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Trey
The new Netflix documentary series the Dinosaurs is getting a lot of attention right now. It walks through a familiar storyline. Reptile like creatures appear and develop over time. A massive asteroid is said to bring extinction. And by the end, birds are presented as the living descendants of dinosaurs. It's visually impressive, confidently told and presented as a window into the ancient past. But as you watch, there's an important question to consider. Are we looking at evidence or a story built on interpretation? Welcome to the Creation Podcast, where we explore how science confirms scripture. I'm your host, Trey. Today we're taking a closer look at the dinosaurs and what's actually supported by the evidence behind it. Joining me is Dr. Tim Clary, geologist and director of research here at ICR. Dr. Clary, thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Tim Clary
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Trey
Well, I know that you love dinosaurs. I mean, you are a geologist, but you do love dinosaurs. And for those who may not be so familiar with your work or your expertise in this area, could you briefly introduce yourself and share a bit about your role at icr, especially as it relates to the topic at hand?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, I do currently serve as the director of research at ICR, but I've been a geologist for over 40 years, working in industry, oil and gas, as a college professor for many years. And all geologists take some sort of paleontology class at some point. So it isn't like this is some completely different subject matter. We're in here and I spend a lot of time doing a lot of intensive research on my own. As a college professor, I put together a course with a lab on the introduction to dinosaurs. So I did a lot of research to get that class together. I went on some digs, many digs. I took students on digs out to Wyoming and Montana. I actually dug for a week with Jack Horner's team. And so I've done some pretty good research, I think. Well enough that I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I'm knowledgeable.
Trey
Knowledgeable, you know, enough to be dangerous.
Dr. Tim Clary
Sometimes people say that.
Trey
All right, well, as you watched the dinosaurs, what stood out to you right away in terms of how the story was being told?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, part of the problem I ran into was the. The imagination, just a vivid imagination and kind of like a portrayal of dinosaurs that even though they looked active and did cool things and the animations were wonderful, they made them, they dressed them up in feathers, dressed them up with a lot of hair on them, and the exterior of the dinosaurs was kind of fabrication, it's not based on A lot of hard science and fossils themselves don't tell behavior. And yet they, throughout the whole, all four episodes, they showed lots and lots of behavior as if it was factual. And one of the things that bothered me a lot was the time that was going through. Each time they would say, this happened 201 million years ago. This happened so many millions of years ago. They presented the time, the deep time, these millions of years as fact, which they're nowhere near fact.
Trey
Right. A quote from the actual documentary says, this is the story of the dinosaurs as it has never been told before. And I'm like, pretty sure it's been told like this before. But also, keying in on that word story is very. It is a story. But before we get into the issues of which there are many, in regard to the documentary, it's worth recognizing where the series aligns with the observable evidence. So what aspects of the documentary stood out to you as accurate or at least worth acknowledging the effort?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, number one, there were dinosaurs. And so they saw lots of dinosaurs. Some of the names, of course, were a little bit unfamiliar to me. They used some obscure ones, but most of them were dinosaurs I knew and portrayed. Some of these, of course, I believe, were actually birds, but that's another whole matter we'll get into. But one of the things I did find was impressive was they agree with being a flood geologist. And we believe the flood had a point where it peaked. The Bible Talks about day 150 of the flood year, and I believe from my research that I've done by looking at sediments all over the world and looking at all the continents, I see a common peak in about the end of the Cretaceous or right after, about the dinosaurs disappear in the rock record. So they kind of go up to that point and they talk about the dinosaur extinction, which we can talk about later. But they have a peak in sea level at that same time that we see the peak in sea level on all the continents of the world. They don't think it quite flooded everything, which I do as a flood geologist, I see the evidence they did flood everything, but they have the highest sea level at the same time. And the reason for it is the same reason that we as flood geologists believe the flood progressed along from little flooding early to more and more and more is because the seafloor went up as you increase the speed of the sea floor spreading and the runaway subduction that we talk about quite a bit in creation geology that actually caused the seafloor to go up more and more and more. Like the bottom of your bathtub. And so the more seafloor you made, the higher the water went. And they actually bring that up in the, I think the second or third episode they show, the third episode they show the water going up higher and higher because of the sea floor. So it's kind of nice that they agree and we agree on that. They just don't think it quite flooded everything.
Trey
Is that about where the alignment ends?
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah, in a lot of ways, yes. Because a lot of this ends up being just speculation.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
Again, you can't tell behavior from the bones. And even the, you know, putting the feathers on the dinosaurs and the hair on the dinosaurs, you know, they're over extending the reality of the facts. And so they're going way beyond what we can actually verify. People have actually, you know, they show somebody with hair. The very first dinosaur just shows up.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
You know, they don't, there's, there's, you know, this is the story of dinosaurs. But they don't talk about the origin of the dinosaurs. Where did they come from? They just. There's a clutch of eggs and then this dinosaur runs around, becomes different. Because dinosaurs walk upright different than reptiles. Typical reptiles today that we have modern reptiles and things and other reptiles in the fossils. But the dinosaur legs came straight down. They had holes in their hip sockets, so their femurs came down and their legs would move just like ours do. The whole leg would move, thigh and all. And that was attached to the tail. And then the tail would kind of swing and. And so they kind of. In the video series or the show, they actually kind of implied that's why they were faster out compete the reptiles who were a little slower dragging around, kind of like crocodiles. But what's weird is they don't mention where this dinosaur clutch came from.
Trey
It just appeared out of nowhere.
Dr. Tim Clary
It just appeared out of nowhere. And that's a big problem. That's the one problem with. They never really talk about. And they didn't do this as well. One of the problems with the whole story of dinosaurs from an evolutionary standpoint is where did they come from? Where are their ancestors? What was the ancestor? Let alone. They usually dwell on the extinction because they think they have a big flashy explosion that caused the extinction. We'll talk about that later.
Trey
Multiple extinctions.
Dr. Tim Clary
But they never get into the origin. And all throughout the show, new dinosaurs keep showing up, fully formed, ready to go. And there's no.
Trey
And then it talks about its ancestors and its descendants, but you never see any sort of.
Dr. Tim Clary
No, you don't see. You look on the rock. If you were to look at the rocks like geologists do, you look in there, you see there's nothing like that below the rocks, below where this thing could have came from. They just have to draw lines and connect them somehow because they have to believe in the evolutionary story of everything came from the first cell that somehow showed up and we all came from that. All plants, all animals somehow became from that one cell, that simple one celled organism to all of us multicellular organisms, including the dinosaurs. But they never address that. So they tell the story, but they don't tell you the beginning.
Trey
Right?
Dr. Tim Clary
Right.
Trey
Well, speaking of telling you the story. So part of how they tell this story is through very high quality animations, very high quality visuals, very compelling. So how do you think, I guess just the narrative aspect of things, along with the animations and the dramatic storytelling, how do you think that that influences how viewers perceive the information that's being told them?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, unfortunately, they see this again and again. They see this in the movies like Jurassic park and Jurassic World, all that series. They see feathered dinosaurs, they see dinosaurs running around upright. They see dinosaurs immediately they were warm blooded because if you're going to turn into a bird, you got to become warm blooded as well. So they just show up warm blooded and all these things. They don't talk about how that happened, how that could have happened. The physiological changes are just kind of blurred over in this. One thing I should go back and mention is all that clutch of new dinosaurs that show up, suddenly, only one survived. So how did that dinosaur reproduce? They would have gone extinct right there.
Trey
Well, through the magic of storytelling.
Dr. Tim Clary
But if you had just a male or a female, you're not going to make more. And so they kind of shot themselves in the foot right off the bat. It's kind of interesting.
Trey
Well, let's talk about. Now that we've kind of discussed where we agree, which isn't much, there were dinosaurs and flooding reaching a high point. Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
For the same reason.
