varieties through time, not gained them.
Here is a quick overview of other giants from the past:
- A 6-foot long, 500-pound armadillo.
- A giant North American camel with a height of 13 feet, weighing in at 5,500 lbs. This camel’s skull measured 3 feet long.
- Modern walruses have a length of 11 feet and a weight of 1.5 tons. A fossil of a walrus was discovered that measured 20 feet and the estimated weight is 4.4 tons.
- An extinct bear similar to the South American spectacled bear was 6 feet tall at the shoulder and would have reached 11 feet when it stood up on its hind legs.
- 65-foot shark fossils have been found. The great white shark is only 20 feet long. Now that’s some shark!
- An owl that stood at 3 ½ feet.
- A giant snake fossil found in Colombia would have measured nearly 50 feet with a weight of 2,500 lbs.
- A 5-foot-long raccoon.
- A giant ground sloth 20 feet long with a weight of 4.4 tons.
- A massive flying bird similar to a condor with a wingspan of 24 feet. The longest wingspan of a modern bird goes to the wandering albatross at 11 feet.
- A 6 ½ foot long millipede.
- A dragonfly with a wingspan of 28 inches.
This list could go on, but you see that thousands of years ago, we had a greater variety of species that were larger and stronger than what we have today, just as a clear understanding of Scripture would have us believe.
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals each according to its kind.” Genesis 1:2
