Geological problems with the flood

This video addresses geological problems with the Flod story, I apologize for the irreverent, but it does present good information

Big Dinosaurs ... small reptiles

You appear to be right about the petroglyph, the pictures I posted do not seem to go out far enough, so I will have to try to find some others to confirm or deny the man image. This of course does not change the fact that when totally outlined the glyph looks much less like a sauropod than in the image on BIBLE.CA

As far as reptiles growing to extremely large sizes -- here is an article about a Galapagos tortoise that just turned 175

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/2005/10/19/exclusive-the-oldest-creature-on-earth-115875-16265479/

While I admit that tortoises are large animals, exactly how old would a tortoise have to be to reach sauropod size ?

I have noticed one other problem with modern reptiles growing to dinosaur size. Look at the legs -- every modern day reptile has splayed legs. Now ... take a look at all dinosaurs, they ALL show legs under their bodies ... like an elephant -- even the juveniles show this. Why? .. the reason is that supporting hundreds of tons with splayed legs, if not impossible would be incredibly inefficient. If indeed given time, reptiles are 'designed' to get as large as dinosaurs, then it is a poor design indeed.

Now we will move on to more authoritative sources
from Discover magazine:

"Fast-growing animals expand their bones continually when they’re young, and some of their old tissue gets destroyed as new bone forms. By contrast, the bones of many slow-growing animals look like tree rings because the animals grow in short bursts.

These microscopic clues survive in fossils. For example, researchers have studied the bones from an 80-million-year-old crocodile called Deinosuchus that could grow to 50 feet long. They concluded that it reached its huge size the way crocodiles do today, growing for 50 years or more.


"Dinosaurs were different. “They did not grow like typical reptiles,” says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, took only 20 years to reach full size. But the biggest dinosaurs were off the charts. Apatosaurus (also called Brontosaurus), one of the long-necked plant eaters known as sauropods, needed only 15 years to reach 25 tons. “They’re just growing faster than anything on land today,” says Padian. "

http://discovermagazine.com/2005/apr/cover


Here is an article from the National Academy of Sciences discussion sexual maturity and more importantly the growth rate of dinosaurs.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/2/582.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=dinosaur&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT


Here's a hit from Google books explaining that modern reptiles do not grow in the same manner as dinosaurs did
http://books.google.com/books?id=FOViD-lDPy0C&pg=PA464&lpg=PA464&dq=can+reptiles+grow+as+large+as+dinosaurs&source=bl&ots=N8GDpfhh_h&sig=S0wME-eXxPEDBsrf_LVsV7verf0&hl=en&ei=H7n1SY_FKJfKlQeL0IDODA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10



And There is also much speculation that dinosaurs were endothermic -- that is warm blooded. - this would remove them from the reptilian model all together -
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/endothermy.html

So as you can see there is little evidence that dinosaurs grew at the same rate as reptiles today.

The non flood

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Fossils are not all mixed up in the sense that we see animals from different time periods mixed in with dinosaurs. If all these animals coexisted with one and other we should see bones, not hundreds of miles away, but embedded in the same rock strata.

Your example of a small dog like creature carries no weight. It has been well known for some time now that small mammals lived along side dinosaurs. Add to that that your example is dog-like not a dog ... or a wolf or any other modern animal. We have found fossils of dinosaurs that have eaten other dinosaurs, why haven't we found fossils of dinosaurs that have eaten deer ?

It was the dinosaur’s extinction that allowed mammals to evolve into the multitude of species we see today. What I am waiting to see is a modern day animal’s bones found in the same strata that date to the same time period as a dinosaur. Not just nearby but embedded in the same rock. This should be a fairly simple task; we find multiple species of dinosaurs embedded in the same rock all the time. You pick the species, but it must exist as a living creature today.

