Dinosaurs in Ancient Art and Text

"As Christians, we should not use faulty arguments or put forward as "evidences" things that have been debunked unless new evidence has been brought forth that call into question such arguments.  That is dishonest and brings reproach on Christ's name." — Troy Lacey, Answers in Genesis, 2025¹

"Therefore, it is recommended that creationists avoid using this example as evidence for dinosaurs living in recent centuries." — Keaton Halley, Creation Ministries International, on the Ta Prohm carving, 2025²

Summary

Young-earth creationists hold that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time, before the Flood and for some centuries after it.  They hold this because Genesis puts land animals and people on the same day, not because of any picture.  Answers in Genesis says so plainly:  "we believe man lived with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles, not because of the above or other evidences, but because Scripture says so."¹  But if people did live beside large reptiles for centuries, they might have drawn them or written about them.  So creationist writers have collected carvings, paintings, figurines and stories that they say show dinosaurs.  This article tests each case the way a museum would test a new object.  First provenance:  who made it, when, and how we know.  Then what the image actually shows, set against the anatomy claimed.  Then the other explanations on offer:  a living animal such as a crocodile, monitor lizard or rhinoceros;  a fossil that someone found and tried to explain;  ordinary decoration;  or a modern fake.

The findings, case by case:

1. The Ica stones are modern. The engraved stones that made Ica famous came to the Peruvian doctor Javier Cabrera from local diggers, with no record of where they were found. In January 1975 two of his suppliers, Basilio Uschuya and Irma Gutiérrez de Aparcana, told the police and a Lima magazine that they had carved the stones themselves. Cabrera's own book records the confession.³ Uschuya later changed his story more than once. But some stones show dinosaurs as mid-twentieth-century museums mounted them, such as "a fully erect T. rex dragging its tail," which Answers in Genesis itself calls "a tip-off" to a modern stone. Answers in Genesis now lists the stones under "Evidences That Are Questionable and Should Be Cautiously Mentioned or Avoided."¹ The best creationist case, published by Creation Ministries International in 2016, defends one different stone, dug up in 2001, that carries a "simplistic sauropod." Its authors concede that most of the famous dinosaur stones show "very little patina."⁴
2. The Acámbaro figurines are modern. In 1952 the archaeologist Charles Di Peso watched a "test" excavation and found that the cache had been "very recently buried" in a freshly cut tunnel, with fresh animal manure in the fill.⁵ The thermoluminescence dates of about 2500 BC that creationists quote were withdrawn by the laboratory that made them. Not one of twenty figurines passed the standard plateau test, and the regrown signal put their firing about 30 years before 1969, close to the date the cache was found.⁶ Answers in Genesis puts the figurines in the same "questionable" tier as Ica.¹
3. The rock-art dinosaurs are composites and stains. The Kachina Bridge "sauropod" in Utah is two separate pecked figures joined by mud stains that form its "legs."⁷ The Black Dragon Canyon "pterosaur" is several separate figures, two of them human, that someone joined with a chalk outline.⁸ The Havasupai Canyon "dinosaur" of 1924 fits a stylised bird or a bighorn sheep. Answers in Genesis still calls Kachina Bridge one of its "Most Reliable Evidences," while reporting a 2025 creationist paper that "may challenge" it.¹ One point is still open: whether the pecking runs down into the "legs." Phil Senter and Sally Cole say no, Answers in Genesis says yes, and neither side has published a close-range record that settles it.
4. The Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" is genuine twelfth-century work showing something else. The carving is old; the critic who studied it on site found "no reason to think that the Ta Prohm carving is a modern hoax."⁹ But the "plates" match the background foliage of the roundels around it. An eroded carving of a similar animal with no plates exists, and the head, snout and legs do not fit a stegosaur. Creation Ministries International's own journal now recommends that creationists stop using it and favours an Asian rhinoceros.²
5. The Carlisle Cathedral brass shows decorative and mythical beasts. Bishop Richard Bell's floor brass of the 1490s is real, but it is a worn border of small animals, and its strips were lifted and reset a few years before Creation magazine wrote about it. The cathedral's canon warden wrote that the border shows "various sorts of vegetation, birds, dogs, fish, a bat, an eel and several mythical beasts."¹⁰
6. The Nile mosaic of Palestrina labels its animals, and its "dinosaur" is labelled as a hybrid. The page that started the claim reads the Greek label over the creature as "crocodile-leopard."¹¹ The mosaic was cut into squares and moved to Rome in the seventeenth century and has been restored several times since, and some pieces "were not reassembled in the correct places."¹²
7. The dragon texts do not describe dinosaurs. Herodotus's winged serpents of Arabia are "small in size and of various colours," swarm around frankincense trees, and are driven off with smoke.¹³ He saw heaps of bones and heard a story; nothing in the text points to a pterosaur. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's "fiery dragons" of 793 fly "across the firmament" beside "immense sheets of light," as omens before a famine and the Viking raid on Lindisfarne.¹⁴ The main secular alternative, that ancient people built legends such as the griffin from dinosaur fossils, was rejected in a 2024 review by the palaeontologist Mark Witton and Richard Hing.¹⁵
8. Behemoth and Leviathan are not the best evidence for dinosaurs, though Behemoth's tail is a real problem for the usual reading. Commentators who read Behemoth as a hippopotamus admit that "tail like a cedar" is "hyperbolical" or "extreme," because a hippo's tail is tiny.¹⁶ That is the strongest point for the sauropod reading, and it is a fair one. But the same passage has Behemoth lying "under the lotus," a thorny shrub, and shaded by it.¹⁷ Leviathan breathes fire. Elsewhere the Hebrew Bible gives Leviathan several heads, and Isaiah calls it "the piercing serpent … that crooked serpent," close to the words that older Canaanite texts from Ugarit use for the seven-headed sea serpent Lotan.¹⁶ The passage fits real Nile animals described with poetic exaggeration, or a mythic beast drawn partly from them, better than a sauropod and a fire-breathing marine reptile.