Trey
For the same reason, right. Now that we've kind of discussed where we agree, let's move on to where the documentary moves beyond observation in the realm of empirical science and more into the storytelling side of things, presented as if it were fact. And one of the notes that I wrote here is this dinosaur in the making. It shows marasuchus, marasuchus dinosaur in the making. It has fur, a furry type substance all over it. The documentary even calls it feathery fuzz. And they immediately say that it's warmer Blooded. And so like immediately off the bat, that takes everything that I was historically taught about dinosaurs growing up. They're reptiles, they're scaly, they have, they're cold blooded, like immediately shifts all of that. And this isn't even a dinosaur. This is a dinosaur in the making. This is before the dinosaur. So why does it have all these things that are beyond what a dinosaur would have? I don't know.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, yeah, they do believe dinosaurs turn into birds as the story progresses along. And part of that's because they changed the definition of what's a dinosaur. So now the definition of dinosaur stretches over. The umbrella now includes birds. There are a few more other types of animals in there sooner or later as well. But you can't change the rules of the game halfway through. Change the rules. And that's what they did, unfortunately. And if you've got consensus behind you, you can kind of do whatever you want. Unfortunately, they're going on consensus. They've got everybody convinced that dinosaurs were warm blooded. I don't think they were. I think they were cold blooded. I think they had scaly skin. That's what the actual evidence shows. But they're putting all this hair on things. They want to make these what's called fuzz or protofeathers because they start to see this hair like fossils. When you get these really good fossils and really fine grains, you can see not only what looks like little hair coming off the edges of the dinosaur. Right. Well, this was looked at back in 2005, but it's been ignored by Ellen Fiducia and his team. He's an evolutionary bird paleontologist and he actually squished some animals like a dolphin and squished it out. And he showed that it's just collagen fibers in the skin that leaves this. Once you bury an animal fast enough, the collagen in the skin, which makes your skin kind of tough, actually kind of leeches off and makes what looks like hair coming off the animal. And so basically all they're really seeing when they see these in the fossil record is collagen. And that's the most likely explanation, probably the most reasonable explanation, because when we see dinosaurs, we see all sorts of scaly skin. So the actual scalies they actually determined, I think in 2017 that Tyrannosaurus rex had scaly skin. So in the video they show the adult with no feathers and no scaly skin.
Trey
I notice that.
Dr. Tim Clary
Yet the babies they show with kind of this fuzz on them.
Trey
It's like, oh. But then I Guess it falls off. Is it to keep it warm as a baby?
Dr. Tim Clary
That's kind of the idea behind it all, but again, that's based on nothing. The actual science shows that tyrannosaurs of all types had no, they actually concluded, much to their chagrin, they concluded that tyrannosaurs of all types had no feathers, just scaly skin. Yet they still show, or they try to show the babies or the young T. Rexes.
Trey
They're not quite lying if they show a baby with it. Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
Cause they haven't found a young dinosaur, young T. Rex that. Yeah, So I get you.
Trey
Yeah. Okay. So just there's this whole idea of weird storytelling to kind of like, make a point, even though the science doesn't show it. So beyond the feathers or proto feathers, there's a bunch of other assumptions that are built into the deep time timeline that they kind of present throughout the series. I mean, that's kind of how it shows. It's like, well, this is this many millions of years ago. Oh, 13 million years in the. Here's this. Seven million years in the future, here's this. So what assumptions are built into that whole framing device?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, the deep time paradigm is out there because you need deep time to give evolution a chance. So that had to come along first. And that came along. Before Darwin wrote his book, they started already saying millions of years. And then, of course, in the 20th century, they've. With isotope studies and mass spectrometers, they came along. They were able to come up with a method called radiometric dating that kind of shows millions of years.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
But every one of those methods is based on several assumptions. And they have to assume that the same decay rates today have always been the same. They have to assume that the parent and daughter ratios, they can determine the exact amount. It's almost like taking an hourglass and turning it over. You don't know when it was turned over.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
You can see the rate. Maybe that might be the same throughout time, but you don't know how much parent, how much daughter you had. There's all this groundwater moving around, moving minerals in and out of the system.
Trey
Things change.
Dr. Tim Clary
And so basically, you're looking at like, four equations, or you're looking at four unknowns, and you only have two equations. So if you're a mathematician, you realize, well, if I just solve four unknowns, you need four equations.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
And so we only have two. So you have to assume two. And that's what they do. They assume a couple of big assumptions, and then the other two oh, look, it's. Science shows this. So many millions of years old.
Trey
We proved it.
Dr. Tim Clary
There it is. And it comes out very. It's very precise, but it's not accurate. There's no way to verify these. There's no way to go back in time and verify these. So it is kind of humorous when you watch these things. They say 201 million years ago. Why not just say about 200 million?
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
They're very specific when you want to be. You know, it's kind of the point where it's almost absurd.
Trey
Well, I think that's specific. Right? The specificity. I mean, it kind of gives this air of we know exactly right, even though there isn't.
Dr. Tim Clary
And the worst part is, you know, young minds who are seeing this and the movies are seeing are getting this idea that dinosaurs look like this, dinosaurs behave like this, because young minds are just soaking it all in. Unfortunately, the older people, like myself, may be a little more skeptical. Even if you're not a creationist, you still might be a little skeptical. And there are people that watch this. Kind of like, that seems silly. All the mating dances they did. They kind of dwelled on mating dances in this thing only different species, kind of bizarre. And that's totally fabricated. There's no evidence of any of that in the fossil record. Behavior is not found in the fossils.
Trey
Well, I think that points to the whole dinosaurs evolving into birds narrative, which they're trying to push. And so if you're trying to make it look like they did that, then, well, birds do mating dances. So let's go ahead and throw that in there, right?
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess that's probably a good point. I think you're probably onto it.
Trey
Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clary
I mean, it's all part of the fantasy.
Trey
Yeah, it's just a story.
Dr. Tim Clary
It really is. I think the whole evolutionary story really is just an adult fairy tale. That's what Dwayne Gish used to say. He used to work for icr. He said evolution is a fairy tale for adults. And this series really shows kind of a fairy tale story. It's almost like you're watching the beginning of Star wars, you know, a long, long time ago in a distant Earth, this happened and this happened and this happened, but they present it as fact.
Trey
And here we are today. You know, what's interesting is when I logged into Netflix and I, you know, the dinosaurs, there it is. When I watched it, it was like number eight in children's, which is distressing for many reasons. A, it's a pretty violent documentary. All Things Considered, but children's. And so children are watching this and they're being told that this is the true story. This is actually what happened. While they're impressionable. And what's fascinating to me is that even I went online to get kind of like a general consensus of what other viewers were thinking. I saw one review by a paleontologist and he's like, I got five minutes into the first episode and I couldn't watch anymore because it was so incorrect from the very beginning. So even evolutionary and uniformitarian paleontologists are watching this and they're like, well, that's not even what we think or believe. And so but yet, like, because it's a cultural, like so many people are going to watch this and it's going to shape their views. And we'll get to that later. But it's just, it's just distressing how it's all presented as fact.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, one example is the Heterodontosaurus. Heterodontosaurus is one that they made it look like a squirrel.
Trey
Oh, the burn squirrel?
Dr. Tim Clary
Yes sir. It kind of looked like a squirrel. It probably didn't look like a squirrel at all. It was another dinosaur, but it had these canines and teeth in the front, teeth in the back. And it was kind of a small dinosaur. But they said at one point that was the ancestry of the stegosaurus.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
Then later they said there was an ancestor to duck billed Hadrosaurus, which, you know, that's when they classify the Haderonontosaurus, they usually put that in the group with the ornithopods or the duck billed dinosaurs. So I was surprised that they, I had to almost play that again. Did they really say that?
Trey
Is that real?
