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A Reptile that Grows

What is a dinosaur? The name "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard." A dinosaur is nothing more than a large reptile. An interesting and significant fact about reptiles is that a reptile continues to grow for as long as he lives. If a reptile lives for 100 years, that reptile will grow for 100 years. This is different from man who grows upward for twenty years and outward the rest of his life. With reptiles that does not happen; the longer a reptile lives, the longer he has time to grow and the larger he becomes.

This is fascinating because of the Biblical framework which tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth by power. God created everything in six days and at the end of that period, on the sixth day, God created man to have dominion over all the creatures. Then on the seventh day God rested. We are told that Adam named all of the creatures and therefore must have named dinosaurs. We learn something else about the conditions God created for man on this planet. They were perfect. It was a perfect environment, there was no sin, no death, no decay.

Vegetation was perfect for man and animal to eat. We are told that it did not rain on the earth but a mist came up and watered the ground. Without rain there was no erosion, nothing to take the trace minerals out of the soil. Therefore all of the plants which were created perfect had the proper amounts of minerals, including all of the trace elements. The early earth environment was perfect in every respect. But man fell into sin.

Evidently the fall of man affected the world in which we live and because of Adam's expulsion from the Garden, he had to deal with weeds, thorns and thistles. Immediately after the fall things were not drastically different. Even though Adam was cursed he was so perfectly created, he lived to be 930 years old.

The environment was such that man before the flood lived longer than he does now. Methuselah made it to the age of 969. Our average life span is about 70 years. The reported average life span in India is only 42 years. The initial impression is that people in India live to 41 and then die. But this is not exactly true.

Some people in India live to great ages just as they do here, reaching the century mark. In India the infant mortality rate is much higher, more children die at birth. And, of course, if you have one person who lives to be 100 and one who dies at birth, the average is 50. People in the United States are led to believe that we live longer than our predecessors of earlier times. Again, this is not exactly correct. A century ago some lived to great ages, but many more than today died of childhood diseases or at birth.

Modern medical care has greatly altered the picture and lengthened the average life span. Nevertheless, our average life span is only 70 years whereas the average life span before the flood was 911 years.

The antediluvian life span was some 13 or 14 times longer than our life span today. Since man lived longer, it seems logical that animals also lived longer. This affects our little reptiles.

If a reptile were allowed to live 13 or 14 times longer than it does today, provided with the proper amounts of trace minerals in the soil so that the vegetation produced for it to eat contained all the proper proteins, vitamins, and minerals, the results would be a pretty good sized reptile. Take the four-foot iguana who lives on the Galapagos Islands today, increase his life span some 13 or 14 times and the result would be a very large reptile. Take the twelve-foot Komodo Dragon living in Sumatra today, increase his life span 13 to 14 times, allowing him to grow the entire length of time, and he would be an extremely large reptile.

Both of these reptiles look very much like some of the dinosaurs which roamed the earth in the past.