*** w73 7/15 p. 447 Questions From Readers ***
When did God create dinosaurs, and when did they become extinct?—U.S.A.
The Bible does not provide specific answers to this question. According to the Genesis account, animals were created during the fifth and sixth creative periods or ‘days.’ If the Hebrew expression translated "great sea monsters" [Hebrew, tan·ni·nim´] includes dinosaurs, which often inhabited swampy, watery areas, this would mean that dinosaurs were created on the fifth "day." (Gen. 1:21) We do not know whether they continued to exist until man was created (toward the close of the sixth "day"). At the very latest it seems likely that they must have disappeared off the earth at the time of the flood of Noah’s day. Dinosaurs were reptiles, and some kinds of dinosaurs bear strong resemblance structurally and otherwise to lizards (sauros is, in fact, the Greek word for "lizard"; saura in Leviticus 11:29, LXX). Not all types of dinosaurs were of such gigantic size. Hence, even if they had survived till the Flood, this would not have required taking pairs of the mammoth varieties into the ark. Other smaller members of the particular family or "kind" to which these belonged would have sufficed to fulfill the divine command.—Gen. 6:19, 20; 7:14.
Some of the older translations of the Bible at times use the word "dragons" to translate the Hebrew tan·ni·nim´ ("sea monsters," NW). (Ps. 74:13; 148:7; Isa. 27:1, AuthorizedVersion) The term "dragon" (Greek, dra´kon) is found in the Christian Greek Scriptures. It has been suggested as possible that, rather than having a purely mythical source, this expression may originally have been applied to enormous creatures such as the dinosaurs, taking on mythical tones only after these mammoth creatures had long disappeared. Interestingly, many of the mythical depictions of the "dragon" strongly resemble certain types within the family of huge reptilian creatures that includes the dinosaur.