Verdict.  Every object and text examined here fails as evidence that people saw living dinosaurs or pterosaurs.  Two cases are unresolved on narrow points:  the Kachina Bridge legs, and Behemoth's identity between a real animal and a mythic one.  Neither leans toward a dinosaur.  The creationist organisations themselves have done much of the sorting.  Creation Ministries International has told its readers to drop Ta Prohm, and Answers in Genesis has moved Ica and Acámbaro into its "questionable" tier.  The cases that remain in use are the weakest of the old ones, not the strongest.  None of this touches the young-earth claim itself, which rests on Genesis.  It does mean the claim has no support from ancient art, and a reader should hear that plainly.

Part 1: How a claimed depiction is tested

A picture of an animal can show that someone saw that animal only if three things hold.

First, the picture has to be as old as claimed.  An object with no record of where and when it was found cannot date anything, because a modern carver can put any animal on any stone.  So the first question is always provenance:  who found it, where, when, in what layer, and who else saw it in place.  The Paluxy "man tracks" failed at this step before anyone looked closely at their shape;  the sibling article Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together follows that history.

Second, the picture has to show what is claimed.  Ancient art is full of animals.  Some are drawn from life, some are stylised past recognition, and many are composites:  griffins, sphinxes, sea-serpents, dragons.  Among thousands of such images, some will look like a dinosaur by chance, just as clouds look like faces.  Senter and Cole call this effect pareidolia.⁷  A real hit needs more than a long neck or a row of bumps.

Third, the picture has to fit a living dinosaur better than the other explanations.  There are four of these.  The artist may have drawn a living animal that is still around, such as a crocodile, a monitor lizard or a rhinoceros.  The artist may have seen a fossil and tried to imagine its owner, which is the folklorist Adrienne Mayor's explanation for the griffin.  The animal may be decoration or myth.  Or the object may be a modern fake.

Answers in Genesis itself states the strongest form of the test.  Of the Carlisle brass it argues that the engraving "included accurate anatomical information that was not known to science for another 500 years."¹  That is the right kind of claim.  A securely dated picture that gets right something only modern palaeontology knows, and that no fossil or living animal could have shown the artist, would be hard to explain any other way.  The same test also works in reverse.  A "dinosaur" drawn the way twentieth-century museums wrongly mounted dinosaurs, standing upright on a dragging tail, points to a twentieth-century artist.  The 1924 Doheny expedition report on the Havasupai Canyon figure shows the trap:  "The fact that the animal is upright and balanced on its tail would seem to indicate that the prehistoric artist must have seen it alive."¹⁸  The report's writer was reading the figure through the museum posture of his own day.

The parts below take the cases in order of how much provenance they have, from none to a great deal.

Part 2: The Ica stones and the Acámbaro figurines

These two collections are the oldest staples of the "dinosaurs in art" case, and they fail at the first step.

