266 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
Lifestyles of the Huge and Ancient
Of all creatures that have ever lived, the dinosaurs are of greatest fascination to man,
particularly to children. This is perhaps because of their spectacular size in many
cases. . . . and because they possessed so many unusual anatomical features. The
fossil record of dinosaurs speaks out as clearly for creation as would be possible for
creatures now extinct.
—Duane Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say NO!When I debated Duane Gish at Purdue University on October 1, 1983, I had seen his pre-
sentation the week before, so I knew he would show some dinosaur slides (mostly from
century-old Charles R. Knight paintings, which are grossly out of date) because his audi-
ence would find them far more interesting than “mammal-like reptiles” or “fishibians.” So
I prepared my own segments (the first and third half hours of the first 2 hours of a 4-hour
debate) to rebut his misleading information about dinosaurs before he even got to it. Did he
change his presentation or acknowledge the fact that I had just shown the transitional forms
whose existence he denied? No, like a robot he gave exactly the same slides and same lecture
that he had delivered the week before, without any apparent awareness that I had blown his
examples to pieces. I don’t know what he was thinking, but many of the people who came
up afterward and told me that I had won the debate said that his dishonest treatment of
dinosaurs convinced them.
Gish (1978, 1995) and the other creationist authors never learn, but (just like their mis-
leading presentation of the second law of thermodynamics) they keep on plugging the same
false statements about dinosaurs because dinosaurs are impressive and interesting to their
audience, which cares only about dinosaurs and no other prehistoric animals. If you read
through the dinosaur chapter in Gish (1995) closely, the entire argument consists of out-of-
context quotations from really old, outdated books, especially popular trade books, which
are highly oversimplified. Gish never bothered to read more specialized books on dinosaurs,
probably because he wasn’t trained to do so and couldn’t tell one bone from another. And
that raises the most important point. Gish had absolutely no qualifications to interpret dino-
saur fossils or to make judgments about them. He may have tried to glean what impressions
he could from reading children’s books and quoting them out of context, but he was no more
qualified to make pronouncements based on such simplistic book reports than your aver-
age high school kid. (Remember, his Ph.D. was in biochemistry and completely irrelevant).
More importantly, reading children’s books (rather than studying the actual specimens) is
not science nor is it even true research. If Gish really cared to find out whether there were
transitional dinosaur fossils or not, he would have gotten the proper training in vertebrate
paleontology and gone and studied the fossils for himself. Otherwise, his statements about
fossils he has never studied are just baloney.
Let’s look at just a few of the many examples of dinosaurs that Gish claimed have no
transitional forms. The first one he always shows is the large long-necked sauropod he called
“Brontosaurus.” He apparently had not learned that paleontologists had stopped using that
name decades ago; the proper name has been Apatosaurus for over a century. (Even most
of the children’s books have stopped using Brontosaurus and correctly use Apatosaurus
now). In our 1983 debate, he showed a few outdated slides of Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus
(one of the stars of Jurassic Park), then zoomed on to his next examples, claiming that there