Dr. Tim Clary
So there are mistakes in there. So I agree with the conventional paleontologists. They took some liberty in terms of tell a story, to tell a story, to make the story kind of run along. But it's interesting how they leave the Earth as the driver behind it all. There changes in the Earth causing all these extinctions throughout this time and this time and this time. And it's caused new things to show up. As if the Earth can actually make life on its own and change life.
Trey
They said at one point the planet continues to evolve. And I was like, the planet's evolving? I thought evolution was just biological life or is that just a turn of phrase?
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah, this is taking natural selection way too far. Now the Earth is the selector. The Earth is deciding I'm gonna spew out a lot of CO2 and change everything and Kill off animals, I'm gonna spew out a lot of methane. There's at least four different reasons in this four part series of why things went extinct at certain levels. And they really didn't go extinct. That's just, you know, as a creation geologist, that's just the order they were buried in the flood.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
That's why there's no ancestors. There weren't any.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
They just show up fully formed, all dead. And then they get wiped out at that level in the flood. And then, you know, animals keep getting wiped out. Wiped out, wiped out along with the plants, everything along with them. Their whole ecosystems were destroyed as the water went higher and higher. So you have the early dinosaurs all over the world are about the same, then the next level. Next level, it's just different ecological zones is what you're looking at.
Trey
So I was thinking, and maybe this is just me, but as I was watching the part about the Carnian pluvial event, they even said that it rained for millions. For more than a million years.
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah. Some people say up to 2 million years of rain. Just rain. How do you know that?
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
How do you know that? And part of the reason for that is they see on their sea level curve, which I disagree with because I've done my own version of a sea level curve through the flood, which goes through all the different rock layers, the Campion, Ordovicians, Saline, all those through the time of the dinosaurs and their worldview. And they're really looking at the sea level is supposed to really be low just before the dinosaurs appear. So they have to kind of have this period where they have to replenish the earth with water somehow because they see that a lot of these rocks were deposited by water. Most of the sedimentary rocks were deposited by water. So suddenly after, oh, let's just throw in a 1 or 2 million year rainfall event. How do you do that? How do you say, give or take another. Even others that watch the show that are, you know, aren't creationists, they just say that's just silly.
Trey
Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clary
Do they hear what they're saying in the story? But they present it in the story as if it really happened. Right. And it's in the geological literature, like it really happened.
Trey
Right. And it's just astonishing to me that they just. Everything is so stated as fact. And again, when I was looking at kind of the reception to it, people were like, there's no evidence given for any of this. It's interesting because you watch a typical nature documentary, sure. There's inferences and people will talk about natural selection and evolution, but. But 90% of what you're watching are actual things happening on screen. Every little bit of this was just cgi. I mean, it was all animated. There's nothing to go off of. And I understand dinosaurs nowadays are extinct, so you can't actually go film them. I'm not saying do that, but so much of it is just like conjecture.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, like I said, it all starts with the way they, you know, the way they're clothed, so to speak, in the hair or the feathers. And even the pterodactyls flying in, they had big, long hair and feathers. Admittedly, a couple years ago, they did find little tiny little hair like structures coming off pterodactyls. But again, it's best probably interpreted as just collagen squished out as the animal was being buried in the sediments they were piling on and some of the collagen in the skin came off. So I doubt if pterodactyls really looked hairy like they do in this particular episode. Yeah, I don't care if you pick colors and do all that kind of stuff, but don't put things on there that the fossils don't support. Right. And they did that throughout the whole movie, the whole show.
Trey
And what's interesting is that they actually, like the pterosaurs. The pteranodons were not even the biggest offenders when it came to having feathers. It was everything else. Right?
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah, the Yutyrannus had feathers all over, just like a. And that's a tyrannosaur again. So again, they. Back in 2017, they said Tyrannosaurs didn't have feathers. The basis for that is based on some of that, what looks like probably collagen in the tail. So the Eutyrannus found over in Asia actually had a little bit of what looks like those hair like structures. And they said, oh, it was fully feathered, but there's no evidence it ever did yet. So much of this is portrayed all because they want to push dinosaurs turn into birds.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
And they make them really smart, too. In Jurassic park and Jurassic World, those movies, they make them out to be smart. They're steaming up windows because they're assuming they're warm blooded again to make them like birds. But I think in the reality, the rocks and the fossils themselves show that they were most likely cold blooded. Based on, like, the lack of turbanites, turbinate bones and things like that in the nasal passages. They most likely. I think the best explanation is, you Know why? Making something they're not. And so I think they were probably cold blooded.
Trey
Well, you make them something they're not so that you can fulfill this sort of fantasy that you.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, because they say they're warm blooded without really saying it. They say T. Rex, they'd eat 20 steaks a day. Even these plateosaurus, they'd eat 25 kilograms, which is about 50, 60 pounds of food a day. If you're cold blooded, you wouldn't eat half as much. Not even half. Probably more like about a quarter if that. And so they just assume certain things. And that causes more problems, I think, in terms of how did they feed these animals? Did they have to eat all day long to survive?
Trey
Well, according to the documentary, a major problem was dinosaurs just starving to death left and right. And they were dramatically portrayed just stumbling through whatever and being like. And then collapsing because the trees got too tall. The trees got too tall. There was a line.
Dr. Tim Clary
There were no baby trees, no young trees, no saplings and anything like that. There should have been lots of smaller trees coming up.
Trey
I mean, it is just like it was suffering left and right as dinosaurs die from various extinction events.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, it was always different. Like I mentioned earlier, it was always like, it's methane this time that's CO2 this time that's volcanoes this time that's an asteroid this time it's inconsistencies. But each time the Earth caused dinosaurs to evolve into something else or something from beyond, or the plants caused them because they got too tall and wiped and killed all the dinosaurs off. They forget that they found grasses in dinosaur dung showing that there was grass. Yet throughout this whole video series, it didn't show really any grass. Act like it didn't exist.
Trey
There were some shrubs and then also tall trees like those were.
Dr. Tim Clary
They couldn't reach.
Trey
Yeah, except for some because they did reach. And then they became sauropods. Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
But then everyone else just died a slow, agonizing death.
Trey
Slow, agonizing death over multiple generations, they all died. It's. Yeah, okay, I digress. So let's talk a little bit about worldview. So when the series fills in all of these details about how animals lived, died, interacted, it's not describing the evidence that we have, it's interpreting it through a particular lens. And we've already talked a little bit about. There's no evidence for that. So how does the worldview of these particular scientists I made sure to look up like, hey, this wasn't just a nothing event. I mean, this was made by Spielberg's company and they had scientists who were experts on making sure everything was at least semi accurate. So how does worldview influence the way that these scientists fill in the gaps where the evidence isn't there?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, they get to tell the story. You know, they write the script. They can gloss over things like where did they come from? Where did these come from? They emphasize more like how these dinosaurs went extinct each time or how the Earth caused them to go extinct. So they kind of emphasize more the extinction versus where they came from because there's really no. Even the very first dinosaurs, there's still no consensus on what their ancestor supposedly was. But that goes throughout the whole fossil record. Everything just shows up suddenly, starting with the Cambrian explosion for the most part, where almost every major form of animal life suddenly shows up, and then nothing has changed ever since. Those animals are just different types of animals throughout the rock record. So that's kind of a worldview that they use and push upon you the evolutionary worldview. But in the series, they didn't really emphasize where they came from. They just, oh, this new animal showed up to fill this gap and suddenly these things are dead. So these animals could flourish. And it was whiplash and that kind of story.
Trey
Yeah, it's every five to six minutes you're following a new main character that just appeared out of nowhere.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, you know, serious talked about dinosaurs appear in what's called Triassic rocks. First of all, you know, below that there's other fossils, but then they finally show up in Triassic, and then they go to. At the end of the Triassic, there's an extinction. That's how they basically identified in the rock record. Every major change in name is from an extinction where things changed enough. The fossils go from one type of fossil to something different. And so they say, okay, there must have been an extinction event. As a flood geologist, of course, we just see those as different levels of the flood where the water went higher and higher, bearing different things, and there's no real extinctions going on because they're representatives of two of every kind, including the dinosaurs on the ark. And they got off. And dinosaurs and humans lived together before the flood, maybe different areas, based on my research, completely different areas. But after the flood, they were in the same areas. We can get to that a little bit later.