The Ica stones

What is claimed.  Thousands of rounded andesite stones from the Ica region of southern Peru carry engraved scenes:  fish, llamas, star-gazers, surgery, and people riding or fighting dinosaurs.  Answers in Genesis gives the case in its fairest form:  "Most were excavated by local farmers from Ica, Nazca, and Paracas native burial sites," the finders will not reveal the sites because grave-digging is a crime, and so "there are likely thousands of authentic stones, and a few hundred (at most) forgeries."¹

Provenance.  By Cabrera's own account the stones first appeared on the market around 1961, through the Soldi brothers, who bought them from huaqueros, the grave-diggers of Ocucaje.³  Cabrera bought hundreds and then thousands, and by his count held 11,000 by the mid-1970s.³  Creation Ministries International's Dennis Swift and David Woetzel sum up the problem:  "The unspoken rule of the Huaqueros is that they never reveal where they find things."⁴  A stone bought from a grave-digger who will not say where he dug has no find-spot, no layer and no date.

The confession.  On 17 January 1975 the Lima magazine Mundial reported that the police had questioned two of Cabrera's suppliers, Basilio Uschuya and Irma Gutiérrez de Aparcana, and that both said they carved the stones.  The account comes to us from Cabrera's own book, which quotes Uschuya's wife:  "My husband told them that all of the stones he sold to Dr. Cabrera he had carved himself.  That he hadn't dug them up."³  Cabrera's reply is the creationist reply still in use.  Admitting to digging the stones up would have meant admitting to grave-robbing, "It is logical that they should answer that they themselves fabricated the stones."³  That is a fair point, and it cuts both ways:  a carver may confess falsely to escape jail, and he may also retract falsely to keep selling to collectors.  Uschuya did both.  Kenneth Feder, an archaeologist who catalogues such cases, says Uschuya "has recanted just about every version of the story he has told," but that he described making the stones from pictures in magazines and books, with knives, chisels and a dental drill, and ageing them by baking them in dung.¹⁹  Swift himself once paid Uschuya to make a stone:  "It took a full day for him to carve a crude dinosaur onto a small stone using a hacksaw blade."⁴

Cabrera's arithmetic, checked.  Cabrera tried to price the confession.  Gutiérrez had said she made 20 to 25 stones a week.  Cabrera wrote that "she would have been producing an average of three stones per day," that the two carvers together made six, and that if each had made 25,000 stones, "they would have needed twenty-three years to complete the task," while Uschuya said he started only in 1965.³  The 50,000 in that sum is Cabrera's own estimate for every stone ever sold, including those still being sold to tourists.  His museum held 11,000.  At the carvers' stated pace of six a day, 11,000 stones take about 1,833 working days, about five years.²⁰  That fits inside the eight working years Cabrera allows Uschuya, without counting any other carver.  So the numbers do not rule out a small cottage industry.  One objection in Cabrera's sum does survive:  he says most of his stones are far larger than the orange-sized ones Gutiérrez dug up for the reporters, and a big stone takes longer to engrave.  Nobody has published a count of the collection by size, so that part cannot be priced.

What the stones show.  Answers in Genesis concedes the decisive point:  "Sometimes it is easy to spot an errant depiction of a dinosaur that was made in the 1960s or 1970s that is a tip-off (e.g., a fully erect T. rex dragging its tail)."¹  A tail-dragging Tyrannosaurus is how mid-century museums and films showed the animal, and it is wrong:  the tail was held off the ground.  An ancient carver who had seen a living tyrannosaur would not have made the museum's mistake.

The best creationist case.  In 2016 Creation Ministries International's Journal of Creation published Woetzel and Swift's attempt to sort genuine stones from fakes.  They sent three stones to two commercial laboratories in Oregon:  a souvenir stone Uschuya made for Swift, one Cabrera stone, and one stone that the Palpa Museum excavated from a Nazca-period tomb in 2001 with about thirty witnesses.  The souvenir failed both a patina test and a test for metal traces in the grooves;  the other two passed.  They conclude:  "The Palpa Museum stone bearing etchings of a sauropod dinosaur and other animals was confirmed as ancient."⁴  That is a real attempt at a test, and the authors are right that no critic has run one on the stones.  But it does not rescue the collection.  The Palpa stone's sauropod is, in their words, "simplistic," "somewhat obscured by the extensive patina and not as detailed as most of the Cabrera Stones."⁴  The laboratory reports are unpublished, the sample is one stone of each kind, and the authors concede that the famous dinosaur stones are the ones that fail their own criterion:  "Most of the stones of unknown provenance, including those with obvious dinosaurian depictions, display very little patina."⁴  A long-necked quadruped scratched on a tomb stone is not a sauropod unless it shows something only a sauropod has, and the published description does not say that it does.

