Dinosaurs and Dragons

You don't have to be a Six-Day Young Earth Creationist to see a connection between Dinosaurs and mythical creatures like Dragons.  You can hold the mainstream view of the age of the Earth and still think a few small patches survived to Ancient or even modern times.  Or you could say Ancient people stumbled upon Dinosaur fossils which helped inspire those myths, but the later option doesn't explain eye witness accounts.

However opposition to Young Earth Creationism is the only explanation I can think of for why so many insist on denying any connection exists or could exist, insisting it must be just a coincidence that man imagined Dragons and then we found the bones of creatures that fit exactly the definition of what a Dragon is.  Because they love being able to casually mock Creationists with "if the Earth is only 6000 years old how come humans never saw Dinosaurs", then countless accounts of people seeing things like Dinosaurs are pointed out to them and they go "no, but..." and move the goal posts.

I'm not desperate to convert anyone to Creationism any more since I'm an Evangelical Universalist now.  I just want people to know that the existence of Dinosaurs is not a sufficient reason to doubt The Bible.

Dinosaurs weren't the only things to inspire these ancient myths, they're often also allegories of more abstract things like Greed.  Same as Godzilla was not inspired only by Dinosaurs but was first and foremost an allegory for the destructive power of Nuclear Weapons.  Even Jurassic Park is about more then just Dinosaurs, it's also another re-imagining of Frankenstein as well as being about the evils of Capitalism.

A lot of why people feel so confident they can mock the idea of a connection is because the modern default idea of what a Dragon looks like is much more specific then what it actually used to mean, being basically Smaug and Charizard.  But even in Tolkien not all Dragons looked like Smaug, Smaug represents a specific sub group, the winged Fire Drake.  And the really specific look of Smaug I don't think was even precedented much before Tolkien, even Beowulf's dragon is not described quite like that in the original text.  There were actually medieval bestiaries describing many different kinds of Dragons, not all of which could even be described as gigantic in size.

Yes, a lot of the images Creationists point to don't look exactly perfectly like a specific Dinosaur, just as Bugs Bunny doesn't look that much like a real bunny rabbit.  Artistic depictions take liberties and oral traditions can obscure the details even when they're trying to be perfectly accurate.
http://creationwiki.org/Ancient_dinosaur_depiction

The 12th century Ta Prohm Temple near Angkor Wat in Cambodia has a carving which resemblance to a Stegasaur is way to close to be coincidental.

But for something that's a personal hypothesis of mine that takes a bit more room for interpretation, let's talk about the Tarasque.

First of all it's said to originally come from Galatia, which fits the fact that the earliest Christian Community of Southern France were people who came there from Ephesus in the 2nd Century.  Now I'm not convinced Martha or the other Bethany siblings actually went to Asia Minor either, I suspect their remains are among those found at the Dominus Flevit Church on the Mont of Olives.

The most peculiar detail of the Tarasque is that it's not a Turtle but is described as having a turtle shell on it's back.  I think this animal was inspired by an Ankylosaurus (the same type of Dinosaur that inspired Anguirus).  This creature doesn't have a Turtle Shell on it's back but one can easily see how it might look that way to an ancient observer.

I no longer share the hostility other Creationists have to the idea of Feathered Dinosaurs.  I don't think Dinosaurs evolved into modern Birds, but God could easily have created creatures that would seem to us like Lizard/Bird hybrids, just as an Ankylosaur could have been mistaken to be a hybrid of a Turtle and something else.

And once we acknowledge Feathered Dinosaurs we can realize that only adds to the amount of evidence of them being known to the Ancients.  From Mesoamerican gods depicted as feathered serpents to the European examples of the Cockatrice and Basilisk.  Both words have been used in translations of The Bible.  Now I don't think the Hebrew word tsepha' was likely to be referring to the same thing as either of those European terms.  But if you're a radical KJV onlyist like Kent Hovind, you can't then deny that what Cockatrice meant to a 1611 English speaker is something The King James Bible is claiming exists (it's right in the etymology of Cockatrice that it resembles a Rooster in some fashion).  I remember watching one Kent Hovind debate where his opponent brought up the Cockatrice and Hovind just ignored it.