Trey
Sure.
Dr. Tim Clary
What we think. But a lot of this worldview is really what they're trying to push. They're trying to push that somehow dinosaurs evolved, kept changing, kept evolving, kept evolving, kept evolving. And eventually they were wiped out by. Not by themselves, these great glorious Creatures that they, they were wiped out by the earth each time the earth keep doing different things. And so as they kept evolving, they keep getting wiped out, keep all of them wiped out. Ultimately they all got wiped out of course by this so called asteroid.
Trey
Yeah, it was interesting to me. So it says that an asteroid killed the dinosaur, but then it said that later that the asteroid caused colder temperatures which, which caused the dinosaurs to die. Which I found interesting because this whole time they were claiming that they were warmer blooded. So if you're warmer blooded, the cold temperatures won't be as much of an issue for you. But if you're a reptile it is.
Dr. Tim Clary
Yeah. They show these big sauropods walking through the snow at one point and they did the same thing as some of the later Jurassic World movies. Yeah. Again kind of pushing in your face. Oh they're warm blooded, they can survive in this. And they have feathers on them to keep them warm. But you know, obviously that.
Trey
But then the cold killed them.
Dr. Tim Clary
The cold killed them and it killed all the plants. So the plants die, then they're gonna die. But yet a lot of things didn't die.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
The one thing they don't mention is the frog fossils go right across the boundary. So all these little tiny little frogs, they find the fossils below that so called extinction event. They find it above that extinction event. How come it didn't kill the frogs and they don't bring that up, the warm blooded frog? Well, they also don't bring up other things. Well the evidence is showing that there's dinosaur original proteins and tissues. None of that was mentioned all four hours of this show. They don't mention anything that goes contrary to their millions and millions of years. That's another thing that pushes back in terms of the assumptions of radiometric dating. But also the soft tissues that we're finding in over our 130 published, conventional, secular papers or whatever you want to call them. And there's things that supposedly way before the dinosaurs.
Trey
Yeah, I was about to say it's not just dinosaurs.
Dr. Tim Clary
500 million years supposedly, you know, way before the dinosaurs show up at 235 million years ago or whatever they're saying now and then all the way to 66 million years ago. There's things that go throughout the whole spectrum of the rock record. They're finding original proteins and not one of those proteins can last even a million years under the ideal conditions. But they're not going to mention that because that goes against the story. So they're weaving this tale and they keep Bombarding the youth of the world, the youth of America, with this in the movies. They keep bombarding in these documentaries. It's a documentary, so it can't be wrong attitude. You know, it's like, this must be true. Based on real science. But so little of this is based on real science. It's just outstanding.
Trey
It's just a story. Something that was so interesting to me. And after this, we'll move on to dinosaurs and the flood.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, there's so much.
Trey
There's so much we could talk for forever. But there was just one line that was just cracking me up, and it was, anchiornis is the bird. And it says, like Morgan Freeman says, he looks a bit like a chicken. He's the size of a chicken, but he's a dinosaur. A dinosaur with feathers and newly evolved wings. And I'm like, where did this come from? Like, and it was like this bright blue, like, very beautiful, like, very visually appealing. Right. Like, that's the whole. The whole thought process is make it look good. Right? But then it's like you're just kind of. It's a dinosaur with feathers and wings. So is it? I don't know. You're the expert here. Tell me more.
Dr. Tim Clary
I think it's a bird.
Trey
Yeah.
Dr. Tim Clary
If it walks like a bird, flies like a bird, it's a bird. The thing is, dinosaurs and birds walk differently. And so you can look at the hips, you can look at the hip structure. You can look whether they have holes in their hip sockets or not. Dinosaurs had open holes in almost every species. Birds do not. Birds either have closed hip sockets like us, you know, there's no open hole you can't look through. We have sockets. And birds have sockets, too. Birds don't move their thigh bones, their femurs, so they're actually balancing further ahead in their body. Their thighs are generally always going forward, and they're only moving from their knees and ankles down. And so they did. So if they had a bony tail like Archaeopteryx, some of these birds that are now extinct that we see in the fossil record, they have a thin bony tail. There's no little bones sticking down. Like, we have bones sticking up in your back. You can feel them. Well, there's bones sticking down called chevrons. And those chevrons hook muscles on dinosaurs, not on birds. And they hook back to the femur or the thigh bone to pull the thigh bone back. So as I mentioned earlier, when they would walk, each step the tail would swing from side to side, Right? Kind of balancing the animal as he went along. Well, birds don't do that. They just, they had a bony tail, the thin bony tail. There was no muscle attachments. They had a different type of hip altogether, so their thighs stayed forward. So this was a bird by every definition of the bird. But recently they changed the definition of dinosaur to include birds. So how do you win?
Trey
You can't.
Dr. Tim Clary
It's like when I played my older brothers in Monopoly games and games when I was growing up, I was the youngest though. They would change the rules in the middle of the game and that's exactly what they're doing here just to make you lose. They're changing the rules in the middle of the game and saying, oh, everything's a dinosaur. Birds are dinosaurs, you know, so when you see birds flying along, you know it's a dinosaur. You know, I've heard famous people say that when you're eating your Thanksgiving dinner, as long as it's not tofu, if you're eating a turkey, you're eating a dinosaur. It's like, do you look at how they walk? Right? And here's a little shameless plug. I have a book coming out, hopefully sometime later in 2026 that will actually be called if It Walks Like a Bird. Because that's how you tell. And unfortunately people are saying these are feathered dinosaurs, but they're feathered birds. Everything I've seen that actually has real feathers in the fossil record has the hip structure like a bird and doesn't have a tail that muscles can attach to and pull the femur back and forth, the thigh bone as it walked. Birds do not walk that way. They walk completely differently. So these things walk like a bird, flew like a bird, because they were birds.
Trey
And I think that that really just kind of goes to show that if you have control over the entire narrative and if you don't need any evidence to make claims, you can just kind of say whatever you want if you
Dr. Tim Clary
get the majority behind you. Unfortunately, you know, they've got the consensus, they've got all these people for decades and decades and decades convinced that especially Starting in the 60s, the dinosaurs were active. It's called the dinosaur renaissance. And then through the 70s and 80s, they've convinced the old timers were like you and me, these things were cold blooded, they had scaly skin and they didn't believe it either. But eventually the young paleontologists won over the old guard, so to speak, and they all are convinced now the dinosaurs were active, warm blooded, smarter than your dog. But you look at the brains on dinosaurs, they're shaped like crocodiles and alligator brains. They're very small compared to their body size, very similar to reptiles today. And part of the reason they're as big as they say they were is because they're using the whole cavity, which a lot of that was filled with fluid. So their brains are actually a lot smaller than what the so called brain or the endocast or the brain cavity shows. And so dinosaurs, they show the T. Rex in their outsmarting the Ankylosaurus rolling over. They couldn't think like that. Birds can think a little better. Birds have a different type of brain altogether different shapes of the brain they can process, they can pick out food and be very specific because they can see it and smell it. And also if you're going to be a dinosaur with feathers, you got to have a beak to preen those feathers. There's no beaks on these dinosaurs to preen feathers if you're just throwing feathers on a dinosaur. Now if it's a bird, of course they're gonna have the beak. And so that's another way to tell a real bird from a dinosaur is to have the jaw of a dinosaur or the beak. Again, people kind of ignore that. They ignore the way they walk, they ignore the requirement of having to have a beak to preen those feathers. Birds spend about 9% of their time preening their feathers. And you gotta have your feathers all kind of combed and lined up. You gotta have a special oil gland to oil them. If you can't fly and you're supposed to fly because your feathers are all tatters, what's the point? So dinosaurs with feathers and stuff would be tatters in a matter of a day or two. That'd be useless.
