Bigger than Tyrannosaurus!

All of us learned in school that the fierce Tyrannosaurus Rex was the largest of the meat eaters. He was large enough to reach into a second story window with his five-foot-long head and grab a person with his six-inch-long teeth. Longer than a railroad boxcar, he probably weighed about ten tons!

Nor was Tyrannosaurus a gentle giant. Healed and unhealed injuries on one fossilized Tyrannosaurus’s bones showed that it had suffered several serious attacks at different times in its life.

Crocodiles are among the last living members of the dinosaur family. Recent excavations show that not so long ago a meat-eating reptile even more massive than Tyrannosaurus terrorized a region of South America. The creature was an extinct species of crocodile called Purussaurus. The bones were found along the border between Peru and Brazil.

Imagine a crocodile that stands eight feet high and is 40 feet long! It could have easily picked up a black bear in its mouth and walked off with it. A second skull has been discovered that suggests that Purussaurus could have reached over 45 feet in length. It is thought to have eaten rodents that were the size of small cattle.

As we look into the past, we see that there were once many more kinds of creatures, and, on the average, they were larger and stronger than creatures today. That’s exactly the pattern we would expect, based on the Bible’s account of creation.

Psalm 143:5-6
“I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands. I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul [thirsteth] after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.”

Prayer: Dear Father, I ask that You would use my voice, along with the fossil record’s story of past death and present degeneration, to call more people to Your forgiving love toward us in Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Notes: Richard Monasters Key. 1991. “A Tyrannosaurus’ Troubled Past.” Science News, November 9, p. 303. Illustration by Nobu Tamura and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.