And now we've transitioned into talking about Dinosaurs in The Bible.  I believe Seraphim was a term for Pterodactyls aka Ropens.  And I mostly stand by my past speculation that Jonah was swallowed by a Sea Dinosaur. Reem (Unicorn in the KJV) however I do not think refers to a Dinosaur but probably an Auroch.

Now the big two when it comes to Dinosaurs in The Bible speculation are Behemoth and Leviathan.  It boggles my mind every time someone tells me that in context' it's clearly describing a demonic creature and not a natural animal.  No, it's context in Job 38-41 is as the climax of a list of normal animals, yet people keep getting away with saying it's the opposite.

Yes there are extra Biblical Jewish legends turning Behemoth and Leviathan into cosmic horrors not compatible with any real animals.  That's why Paul warned us to not regard Jewish Fables.  These non-Biblical ideas about Behemoth and Leviathan are partly the inspiration for Groudon and Kyogre the 3rd generation mascot Legendary Pokemon (and Rayqyaza was based on the Ziz) but none of that has any basis in Job.

I watched this YouTube video on Behemoth recently, at the very end it starts vaguely alluding to Republican politics and a Soterolgoy I no longer support, but mostly it's a pretty good video.  There is little internal debate among Creationsits about what Dinosaur the Behemoth is, it's a longed neck herbivore, basically the first Dinosaur we see clearly and unobstructed in Jurassic Park, so just imagine John Williams score for that scene as you read Job 40.

Leviathan is more complicated however.

Firstly because unlike Behemoth the word does show up outside of Job, in Isaiah 27 and a couple of Psalms.  Other references to Leviathan are possibly using him as an analogy for the 7 headed Dragon and/or The Beast out of the Sea of Revelation, like how Jesus uses Birds to represent Satan in the Kingdom Parables of Matthew 13, being used symbolically in some places doesn't make it not a word for a real animal.  I also think Leviathan is possibly used of a Constellation in some verses.  If The Ancient Hebrews had a view of the Constellations analogous to our own, then Draco, Serpens, Hydra and Cetus are all good candidates.

I think it's best to stick to Job when defining the Zoological characteristics of Leviathan.  Which first of all means the words translated "piercing" and "crooked" in Isaiah 27:1 aren't used in Job 41 and so maybe descriptions of the Constellation or poetic idioms about Satan are not useful for figuring out what the real animal looked like.

Isaiah 27:1 is a really complicated verse to consider here.  It could be using multiple idioms for one thing, or describing three different things, two Leviathans and a Dragon, or two things, Leviathan and a Dragon.  This verse probably isn't about the actual animal anyway, but I still wanted to point that out.

If we limit our clues for the real animal to Job 41 does that weaken it's aquatic association?  Not quite, verse 31 seems to say it spends some time in the sea.  But it is most likely Amphibious and not purely a Sea Creature.

I have a personal hunch that the Leviathan of Job 41 could be Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.  There are plenty of inaccuracies to how this Dinosaur was depicted in Jurassic Park 3, but according to this video it was indeed Amphibious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STn0CxdMIKk&t

Fire breathing, that is the big factor in objections to saying Dragons are real, including specifically Biblical ones which definitely attribute fire breathing to Leviathan and possibly but more debatably the Seraphim (there are other views of what them being called "firey" means).

The Bombardier beetle has an ability that certainly seems like shooting fire. 

Skeptical analysis of such arguments for fire breathing animals often miss the point. Creationists only need the specific Biblical references to be literally true, so it doesn't matter if it actually looked like what Smaug or a Fire Type Pokemon can do.

One anti-Creationist website I was reading gave a simplified summery of the history of dragon legends and claims dragons didn't start breathing fire till the 5th century AD and none had wings till the 13th.  That ignores The Bible's own descriptions of both winged serpents and Leviathan, as well as Beowulf.  Basically this site wants to say Dragons didn't start resembling Dinosaurs till the 19th Century, which is an utterly absurd suggestion.