Trey
Huh, I didn't know that. Yeah, the Heterodontosaurus, which I just called the straight up bird squirrel, they referred to its mouth as a beak. Like they specifically said a beak when it was clearly not.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, it had teeth in the front, that particular dinosaur. I studied that one for you. It's just fun to say. So. I used to teach about that one in my class, Heterodontosaurus. It just means different tooth dinosaur because it had teeth in the front, teeth in the back, and it had these canines like almost like a dog or cat coming down. So it's kind of an odd looking animal. But they, they fabricated this. They'll hate big cheeks. Like they don't know that. There's no impressions of cheeks that I've ever seen on these dinosaurs. To know there's not that many specimens of it, right? And so they pull. Pulled some very obscure dinosaurs out of their hat to impress people with their vast knowledge of dinosaurs, which only about. Again, about a third of them. I didn't. I'd never really heard of myself. And just I recognize the kind of dinosaur, right, because there's so many. There's only so many kinds. There's only about 60 kinds of dinosaurs, but they have a lot of different species names to them, so they pull a few obscure ones out, but for the most part, if you look at the hips of a dinosaur and a bird, you can tell the difference. And that's. They don't do that. They cover it all up with feathers and have a walk around. They say it's a dinosaur all the same because they change the definition of a dinosaur. So they're all the same.
Trey
All right, well then if the story being told is kind of shaped by that worldview that the scientist is going to have in the back of their mind anyway, then it makes sense to compare it with something else, a different starting point. So instead of beginning with the millions and billions of years ago, let's see what the Bible has to say about dinosaurs. If this whole story is being shaped by this narrative framework that anyone is going to have in the back of their mind, whether you're an evolutionist or not, then it makes sense to compare it to the alternative. So instead of beginning with deep time and the millions and billions of years, let's see what the Bible has to say about all of this. And so my question for you is, from a biblical perspective, where do dinosaurs fit into the biblical story? And I think that this is important because I think that dinosaurs are so intrinsically linked to the idea of long ages. And then we have some people say that Christians don't believe in dinosaurs. I've had some Christians tell me dinosaur bones were put into the earth to confuse Christians, but by Satan. And it's like, no, no. So let's set the story straight. Where do dinosaurs fit into the biblical timeline?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, most of the fossils we find are from the flood, the global flood that occurred. But dinosaurs, if you go back to the book of Genesis, the very beginning of it, talks about all these land animals were created on day six. So they talk about the beasts of the earth. You got to remember, the word dinosaur didn't exist until 1841. Some books say 1842. Depends on when you gave the talk or published it. It doesn't really matter. By 1841, 1842, King James was translated as 1611. So most of the English translations don't use the word dinosaur at all. They just talk about dragons. And they'll refer to some animals in the Book of Job, of Leviathan, even in the Psalms of Leviathan and Behemoth, which I think were likely dinosaurs, but we can talk about those in a minute. Sure, but they go back to 6,000 years ago, when the Earth was created. And they were created on day six, just like humans were created on day six. So you have your flying animals, the birds on day five, the swimming animals on day five, day six, God makes the land animals. He made the beast of the earth. He didn't list cattle, he didn't list horses, just because he didn't list dinosaurs. He called them all the beasts of the Earth. And again, the word didn't even exist at the time the Bible was translated in English. So you can't expect the Bible to talk about the word dinosaur. It wasn't there.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
And most commentators will say something else when they talk about what we think, what I think might be a dinosaur, like behemoth, they'll say, oh, it's a crocodile or it's a hippo, or it's a this or that or some other, you know, mythological. Or they'll say it's a mythological creature. But God specifically talks about all these different aspects of it. The teeth, the bones, this and that. If it's a mythical creature, why would he be so specific on all these things?
Trey
And at that point, it sounds like
Dr. Tim Clary
God's lying, but they fit into the flood. As I mentioned a little earlier, all they are is just the different levels of the flood. Their environment was being inundated. Early into the flood, you had mostly just marine fossils. According to the research that I've been doing for the last 13 years, looking at all the rocks across every continent, dinosaurs don't show up right away, and so neither do a lot of animals. But suddenly they show up. Boom. Because they're being buried by the flood. As the flood wars went higher, their environment started being buried. First you get these reptiles that weren't dinosaurs. And then right towards the end of what's called the Triassic, you see, boom. The dinosaurs show up all over different places.
Trey
When you say Triassic, you're not implying millions of years.
Dr. Tim Clary
Right. There is no Triassic period of time. Time. We have to use these names to kind of know where we are stratigraphically. But there was no Jurassic period of time in the past when just these animals lived. And that's the impression that these types of shows give is that in the Jurassic this is what was on the earth at the time, nothing else, Right. And in the Jurassic dis was on the Earth, nothing else. And that's not true at all. You're just looking at different levels of the flood as it went higher and higher, bearing different ecological zones, right? And so the entire system is wiped out. Different dinosaurs lived at different, slightly different elevations. We see a common duck billed dinosaurs and horned dinosaurs like Triceratops and T Rex type animals on every continent at the same level. All found in what's called Cretaceous rocks. But you go down a little bit to the earlier rocks, the Jurassic, you see a lot of the long necked dinosaurs, the sauropods and things and stegosaurs, that's the same way around the world. So there must have been some way that God built the earth so that all over the world water went higher to same levels as sea level rose uniformly all over the world it was buried in the same environments. So you see a very common nature to the fossil record, but it's a record of the flood. It's a record of the judgment of the flood for the wickedness of humanity. And the dinosaurs were of course eating each other because we do see the evidence for that in the fossils with teeth marks and teeth bones stuck in it. But the Bible says that dinosaurs were supposed to eat plants. That's the original design, all animals, there was no shedding of the blood. It was all these green herbs for food. The King James says he gave you all those green herbs for food. So even T Rex ate plants and probably continued to eat plants. Just like today we see crocodiles and alligators still eat plants. So the T Rex again, they stayed in their zones because that's where their plants were that they were designed to eat. That God designed, Jesus designed these animals to eat certain things. That's their food source, that's their hamburger. Now if you love hamburgers, you're gonna stay near your hamburger. Even though occasionally you might eat a stegosaur or you might eat something else just because that tastes good too. But you're supposed to eat these plants. So that's, I think one of the reasons why it's such a very organized fossil record with the same dinosaurs are buried pretty much at the same level on every continent. But again, that's a little speculation on my part.
Trey
Not as much speculation as the Netflix show.