If I understand you correctly, you are postulating that given time and reptile could grow to be as large as a dinosaur. While it is true that reptiles are technically indeterminate growers, if there were no limits to their growth, then we should see dinosaur sized geckos.. but we don’t. Why is that? There can be other limits to an animal’s size other than genetic code to stop it from growing. . Structurally its body form simply might not support a huge amount of body weight, or the organs it has are inappropriate for large sizes.For example, some dinosaurs had 'brains' in their tails to help them manage their bodies. Clearly dinosaurs were disposed to large sizes, geckos are not.

This new petroglyph is better than the first, but I still see problems here.

I went back a page from the link you sent for the petroglyph.

http://www.bible.ca/tracks/native-american-dino-art.htm

They printed this quote from the park guidebook - "There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to a dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all.". I was disappointed that I could not find an online copy of the guidebook to read the quote in context. The also mention that the “The park literature attributes the petroglyphs to the Anasazi who inhabited the area from approximately A.D. 400 to A.D. 1300.” This jives with the information available on the park site.

Now the cave paintings in France are estimated to be from between 15,000 to 17,000 B.C. I know that if you are young earth creationist , you don’t accept that age, even though it is likely that the same dating methods were used to determine the age of the petroglyph.. that you do accept. But that is another issue. I will ask that you grant the cave paintings in France are at least as old as the petroglyph in the picture you sent. If you don’t agree to that premise, I would ask to explain why not and how old you do think the cave paintings are. Ok … so assuming the cave paintings in France are at least as old as the petroglyphs, the question of why, when those people created such detailed pictures of the animals in thier enviornment, are there NO pictures of dinosaurs?? There were dinosaurs in France … fossils prove that. So why no dinosaur paintings in the cave?

The petroglyph itself presents some problems as well

There are anatomic anomalies from what we know about sauropods. It is not likely that sauropods dragged their tales as depicted here as evidenced by the lack of tail marks when we find foot prints such as those in Glen Rose Texas. The head here is depicted as being very round, however sauropods heads were elongated much like a horses. It is not known if sauropods smiled or not.

Here are two unenhanced pictures of the petroglyph .

The‘sauropod’ is still reasonable visible but there seems to be something missing. Hmmm. what could it be ? Right , the glyph of the man. I admit that when taking pictures of rock faces, not all details are always visible. That notwithstanding, in the example you sent the in the man is very visible and is in fact much clearer than the sauropod, but is completely indiscernible in the unenhanced photo. You would think that there would be at least a hint of a man figure there, but no it is just not there . I can’t go so far as to say that the pictures on BIBLE.CA have been altered, but it does seem strange that the man is not visible in the pictures I found. I am trying to find an image analyst to take a look at the BIBLE.CA pictures and determine if it actually has been modified.

And while we are on the man figure .. why doesn’t the park literature make mention of it ? This would be a fairly important fact. Even without the guide in hand, I can safely surmise that there is no mention of the man glyph in the guidebook because if there was, surely BIBLE.CA would have quoted that as well, but they didn’t.

Still, even without the man figure there does appear to be petroglyph sauropod that was created by Native Americans between 400 to 1300 A.D. So let take a closer look at the glyph itself.

Here are two pictures of the glyph outlined to showing the entire glyph, not just the 'sauropod'

As you can see, when the entire glyph is exposed the picture looks far less like a sauropod than BIBLE.CA would lead you to believe. In one outline the ‘tail’ is not attached, and in both outlines there appears to be a an extra set of legs attached to the tail. There is something growing out of the back in both. While I suppose it still looks something like a sauropod, I don’t see the clear sauropod image that is depicted on BIBLE.CA.

Finally there is your last statement that ‘God-did-it’. How do you know this ‘supernatural force’ is your god? Why not Allah-did-it, Buddha-did-it , Vishnu-did-it, Fairy’s-did-it or the Flying Spaghetti Monster-did-it ? There is as much empirical data for each of these supernatural beliefs as there is for yours. That being said, if your final answer is God-did-it then I simply reject that as an explanation. As Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof’. And while absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence it is certainly absence of probability. If not then the existence of fairies is equally possible as the non-existence of fairies.

Don’t get me wrong, you are welcome to your faith, but I don’t think it fair to expect others to accept or even respect that which has no evidence.