The Velociraptor (“Swift seizer”) moved through the ship’s hold, padding over damp, straw-covered planking now wet with blood. It walked on its two hind legs, two very deadly legs, armed with sickle-shaped claws.
As it crept through the darkness toward a thin sliver of hazy light ahead, it angled its long head at the scent of prey and paused, its upturned snout pointing the way. Neither the motion of the ship bobbing in the ocean nor the dark were obstacles to the Velociraptor. Unlike its prey, it was nocturnal. The two puny humans at the end of the hold could not see it, nor likely even hear it. A man and a woman, they were engaged in heated conversation.
And no wonder, given what had taken place in the holds of their ship over the past several months, all their carefully preserved species…
The mammals with which Velociraptor had shared this deck were dead now, no longer a source of food.
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Just over two meters long and two feet tall, the predator weighed just 30 pounds but it’s feathered skin covered coiled muscle. Bent forward, tail extended behind it, it was no taller than the biped’s hip. It may have lacked the sheer impact of the Tyrannosaur now in the bottom hold, but the little dinosaur hunted in packs. It’s pack now was only its mate and a young one born on the voyage, but several months had been enough time to make a little killer of it. The humans had long since ceased to go into the horror that had become the bowels of their ship. Until now.
At the last moment, one of the bipeds turned, perhaps hearing the scrape of a claw on deck. But it was already too late. The Velociraptor, moving at 40 miles per hour, had already covered the distance between them and was leaping into the air. Striking the human male in the chest, and knocking the air from his lungs, the Velociraptor gazed down at its pray. A retractable claw, three inches long, tore through the neck of the white-bearded human. Noah hadn’t even had time to scream.
The other human, the female, shared his fate. Noah’s wife stared up at the creature perched atop her chest as her throat filled with blood around the claw impaled in her throat. The Velociraptor looked down into the eyes of Noah, wide open in terror, and opened its jaws, exposing 28 serrated teeth on each side of its long jaws. It was the last thing the human saw as the jaws came down to tear open the human’s soft flesh.
There was no place to hide on a boat just 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 50 feet high. As Shem, Ham, and Japheth and their wives would discover very soon. Noah’s ark was about to become a ghost ship. The human race was about to end.
Attractive a scenario as that might seem, there is the not-so-small problem that the Velociraptor lived 75 to 71 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, while Noah is believed by Creationists to have built his ark just 4,359 years ago.
By the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs were extinct. There were no Velociraptors to be taken aboard Noah’s ark. Even had such an ark existed. Even had such a worldwide flood been possible.
Yet creationist Carl Kerby of Answers in Genesis told Bryan Fischer Thursday that,
I see some people that like to mock and ridicule, especially about the dinosaurs, how did they put the big old dinosaurs on there? Well, I would suggest to you they didn’t take the big old dinosaur — they would have taken the younger ones. You think of a guy like me, if you’re going to go repopulate a planet, you’re not taking me with you. I’m old. My repopulating days are done. You take my son or my grandson. My grandson is a whole lot smaller than I am.
Watch courtesy of The Raw Story:
There you go! What passes for common sense among creationists.
Don’t get too excited. Sure, Velociraptors are small, but what about a brachiosaurus? Even its babies must have been huge and if, as Genesis tells us (Genesis 7:24) “the waters grew strong on the earth a hundred fifty days,” those babies must have had time to grow into something less manageable. Either too large, or too dangerous, for the ship’s hold.
And that leaves out entirely worries over the animal species Noah allegedly crammed into his ship. Even today there are some 8.7 million species, and that is to excludes the countless species that have become extinct. And then there was the food needed to feed them.
Where did Noah stow sufficient forage for creatures like brachiosaurs? How did he keep the carnivores like Velociraptor fed? Meat spoils quickly and there was no refrigeration. Surely, Noah did not feed them any of his precious species. Without food, all the carefully protected animals would have quickly sickened and died. The ship wasn’t big enough for the food – or water – let alone the various species themselves.
Dinosaurs on Noah’s ark is just plain silly, but then, so is the idea of the ark itself. It’s just stupidity piled on top of stupidity, and they’re going to worry it like a dog a bone, so stay tuned.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