Dr. Tim Clary
That's what I was going to say. Not as much as the show. We watched four episodes of that show. But I mean, you know, that's the biblical worldview. They were created on day six. And God even says this in the book of Job, look, a behemoth, which I made along with you, implying they were made the same day of the creation week. And then most of the fossils anyway, they didn't go extinct. But many dinosaurs were fossilized. Thousands and thousands and thousands, if not millions of them were buried in the flood. Water rose higher for the judgment of the flood. And then of course, about 60 kinds, maybe 70 kinds of dinosaurs were on the ark, right? So I think that's all they really were. And they weren't giant and they probably were juveniles. God wouldn't bring the 130 foot long sauropods down here, probably because they have to be able to reproduce afterwards. And there may be a point where they got too big, you know, nobody knows. But nonetheless, God probably brought smaller ones. He brought them to the ark, put them on there, and they had plants to eat. Noah and his family would have brought their specific plants, not a side of beef or anything like that for the dinosaurs. They were designed to eat just plants and get their full nourishment. And so after the flood, the climate was much different. Things changed dramatically from the pre flood to the post flood. Pre flood, I think it was almost like Jamaica. Everywhere you had a global greenhouse going on based on the fossils that we see and the, the large dragonflies and things that must have been more oxygen and the plants were flourishing all over, must have been more CO2. And afterwards I think there was a lot less because a lot of that was pulled out of the atmosphere to make rocks like limestone. And so limestone is calcium carbonate, CaCO3 so you need CO2 and things like that to make that. So there's a way to change it in the flood model as well, to change the atmosphere. But nonetheless it was cooler afterwards because you went right into an ice age within 100 or 200 years after the flood. And so the earth was cooler from all the volcanoes and so you had a much cooler climate. And then now dinosaurs didn't have their specific areas to live in, so they had to live in the same kind of warmer equatorial climates that humans were living in as they migrated down from the ark to the Middle east and maybe a little further south to get away from the snow to the north. And so they were kind of limited in that range and there was more interaction. And if you're a human and you see this big scary looking dragon, Maybe it's only 8ft long or 10ft long, might not have been as big as the ones we see in the fossils. You're going to want to protect your family, you want to protect your sheep or your horses or whatever you're raising from these wild animals. And that's the same thing that humans have done throughout time. We've killed off their property. Predators are coming to prey on not only our animals or flocks, but also our own family.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
And so many dinosaurs struggled probably to survive in the new climate because they were, I believe, cold blooded. And it was a cooler climate in general than the pre flood, but also now you're having direct interaction with humans. And we see a lot of that in the artwork throughout history, going back thousands of years. We see Egyptians roping what looks like big long sauropods on an armor palate. And we see in Cambodia, we see what looks like a stegosaur. We see these paintings and carvings all over the world and all these different cultures. And many people like Vance Nelson have put together whole books on that. But every one of those dinosaurs, almost every one of them, maybe not everyone shows the legs coming straight down, which we didn't know until 1841 that they knew before. So how did they know not to draw these like a crocodile with sprawling legs? If it's just a crocodile or some sort of a mythical dragon, why wouldn't they draw them like what they. Yeah, exactly. Why wouldn't they draw them like they would have drawn modern reptiles today with the legs sprawling? But no, they always have them with the legs coming straight down. To me, that is compelling that these, they really did see dinosaurs, not just, you know, some big crocodile.
Trey
And it's across cultures.
Dr. Tim Clary
It's across cultures across all the kinds.
Trey
Marco Polo wrote about them, you know,
Dr. Tim Clary
and you know, you can read in the book of job, job 40 about Behemoth, and job 41 about Leviathan. And it's very specific. There's a lot of people that say, oh, well, it's just kind of mytho history, just like they say the book of Genesis is. But it's very specific in both. You know, in Genesis they talk. Day one, evening, morning, day two, evening, very specific. And you go through the flood record, you know, so many years of Noah's life. And you can figure out how many days they're on the ark. Over a year, you know, the water covered the earth. It rose to day 150, which coincides with about the end of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs went out. Based on the research that I've been doing. And every kind of, kind of peaks at the same time, all about that same level that they say water was peaking. But they don't quite flood everything because they can't kill.
Trey
It can't be a global thing.
Dr. Tim Clary
But it really did come upon within 150 days. It went all the way up and then took over another half a year to go down. But to me that's what explains the fossil record. That's what explains the dinosaur fossils and the order that they're found in. We use words like Thoracic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, but those might have been just a week apart from each other. They buried very quickly. You look at the rock layers, there's no evidence of erosion between the layers of millions of years between this event. Where's the evidence of the big asteroid for example?
Trey
I don't know. That's supposed to be the thing that killed everybody.
Dr. Tim Clary
At the last episode they show us big asteroid hits again. Didn't kill the frogs.
Trey
Didn't kill the frogs.
Dr. Tim Clary
Didn't kill a lot of other little things as well. But even the evidence for that is not very strong. I looked at all that with my research. Look at all these different continents. Look at oil wells all over the world. You look at the wells drilled into that crater, there's about eight of them and supposed to be a big crater that hits. And you saw the big fireball in the show. It's just amazing how well you'd think it would have killed everything on the Earth the way it. But it was supposed to be about a six mile wide rock that hits the earth and it's like a billion, I forget how many it was a billion atomic bombs or something like that. Equivalent. And it's supposed to make about 100, 120 mile wide crater, right? Well, there's no crater there.
Trey
Right?
Dr. Tim Clary
That's number one. There's no topographic crater. It's all based on a gravity signature which is very ambiguous. Secondly, there's no melted rock. All that heat, all that impact should have melted 2 to 3 miles of rock underneath the crater. You look all the wells drilled in it, there's almost no melted rock at all. So where's the. Like they say in the old Wendy's commercial, where's the beef? Where's the melt?
Trey
Yeah, where's the evidence?
Dr. Tim Clary
And then there's all this iridium, this dust they show in the last episode going up and around. There's almost no iridium at that site. So there's no smoke with a smoking gun. I don't think there is a gun. I don't think there was an impact there at all. I Mean, it could just be explained by an igneous intrusion. So you get a little bit of igneous rock in that one particular well and a little bit in another one. But the most you get is about 1,000ft of what looks like igneous rock. In one of those wells, there should be several miles of melted rock. So where's the heat of the impact? Where's the crater from the impact? There's no tobrik evergrater. It's all based on a gravity. Because they need something.
Trey
Yes. Where did they all come from?
Dr. Tim Clary
Finish the story of dinosaurs again. It's ironic. They don't explain the beginning of them very well, and then their ending is very dramatic. But it's not based on a lot of hard science. It's just based on consensus that people have gone jumped on the bandwagon. But there's a few paleontologists that have pushed back and said, well, what about the frogs? Like Bob Bakker. But he's kind of talked down now. Nobody. They're like, yeah, right, did it only kill the dinosaurs? Even Ellen Fiducia, who did the study on the collagen and stuff, he actually. He's a bird paleontologist. He's the one that says these dinosaurs are not birds either. He says these are. You don't know what a bird is. Birds have completely different hips. But he gets pushed aside because he doesn't go along with consensus. There's a lot of bullying going on in terms of funding and everything else and publications. You've got to get on board. And so the evolutionary scientists all have to go with the same story to get anything published. And it's rather unfortunate. So you can't hardly publish anything that goes against mainstream. And unfortunately, that's the problem that even scientists like Alan Feducci have, who are evolutionists, but they can't publish things contrary to the story that's being sold. And this is just a wonderful example, this whole show is a wonderful example of a story that's being portrayed that they want you to believe, but it's based on very little factual information.
Trey
Right. And their voices are being crowded out and shouted down, even though they believe in the same thing. So what do you think that viewers of something like this, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that anyone go and watch this, you know, but if someone were to go watch this, what should they keep in mind as they're watching?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, keep in mind this is just a story. It's like a fictional novel. If you go in there, think, okay, this is fiction, it's kind of cool to see the way they made the dinosaurs running around doing their things. Even though they probably go way too far on their behavior and the way they look, it's still kind of fun to watch because everybody's still fascinated by dinosaurs. But if you go into. And this is fiction, unfortunately, they portray it as this is fact. This is what happened. It's kind of like they're rewriting history. And so you're the winner. You get to write the history. So if you have the consensus, you get to write the history. But if you go there just for the entertainment value of it all. But unfortunately, it's a little slow. And the narration is, you know, Morgan Freeman does a wonderful job, but he's. It's a little slow. And the whole thing is go to sleep too. You could do the whole thing in two episodes and not four.
Trey
Right.
Dr. Tim Clary
And so I recommend, if you're going to watch it, speed it up a little bit. Watch that one and a half speed. Yeah, the dinosaurs might walk a little funnier.