Verdict on Ica:  fails.  The dinosaur stones that made Ica famous have no provenance, were confessed as carvings to the police and the press, and include anatomy copied from twentieth-century restorations.  The single excavated stone is unresolved as a picture, because its images and test reports have not been published in a form anyone can check.

The Acámbaro figurines

What is claimed.  In July 1944 the German merchant Waldemar Julsrud began buying clay figurines that a local labourer dug up near Acámbaro, Guanajuato, paying a peso apiece.  Swift's account calls Julsrud "a German hardware merchant" and says he paid the digger "one peso (worth about 12 cents) for each complete piece he brought in."²¹  Julsrud ended with about 32,000 pieces, including figures that look like sauropods, stegosaurs and Tyrannosaurus.⁵  Answers in Genesis gives the argument for authenticity at its strongest:  "the sheer number of figurines seemed to make the possibility of a hoax remote, unless an entire crew of villagers was involved in producing them."¹

Provenance.  Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation went to Acámbaro in June 1952 to answer that question in the field.  He examined the collection and found the edges of the modelled eyes and scales "sharp and new," no soil packed into the crevices, and breakage that looked deliberate:  "In the entire collection of 32,000 specimens no shovel, mattock, or pick marks were noted."⁵  Then he watched two excavators find a cache in a prehistoric room.  "The cache had been very recently buried by digging a down sloping tunnel into the black fill dirt of the prehistoric room."  The diggers had cut into the sterile red floor below the fill and mixed the two soils as they backfilled, so the tunnel was easy to trace.  There were fingerprints in the fresh earth packed into one small bowl, and "the presence of some fresh animal manure in the tunnel fill, offered proof enough that the material had been recently planted."⁵  Di Peso also answered the numbers argument:  "a family living in the vicinity of Acambaro make these figurines during the winter months when their fields lie idle."⁵  At a peso per piece, a village family with idle winters has a reason to make many.

The dates.  Two kinds of date are quoted for the collection.  The first is radiocarbon.  Swift's account lists three dates from samples Charles Hapgood sent to a New Jersey laboratory, the oldest "6480 + - 170," which he converts to about 4530 BC.²¹  A radiocarbon date measures the carbon in the sample, not the moment a figurine was fired, and Di Peso's account shows why old carbon is expected:  the figurines were buried in the fill of a prehistoric room and packed with that fill.  Neither Swift's page nor Carriveau and Han says what material was dated.  The second kind is thermoluminescence, which does date firing.  In 1969 to 1972 the University of Pennsylvania's MASCA laboratory produced dates around 2500 BC, which the museum's director publicised.²²  Gary Carriveau and Mark Han then retested the collection and showed that the dates were invalid.  "A random sampling of twenty figurines from this collection was tested for a plateau; not one passed this essential test."⁶  Retesting samples first measured in 1969, they found a regrown signal "where no signal should be expected," and its size placed "the time of firing at about 30 years before 1969, a time very near to the discovery of the figurines."⁶

Swift tells it differently:  the laboratory retracted its dates "when the lab at the University of Pennsylvania found out that dinosaurs were part of the collection," and "the testing was a hocus pocus, laboratory trick to avoid the obvious conclusion that dinosaurs and man lived together."²¹  The published paper gives a physical reason, a failed plateau test, that any laboratory can check.  Swift's account gives an unnamed technician and no paper.

Verdict on Acámbaro:  fails.  The one archaeologist who watched the figurines come out of the ground saw them planted, the thermoluminescence dates failed the test that would make them dates at all, and the radiocarbon dates measure carbon that was in the ground before the figurines were.

Part 3: Rock art in the American Southwest and beyond

Rock art has better provenance than the Ica stones.  Nobody doubts that the Kachina Bridge petroglyphs are ancient:  Senter and Cole attribute most of the images at the site to Ancestral Pueblo farmers of about AD 200 to 1300, and some to earlier hunter-gatherers.⁷  The question here is what the images show.

