Customer Reviews

What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? (DJ and Tracker John)

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1 star:		(23)

 

 

Have you ever noticed your child using multisyllabic words that you didn't know when you were their age? Does your child come home with ideas you've never heard of before, claiming that organisms change over time or the earth revolves around the sun? It can be truly disheartening to know that the rest of the world wants your child to know more and accomplish more than you yourself did.

Fortunately, there are people like John D. Morris and Ken Ham who feel your pain and would like to help. With books like "What Really Happened To The Dinosaurs" you can counter all those irritating facts and discoveries by legitimizing the same fairy tales that were used to explain the scary and unexplainable to you as a child!

Obviously, if it was good enough for bronze age sheep farmers who never left the towns of their birth, it's good enough for my kids! Who wants a child graduating college and thinking they know better than you? Not I, that's for sure. Thank you, John D. Morris! Thank you, Ken Ham!

I cannot believe what I am seeing here! This is a disgrace and I feel so bad for the kids that are spoon fed this nonsense as truth despite the fact that there isn't a lick of evidence to support this claim. I do hope this book is filed under the fiction section.

If, as a Christian, you buy the atheistic view that the natural process of evolution disproves God, this is the book for you. It twists the Biblical creation account into a neat "scientific" box, based on faulty logic, in a misguided attempt to preserve Biblical truth for a 21st century science-minded culture. Winsome illustrations depict dinosaurs in the garden of Eden and on Noah's ark, and even suggest that dinosaurs may still be living today in some remote area in Africa. "Evidence" includes dragon mythology, and dinosaur cave paintings. Apparently the authors assume that earlier generations either never found dinosaur fossils, or wouldn't form their own ideas about the living creatures that produced such bones. Clearly, to imagine a dragon, they must have seen an actual living dinosaur. Such evidence is unacceptable to me, and as a committed Christian, I am deeply concerned that so many are leading their children to equate faith in God with a "belief" in non-science.

I'm not about to wade into the whole Evolution vs "intelligent design" argument, but this book is really one mangy dog. I'm not sure what background the authors have, but I doubt it is any deeper than what one could gleen from viewing half of Jurassic Park. By all means, give your child this book. Just don't blame me when they get laughed at and picked on by their classmates for sharing what they learned from it.

The book is total nonsense from cover to cover. Only a person totally wrapped up in young earth creationism could even conceive of giving this to their children as a serious guide to early life on this planet. It's grossly misleading and misrepresentative of basic facts. I can make many specific criticisms of the issues within the book.
One page begins with "Some scientists think that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, long before humans lived on the earth, but the Bible tells us the real story." The age of the Earth and Dinosaurs is undisputed fact, the Earth is billions of years old and the evidence to support that is overwhelming. Humans and dinosaurs could not possibly have coexisted. To claim that the literal reading of the Bible is "the real story" is basically false. Accompanied is a picture of some people farming with a couple of dinosaurs in a pen. Who can seriously believe that people kept Dinosaurs on farms? It's like a scene out of the Dinotopia books. This is shortly followed by the claim that before the original sin was committed all dinosaurs ate plants, presumably even things like the T-Rex. Generously it's claimed that "eventually some dinosaurs probably did eat meat". We know certain animals ate meat or ate plants because the teeth for each purpose are totally different, compare the teeth of a cat to those of a sheep. No Tyrannosaurs exists with teeth developed for plant eating, this is utter nonsense.

Then we move onto the concept of what part the flood has to play in all this. Apparently Noah and his family were saved and all of the other people drowned, to sum up in the words of the book "You see boys and girls, it is very important to believe God's word". Well that seems like a good way to scare a child into believing in God...or else. Then the book makes the claim that Creation Scientists have "shown" that there would have been plenty of room on the ark for all the animals. How does one demonstrate that exactly? The accompanying picture of the ark makes it look the size of a shopping mall. The book claims that "although there were many different dinosaur names there were only about fifty kinds of dinosaur". I don't even understand this, what fifty? All those "different names" represent defined species, they are all different, there may be the odd overlap here and there but there are thousands of species of dinosaurs not fifty and probably many more to discover. But anyway we are supposed to accept that Dinosaurs did indeed go on the ark which leads to ridiculous scenes of a pair Apatosaurus's queuing up to get on board.

Further evidence for the flood is given by the fact that the flood would kill millions of animals and scatter their remains everywhere which is what we supposedly find when digging fossils today. This is a gross distortion of fossil science. Fossils are indeed scattered across the world but they are not randomly assorted as though be some massive deluge of water. Different types of fossils are grouped in different layers of rock. This rock takes thousands and millions of years to gradually accumulate trapping examples of animals and plants as time passes. Fossils are assorted by age through the rocks as you go deeper into older rock layers. More complex organisms that more closely resemble modern day organisms are in more recent rock layers, the earliest crudest forms of life are in the oldest. Also we find that you get groups of fossils, such as packs of animals and families, they aren't all mixed up in a great jumble across the globe. The fossil record is obviously not the work of a flood that washed everything around in one go over a couple of months.

So what really happened to the dinosaurs? The book puts forward several suggestions. One is that the flood destroyed all the vegetation and the dinosaurs starved to death. This is ludicrous, surely even a young earth creationist can't think this casts God in a good light as it seems spectacularly short sighted to tell Noah to take the Dinosaurs on the ark to save them knowing they'll starve afterwards. This book can't even exhibit internal logical. Another suggestion is that humans may have killed them all off, one cited example is that of George and the Dragon, so we are now expected to believe that knights were hunting dinosaurs into extinction during the middle ages.

The book is also worryingly preoccupied with the concept of sin. If you want your children to feel guilty on nearly every page this will do the trick, many pages mention it if only to drop "Sin is such a terrible thing isn't it?" at the end of a page as an afterthought but several have whole paragraphs designed to heap guilt upon the reader. It continually talks about how horrible sin is, how it ruined beautiful creation and how it is our fault, and how every time we see or think about death we should be reminded about sin. This is a patronising, miserable book trying to mislead the young reader about the very basic facts of the world and make them feel horribly guilty at the same time. No parent should give their child this, please give them something fun and genuinely informative to read.

This book is a blatant lie to vulnerable children. Please stop spreading this absolute nonsense. Religion is hurting the world, and this is a prime example of it.

My son, who loves dinosaurs, was given this book as a gift from a relative who is into the Young Earth movement. As a Christian, I am disturbed at the latitude the author takes with the Bible. This book would be laughable if it were not so infuriating. Pure indoctrination into the Young Earth cult, that is all that this book is.

this book really stand in among giants in the amount of disinformation it spreads. From the very first page, it quotes pseudo-science as fact, implies causality when there is no evidence, and then invents evidence when there wasn't enough bad science to justify their viewpoint

This book clearly stands along side the bible and the Koran in the shear amount of garbage it tries to pedal.

Waste of money

Giving this book to your child should is giving them a life of sullen mediocrity. What it really comes down to is, as a parent do you want your children to be better than you or do you want to see them excel your wildest expectations? Its starts with them thinking you are insane for your biblical beliefs.

The truth is it should be a crime to deliberately mislead their children into believing this garbage. Truth is obviously not a very serious matter for DJ Morris and John Tracker.