Trey
Yeah, the animation might look a little
Dr. Tim Clary
odd, but there's so much, you know, where they show the dinosaurs starving to death several times. And there's things I never heard about during the Cretaceous. They're all saying there was a snow episode. I never knew that. As a geologist, how did I miss that when I'd been in the geology world for well over 40 years and I tried to keep up on things pretty well, but I must have missed that one. So I don't know if they added that in or if I just missed that in my ignorance, I'm not sure. But there's some things in there that they make the Earth to be the big driver of things. So be forewarned that this is gonna push deep time. This is gonna push, you know, extreme evolution caused by the Earth. The Earth is deciding what lives and what doesn't, ultimately. And the plants help along too. The plants have kind of an evil side to them. You know, they grow tall really fast and you starve and then you die. But if you look at it as something like, you know, Lord of the Rings, then it's okay. But if you're gonna take this as fact, I think that's the.
Trey
Don't do injustice to Lord of the Rings like that.
Dr. Tim Clary
That's what I feel like with dinosaurs. They do injustice to the dinosaurs. It's a shame. They're wonderful created creatures. They do an injustice to them by portraying them this way.
Trey
You know, it's interesting that you mentioned that the Earth was doing all These things. I saw some comments and some reviews. People were like, is it just me or does this whole thing have some religious undertones? And what they mean by that is not like, oh, it's church related or anything like that, but that there's some, like, grand scheme of things happening and that the earth is deciding and nature is in charge and nature determines who lives and who dies, you know, and
Dr. Tim Clary
it's always getting better, right? But if you're a real true evolutionist, you realize it's supposed to just be random. There's no getting better. It's just kind of by death new things are brought out, right? And they portray that part, but it doesn't, you know, the stiffness. Evolutionists would tell you that there's no direction, but yet they kind of imply that that earth is driving this to better and better things.
Trey
Their descendants will be better suited.
Dr. Tim Clary
The dinosaurs had their day, but now we're better. You know, that sort of thing idea so fascinating.
Trey
The dinosaurs is visually compelling and powerfully told that how a story is framed matters. When interpretation is presented as fact, it shapes how people understand both science and history. Scripture offers a consistent foundation and ongoing research continues to point to a very different picture than what's often presented in mainstream media. Dr. Clary, as we wrap up, what are the most important takeaways that you'd want viewers to remember after watching this episode?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, number one, that evolutionary science has no explanation for the origin of dinosaurs or really for the extinction. They say they went extinct from this and this and this. That's why they have five different methods, right? But number one, they have no idea where the origin of dinosaurs came from, what their ancestor was or the ancestors to all the dinosaurs when push comes to shove. Secondly, most of what's portrayed in here is sort of just a story. It's not based on factual information, not based on the fossils, most of its behavior. They make dinosaurs out to be smarter than they really should be. They make them out to be warm blooded and covered in feathers. And all this is not backed in the fossils at all. There's no basis for most of this. It's just a fairy tale that they're portraying to try to convince people that evolution is true.
Trey
It's a modern fairy tale.
Dr. Tim Clary
And then the third and final thing is the Bible gives us the answers. The Bible tells us the origin of dinosaurs. God created them on day six of the Creation Week, 6,000 years ago or thereabouts, and there was a real flood. That's what buried these fossils. That's what made all These fossils, the wonderful things we can dig up. Millions and millions of dinosaur fossils. All the fossils, in fact, almost all the fossils.
Trey
A lot of marine fossils, Marine fossils,
Dr. Tim Clary
and they're all mixed with dinosaurs. You've got six species of sharks mixed with T. Rexes in Montana. And it's like that all over the world. There's this marine mixing. If you have waves coming in from the ocean, they kept getting higher and higher. That's what you're going to bring in some marine animals each time. So you expect a lot of mixing. And that's exactly what we see. The fossils tell a different story than what they're portraying in here. They think it's all clean and you can sort this out, sort that out, but it's really not. The Bible gives us the best answer that judgment of the flood is the reason why we have all these dinosaur fossils all over the world in the same general order. And they all peak at about the same time, which we agree with, around the end of the Cretaceous. That's kind of was when I found the peak of the flood as well. And so the rocks cover the most area even today, after all the erosion of the receding water, you can still see the most area is still covered. The most volume is pretty much in that. Around that same end of Cretaceous into the early Tertiary, as we used to call it.
Trey
So at least they got that right.
Dr. Tim Clary
So they got that part right. But again, they have no. To reiterate, they have no explanation for the origin of dinosaurs, where they came from. They just have them showing up and then they just keep changing because Earth is driving it. And they ultimately don't have a good explanation for the extinction of them as well. And then most of what they're portraying is just what they want it to be, kind of a fairy tale story. It's like Goldilocks or one of those stories. But they ignore. The real answer is in the Bible.
Trey
Absolutely. Thank you so much for watching this episode of the Creation podcast. I encourage you to, like, subscribe and share with someone who you may have had conversations with regarding the dinosaurs documentary. You may notice these names scrolling next to me. Those are our members and patrons. And if you want to join them and have your name scrolling along on screen as well, you can join either our members or patrons program. The links are in the description below.
Dr. Tim Clary
Below.
Trey
While Those are scrolling, Dr. Clary, we have a question for you.
Dr. Tim Clary
Okay.
Trey
Are you ready for this? Okay. Tim asked, not you, how and when, before, during or after the flood were dinosaur footprints made, covered, preserved, uncovered and discovered Please explain in a very detailed and specific way the step by step procedure.
Dr. Tim Clary
Wow, that's a lot to cover.
Trey
Yeah, you got this.
Dr. Tim Clary
Most of the footprints, I think almost all of them were made in the flood, number one. And so as the dinosaurs are being inundated, the water is coming higher. Oftentimes what we find first, even before we find the bones, is the footprints. Now the dinosaurs were smart enough to kind of get out of the way. They left their footprints and then they got out of the way. But the waves kept coming higher and higher. So once you made the footprints in this new soft sediment, they were quickly buried again by another layer. Because if you leave footprints in the sand today, it doesn't last. You walk on the beach and the next day they're gone. You walk anywhere. Most times the footprints disappear within a matter of hours or maybe just a few days. But if you bury things, keep burying things fast. Eventually the waves caught up with the dinosaurs as well. And so we see their bones. But the footprints have to have special conditions, just like fossils. You have to bury things fast and deep. So you have to make the footprints and then you have to be buried quickly to preserve those footprints. And we see that there's footprints, there's worm burrows and everything from the very beginning of the flood, from the Cambrian explosion even before that. There's fossils in some of the rocks, maybe some earlier areas where the flood was affecting early on. But when you finally see that Cambrian explosion all over the world, that's when you start seeing worm burrows and things leaving trace fossils, they call them, like footprints. And then eventually you get to higher levels where you start flooding the dinosaurs and reptiles, you start seeing their footprints, but you have to bury them fast and deep. So I'm not sure how specific they want me to get into, but you gotta have a, it can't be really rough, right, or you'll destroy em. And there might have been, there's probably a lot of fossil footprints that could have become fossils that were destroyed by the next layer coming in. But the waves weren't always rushing in at high speeds. Sometimes they're washing back and then the next wave would come in like tsunami waves. Do you get normally a series of them. And it's very complex because you're looking based on our models of rapid plate movement, you're looking at thousands of tsunamis a day. And so there's going to be a lot of. And they come from all directions. Wherever you have subduction zones going on, you're going to have all this wave interference and that's part of the reason why you have rapid changes in rock type and what we call stratigraphy very, very quickly. It can have really thin layers that can repeat really quick. So it isn't a surprise to have some areas where you can make footprints. And then the animals are trying to get away and they're walking through shallow water, leaving these footprints. And those footprints are buried very, very quickly. So there's places like in Bolivia just last year they found 18,000 dinosaur footprints. 16,000 of them were from theropod dinosaurs or so called median dinosaurs that supposedly they're the ones that supposed to evolve into birds, but they actually find some that are walking along. And then on top of those, they find dinosaurs swimming on top, leaving just barely scratch marks and things. So it's interesting how they were walking along and then the next wave came in. Next thing you know they're deeper water and they can barely scratch the bottom.
Trey
Fascinating.
