Dinosaurs in the Art of Archeaology Museums Like the Peabody

[teri107]

If dinosaurs lived in the time of man as a Christian understands is true from Genesis you might expect sculptures or drawings of them by ancient artists to show up in archaeological museums--if they were willing to allow them to be shown. For the first 100 years after dinosaurs were "discovered" scientists were quite willing to call them "dragons".

Discovery Magazine points out that science is mostly just guessing with it s dinosaur art and that many species are represented by the same art showing them in the same stance.

But what if we are overlooking the depictions of actual eyewitnesses of the past?

[Victor08]

http://paleo.cc/ce/dino-art.htm

Alleged Dinosaurs in Ancient Art
© 2009-2012, Glen J. Kuban
DRAFT.
Part of Kuban's Paluxy web site

Many "young-earth" creationists (YECs) have claimed that dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts are depicted on petroglyphs and other ancient art, supposedly proving that the creatures lived in recent times, and overthrowing the conventional geologic timetable. These claims involve several problems.

First, even if ancient humans saw dinosaurs, pterosaurs, or other "prehistoric" creatures and depicted them on artwork, it would not disprove evolution or conventional geology. There is no reason why a plant or animal group could not have survived longer than previously thought, and paleontologists have always celebrated such finds. Examples include discoveries during the 1900's of a living population of coelacanths (a type of lobed-finned fishes), the Ginkgo (a tree with fan-shaped leaves), and the Dawn Redwood.* Technically even a group of dinosaurs is still alive today: birds. Most modern paleontologists regard birds as not only the descendents of bipedal dinosaurs, but proper members of a dinosaur clad (feathered theropods, to be more precise).

Second, certain animals that are often considered "prehistoric," such as mammoths, mastodons, and saber-cats, are known to have lived alongside humans, in some cases only 10 or 15 thousand years ago. Therefore, the depiction of these particular creatures in ancient art is not even a geologic anomaly.

Third, even if some ancient art depicts real prehistoric creatures, it need not mean the artist saw the living creature. The artwork could have been based instead on fossil remains. Although the point is often ignored or minimized by YECs, it is entirely possible that ancient people sometimes came across fossilized remains of ancient creatures, and drew more or less plausible deductions about their appearance, or combined them with what they knew of contemporaneous animals. This consideration alone largely discounts any anti-evolutionary value for most of the artifacts and petroglyphs in question.

[joergehamilton]

We are really lucky that dinosaurs were not lived in the time of man; otherwise we pay the penalty. These creatures are shown now days in museums only; through the design of their sculpture we can imagine how big and how much dangerous they are?