What Happened to the Dinosaurs?

We have to fill in the missing details about what happened to the dinosaurs based on our worldview—our starting points. We all have the same fossils, the same facts, and the same evidence. Our beliefs about how the earth was formed shape our interpretation of the evidence.

Fossils Give Clues

There are still many mysteries surrounding dinosaurs. We know they are specific types of land animals that were created, along with man, on day six (Genesis 1:24–27), but they have since gone extinct. So we are left to wonder how they lived, what they looked like, and what they ate; and we especially wonder what happened to them. How did a group of animals that left fossilized footprints on every continent eventually cease to exist? The fossils contain clues about these mysteries, but we still don’t know the whole story.

Paleontologists who believe in evolution have all sorts of ideas for why dinosaurs are no longer here. Some suggest that an asteroid struck the earth or that many huge volcanoes erupted simultaneously, causing dinosaurs to go extinct. As a consequence, some say the dinosaurs that survived those blasts starved to death, while others say they died of overeating. However, these scientists don’t have the full story because they don’t start with the eyewitness account of creation that God gave to us in his Word, the Bible.

Paleontologists who believe that God created the earth in six days as recorded in the Bible have a different answer to this question about dinosaurs. These scientists conclude that most of the dinosaurs died in the global flood.

So why did the dinosaurs that survived the flood on Noah’s ark eventually go extinct?

The dinosaur kinds that Noah took with him exited the ark into a vastly different environment. They, along with other now-extinct animal kinds, died out due to competition for food, a post-flood ice age, other post-flood catastrophes, or maybe even because people killed them for food or sport.

Start planning your visit to the Creation Museum today, and be sure to visit our Flood Geology exhibit to learn more!