Paleodragonology

  CLAIM:  St. George killed a dinosaur near the end of the third century CE. (Ham, 2006 , p.161) (Ham, 2013 , p.35) (Hodge & Welch, 2011 , p.18) (Hovind, 2003 , 31:46) (Petersen, 2012 , p.165) (Thomas, 2013 , p.18) RESPONSE:  In his 2013 Dinosaurs and the Bible , young-Earth creationist Brian Thomas notes that he believed, as do many other creationists, that St. George's legendary encounter with a dragon is actually shaped around a historical encounter with a late-surviving dinosaur: "The few dinosaurs that remained (after the Flood) were often hunted, as many dragon legends portray. St. George was reputed to have slain a dragon in the Middle East in the late AD 200s, and another legend holds that the prophet Daniel killed a dragon near Babylon centuries earlier. These two examples represent scores of historical accounts from around the world." (Thomas, 2013, p.18) St. George was a historical figure, though he was not reputed to have actually killed a living, breathin...

  CLAIM:  The Chinese Zodiac, likely created during the Zhao period in the 5th century BCE, depicts dragons as living creatures alongside other known animals like bulls, monkeys, and roosters. Why would there be a random mythical animal thrown in for no reason? (Hodge & Welch, 2011 , p.5) (Thomas, 2013 , p.18) RESPONSE:  Just because animals were depicted by ancient cultures does not mean these depictions were intended to depict biological organisms by default. For the ancient Chinese, dragons were real, but not because they were animals that could be found like a rat or an ox. They were quasi-spiritual entities associated with the divine: they were guardians of heaven and of the underworld, deities that controlled nature and presided over the operations of the world, they ruled over the seas, occasionally took on human forms, were companions of rulers, or even demons or workers of chaos. (Carr, 1990) They were associated with the world but not entirely a part of it, ...