Dr. Tim Clary
So they found some really fascinating things that really supports the flood. These waves just kept coming and coming higher and higher. But again, like any fossil, footprints have to be buried fast and deep to preserve them.
Trey
And then how do they become uncovered?
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, they became uncovered like dinosaurs. There's billions of dinosaurs probably out there that we'll never find because they're buried thousands of feet of sediment. Like in Nebraska, where you have younger rocks on top. So if you don't have mountains to uplift, that came up later in the flood year, like Mount Everest came up as the flood water was receding in the Rockies, the Andes, a lot of the mountains around the world all popped up as the waters are receding, folding those soft rocks up and exposing as the water ran off. The receding phase ripped off a lot of the sediment that was over the top and exposed these dinosaurs along the flanks of these uplifts, or the whole surface was eroded down to a certain level, like in Montana, where you see some minor little uplifts arching up the rocks and just eroding down deep enough that you expose the Hell Creek formation, for example. And so you need some sort of erosion to. Because the flood didn't end at the time the dinosaurs were buried, that was just the peak of the flood. There was still more sediment from the receding phase that threw a lot of mammal fossils on top of the dinosaurs and things all over the world. And a lot of that got eroded off at the final stages of the recession. And thousands of feet of sediment was ripped off. For the Grand Canyon region, for example, north of Grand Canyon, to make the Grand Staircase, the Evolution is called the great denudation. They don't know where all these thousands of feet of sediment just kind of end. They should have kept going, and suddenly they're gone. So we know there's a lot of erosion, and that erosion explodes a lot of dinosaurs. But uplift, like Colorado and Wyoming, these uplifted areas exposed dinosaurs that would have been buried thousands of feet down. And there's a lot more down there. We just will never find them.
Trey
We need to dig deeper.
Dr. Tim Clary
Well, they did one last thing. What's interesting is, and I've talked about this before, they actually took an oil well core in the North Sea, 70 miles off Norway. They drilled down a mile below the bottom of the ocean. They took a core this big around, pulled up a Plateosaurus toe bone, which is one of the dinosaurs in the Netflix series. 70 miles offshore, they just happened to hit, in their little core, an identifiable dinosaur bone. So they were being washed in. You know, marine animals being washed down, dinosaurs are being washed out. There was a lot of movement from these massive tsunami waves. There was from all the rapid plate moving during the flood year. So it's an amazing story that we get to look at as geologists and paleontologists to really see the history. But it's all about your worldview. If you come at it from a worldview of an evolutionary standpoint, that Earth just sort of evolved and pulled life just somehow evolved on the Earth and went through all these changes, then you got to tell a story like the Netflix series does. But if you want the real story convoluted, right? And it's really a fairy tale. But if you want the real story, you go back to the Bible. Start there. The Bible tells us about when these animals were created, all land animals on day six. And also they bought a flood in Genesis, a judgment for the wickedness of mankind kind, but also that the animals were eating each other as well. So God's like, let's start over. We'll take a small remnant of each kind and we'll start over. The animals didn't have a chance. God chose the two.
Trey
Right?
Dr. Tim Clary
Humans all had a choice. But only eight people get on the ark. And so there's maybe up to a billion people that perished in the flood. But they had a choice, just like we have a choice today. The door of the ark was salvation. I talk about this a lot. The door of the ark was salvation. But Jesus, by his death on the cross and is shedding his blood and his rising again. We just celebrated Easter. He's opened that door of salvation for all of us.
Trey
Yeah, Absolutely. To anyone who will accept.
Dr. Tim Clary
Absolutely. Well, it's just like walking through the door. You had to believe enough to walk through the door to get salvation on the ark.
Trey
Yes.
Dr. Tim Clary
You have to believe enough to accept what Jesus did for us, substituted his death for ours. He took our sin. It's the same thing. You have to not physically walk through a door, but you have to believe enough to be willing to walk through that door.
Trey
Thank you for watching the Creation podcast. We'll see you next time.
The Creation Podcast, Episode 123
PhD Geologist Reacts to New Netflix Dinosaur “Documentary”
Released: May 20, 2026 | Host: Trey (The Institute for Creation Research) | Guest: Dr. Tim Clary, Geologist and ICR Director of Research
This episode critically examines the new Netflix documentary series "The Dinosaurs" from a young-earth creationist perspective. Host Trey and geologist Dr. Tim Clary assess the scientific and narrative claims of the documentary, focusing on its evolutionary assumptions, portrayal of dinosaurs, and treatment of fossil evidence. They expose where the documentary aligns or diverges from both observable evidence and biblical worldview. The episode also explores how worldview shapes scientific interpretation and discusses the biblical placement of dinosaurs in history, emphasizing the global flood and the role of presuppositions in science communication.
Storytelling and Presentation
"They made them, they dressed them up in feathers, dressed them up with a lot of hair on them… kind of fabrication, it's not based on a lot of hard science… Fossils themselves don't tell behavior." — Dr. Clary (02:16)
Use of Deep Time
"It's very precise, but it's not accurate. There's no way to verify these. There's no way to go back in time and verify these." — Dr. Clary (14:27)
"They have a peak in sea level at that same time that we see the peak in sea level on all the continents of the world… They just don't think it quite flooded everything, which I do." — Dr. Clary (04:21)
"They never address that. So they tell the story, but they don't tell you the beginning." — Dr. Clary (07:46)
"The actual science shows that tyrannosaurs of all types had no feathers, just scaly skin." — Dr. Clary (12:14)
"Why not just say about 200 million? They're very specific when you want to be. It's to the point where it's almost absurd." — Dr. Clary (14:40)
"You can't change the rules of the game halfway through… and that's what they did, unfortunately." — Dr. Clary (10:19)
Worldview Shapes Interpretation
"If you have control over the entire narrative and if you don't need any evidence to make claims, you can just kind of say whatever you want if you get the majority behind you." — Trey (35:13)
Children as an Audience
"Children are watching this and they're being told that this is the true story, this is actually what happened. While they're impressionable." — Trey (16:25)
Biblical Timeline of Dinosaurs
"The word dinosaur didn't exist until 1841… He called them all the beasts of the Earth." — Dr. Clary (39:59)
Fossil Record as Flood Record
"So you expect a lot of mixing. And that's exactly what we see. The fossils tell a different story than what they're portraying in here." — Dr. Clary (58:38)
Post-Flood Dinosaur Survival
"They always have them with the legs coming straight down. To me, that is compelling that these, they really did see dinosaurs." — Dr. Clary (48:43)
"There's no crater there… Where's the melt? Where's the evidence?" — Dr. Clary (50:52)
"There's a lot of bullying going on in terms of funding and everything else and publications. You've got to get on board." — Dr. Clary (51:57)
Be Skeptical of Documentary Certainty: Most assertions in "The Dinosaurs" go beyond what evidence supports, often presenting interpretation and conjecture as fact, especially regarding behavior, appearance, and evolutionary lineage.
Worldview Matters: The way scientists and filmmakers interpret fossils and Earth's history is heavily influenced by their starting assumptions—whether evolutionary or biblical.
Limited Agreement with Mainstream Science: While agreeing that there was a peak in flooding/extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, the reasons and framework radically diverge.
Fossil Record as Flood Record: The order and nature of fossils are interpreted as ecological zonation and rapid burial during the global flood, not as evidence for deep time or evolution.
Scientific Consensus Can Constrain Inquiry: Scientists who question the dominant narrative (even as evolutionists) can find themselves sidelined.
Approach Media Critically: Treat “science documentaries” as entertainment and distinguish between evidence-based claims and speculative storytelling.
The episode urges listeners to critically engage with documentaries like "The Dinosaurs," remain alert to distinctions between fact and narrative, and recognize how underlying worldview assumptions shape interpretations. Dr. Clary and Trey consistently advocate for a return to Scripture as the interpretative foundation, presenting it as the only consistent and historically reliable worldview for understanding dinosaurs and Earth’s history.