The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation is a creationist organization for Catholics. It holds to the idea that our world was created in six literal days and that the Earth is very young—at most about 10,000 years old.
This stance poses difficulties, such as how to account for the fossil record. When did all those extinct animals live—particularly the interesting ones, such as dinosaurs? The Kolbe Center’s position is that dinosaurs and man lived contemporaneously, with dinosaurs dying out early in man’s history.
At the organization’s website is an unsigned article titled “Historical Evidence for Dinosaur and Human Co-existence.” The opening paragraph reads this way:
“Did dinosaurs and humans ever live contemporaneously? Certainly. The Book of Genesis makes it clear that every kind of land animal was created on the same day as man; therefore, people and dinosaurs must have walked the Earth at the same time for at least some portion of history. This article will inspect the historical evidence for this fact, beginning with a very controversial description of an animal from one of the Bible’s oldest books.”
That book is Job—in particular, Job 40:10-19, which refers to a creature called Behemoth. This is how the article sets out its argument:
“God goes on to explain that Behemoth eats grass like an ox, moves his tail as a cedar, has legs like bars of iron, feeds where animals play, finds shade in the marsh, is not frightened by the Jordan River rushing into his mouth, cannot have his nose pierced with a snare, can’t be taken when he is on the watch, and is chief of the works of God.
“This description of Behemoth is thorough enough for one to confidently identify the animal as a sauropod dinosaur; specifically, a titanosaur. Consistent with Behemoth’s description, titanosaurs grazed on grass, had massive, tapered tails comparable to a cedar tree, possessed unusually solid leg bones, led an amphibious lifestyle, and were the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.
“With length estimates for the largest specimens ranging from 100 to 200 feet, titanosaurs really are chief of the works of God!”
This section of the article is accompanied by an illustration that was taken from Wikipedia (see image).
Notice how small the human figure is compared to the dinosaur. Fortunately for homo sapiens, the lumbering titanosaur moseyed along at no more than five miles per hour—its bone structure wouldn’t allow a faster gait—which means a man who found himself in the dinosaur’s path (or the object of the dinosaur’s anger) could outrun the creature.
That assumes, of course, that man and dinosaur lived at the same time, which is what the Kolbe Center is trying to prove. I don’t think it does a convincing job (no pun intended) of it.
The article says that Behemoth couldn’t have been some other large animal such as the hippo or the elephant because such animals don’t meet all of the biblical criteria. Well, neither does the titanosaur.
We are told that Behemoth “finds shade in the marsh.” According to Wikipedia, marshes “are often dominated by grasses, rushes, or reeds. If woody plants are present they tend to be low-growing shrubs. This form of vegetation is what differentiates marshes from other types of wetland such as swamps, which are dominated by trees.”
So marshes are characterized by short plants. According to Wikipedia, the titanosaur was up to 130 feet long (not up to 200 feet long, as the Kolbe Center article suggests) and as much as 24 feet tall at the arch of the back. How could an animal that big “find shade” among plants that were only waist-high to a man? (Please, no jokes about elephants hiding in strawberry patches.)
Then there is the remark that Behemoth “is not frightened by the Jordan River rushing into his mouth.” I can see how this might be true of a hippo, but it hardly sounds like a useful description of a titanosaur. It would be difficult for a dinosaur so large to maneuver itself in the Jordan, which has a maximum depth of ten feet. In many places the river is only three feet deep—about as high as the titanosaur’s ankle.
The dinosaur could lie on its belly in the middle of the river so the water could be “rushing into his mouth,” assuming the animal could adopt such a posture at all. More probably it would have to lower its immensely long neck to position its mouth to catch the flowing water—which, by the way, doesn’t “rush.”
Between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea (75 miles), the Jordan drops only ten feet per mile. The water moves so slowly that a child can stand in the shallows without danger of being knocked over. No titanosaur would be “frightened” by the water’s speed.
The Kolbe Center article says that the description in the book of Job is sufficient for us to “confidently identify” Behemoth as a titanosaur. Confidently? I don’t see how the anonymous author can say that.
There are two things we can say “confidently” about this article, though: it demonstrates that the Behemoth, whatever it was, wasn’t a dinosaur, and it does a disservice to the Church by promoting a preposterous argument.