45: dinosaurs (no, really)

I believe in dinosaurs.

I even believe that dinosaurs were on the earth at the same time as humans.

I believe in a world wide flood that left fossils on the top of mountains.

I believe that Job was describing dinosaurs when he talks about Behemoth and Leviathan.

The topic of dinosaurs keeps popping up lately! I bought a really interesting, easy reptile book the other week. The first couple pages cover the tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, etc. Then the last page, talking about the Komodo Dragon says,

"As he flicks his yellow tongue, he looks like the dragon of fairy tales and legends.

We know there are no real dragons.

And no one ever saw a live dinosaur."

I almost felt like I was being brainwashed. Like, "Now make sure children, you understand, no one every saw a live dinosaur. Understand? There are no such thing as real dragons. Okay?" *waits for heads to nod* "Good!"

What I want to know is, how did ancient peoples know about dinosaurs in order to carve "imaginative" rock drawings of themselves with dinosaurs if they had never seen one before? If they had never seen a dinosaur because they had died out millions of years earlier, how did they know what they looked like in order to draw them?

How could there be legends of dragons throughout history if before archeology no one had ever encountered dragon-like beings? It's not like there was some scribe prehistorically that recorded all his observations for future generations.

It's been rather funny lately at tutoring. I'm not sure how he started talking about dinosaurs. But I've been learning a lot. Dinosaurs were never on the earth with people. How do you know? Because they all died out. How? In that big meteorite that killed all of them and then volcanos erupted. (My mind was trying to wrap around how a big meteorite could reach all the dinosaurs all over the earth and yet not destroy everything else on the earth.) What about the other animals? The other animals got away. How did they know the meteorite was coming and the dinosaurs didn't? Their leaders led them away.

I dropped it after that.

Call me a brainwashed Creationist, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

But since they watched a movie about it in school, I'm sure my little fellow will grow up believing the meteorite dinosaur theory as fact. It'll be ingrained as much as two plus two equaling four.