Kachina Bridge

What is claimed.  A pecked figure on the wall beside Kachina Bridge, in Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah, has a long neck, a long tail and four legs.  Answers in Genesis lists it among its "Most Reliable Evidences":  the site shows "a bighorn sheep, a turtle, and what appears to be an obvious sauropod dinosaur," and "The Anasazi people clearly saw living sauropods."¹  Senter and Cole list the creationist books that used it from 1997 onward, and note that "A plaque illustrating the image is even exhibited in the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky."⁷

What it shows.  In 2011 the palaeontologist Phil Senter and the rock-art specialist Sally Cole examined the panel under changing light, by eye, with binoculars and with telephoto lenses.  The figure sits about two metres above head height on a near-vertical wall, which is why so few people have looked at it closely.⁷  Their finding:  "the 'neck' and 'back' of Dinosaur 1 are a composite of two separate petroglyphs, and its 'legs' are a natural mud or mineral stain."⁷  The two pecked shapes have a gap between them and differ in the pattern and density of their pecking, and a later spiral is pecked over the "head."  They looked at three other "dinosaurs" on the same panel that a creationist website had named, and found one entirely a mud stain and two human-made shapes that are not animals.⁷  Their conclusion:  "The four Kachina Bridge 'dinosaurs' are illusions produced by pareidolia."⁷  They also said plainly that "in this case there was no deliberate hoax."⁷

The creationist reply.  Answers in Genesis answered in March 2011.  Ishmael Abrahams objected:  "So all the researchers did was . . . look at it?  They performed no paint test, etching experiments, weathering experiments, animal shape research, or researching related rock art in the region?"  On the composite finding he wrote that "An artist can easily use multiple images to composite a whole image," and on the stained legs, "But why assume it is not part of the image?  Using stains of mud or other sources of coloring was common for artists."²³  Answers magazine carried the same complaint about the lack of "paint tests, etching experiments, weathering experiments, etc."²⁴  In 2025 Answers in Genesis made a different and sharper claim:  "the pecking and divots of the petroglyph clearly extend down to the legs making this "debunking" of the petroglyph spurious."¹

Weighing it.  The method complaint has some force.  Senter and Cole used their eyes and lenses, not a pigment or weathering test, and they say themselves that natural and human marks on sandstone can be hard to tell apart.  But the complaint applies with more force to the original identification, which was made from photographs taken from below.  The two positions now disagree on one observable fact:  whether pecking runs into the "legs."  That can be settled by close-range photogrammetry or a published pecking map, and neither side has published one.  Answers in Genesis also reports that "new research has been presented at the 2025 Creation Research Society conference that may challenge the conclusion that the petroglyph is a sauropod."¹  That research could not be found for this article.  Even if the legs prove to be pecked, the figure would still be a long-necked, long-tailed quadruped in a rock-art tradition full of snakes and stylised animals, with no feature that only a sauropod has.

Verdict on Kachina Bridge:  fails, with one point unresolved.  The image as published is a composite with stained legs, by the only published examination of it.  Whether the legs are pecked is open until someone publishes a close-range record.

Black Dragon Canyon

What is claimed.  A red painting in Black Dragon Canyon, in Utah's San Rafael Swell, looks like a winged creature with a long head.  A 1979 guidebook said it "looks very much like a pterosaur," and at least three young-earth books used that line with photographs.  Two of them likened it to the crested pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus.⁸

What it shows.  Senter visited the site in 2011 and found that the "pterosaur" is not one painting.  "Its 'head' and 'neck' are a painting of a person with outstretched arms."  Its torso and limbs are a second human figure, and its other "wing" is a horned serpent.  "The three paintings only appear connected because someone outlined the group with chalk."⁸  Senter allows that "the chalking was done not as an archaeological exercise but as a practical joke."⁸  In 2015 the rock-art scholars Jean-Loïc Le Quellec and Paul Bahn and the chemist Marvin Rowe analysed the pigments with portable X-ray fluorescence.  They report that the method "refutes this ill-founded interpretation and reveals a scene characteristic of Barrier Canyon style, featuring an anthropomorphic figure."²⁵

Verdict:  fails.  The pterosaur is a chalk outline drawn across separate ancient figures.

Havasupai Canyon and the rest

The oldest case is from 1924.  The Doheny Scientific Expedition photographed a petroglyph in Havasupai Canyon, Arizona, and its leader Samuel Hubbard concluded that "the prehistoric artist must have seen it alive."  Hubbard did not draw a young-earth conclusion.  He thought it meant that "man goes back in Geologic time to the Triassic Period," or that "left over" dinosaurs survived into the age of mammals, which "indicates a vast antiquity."¹⁸  Senter compared the figure with other southwestern rock art and found it most like a stylised bird.  A second Havasupai figure that one creationist author called a dinosaur matches the region's bighorn sheep or rabbits.⁸

Senter's 2012 survey went through every rock-art "dinosaur" or "pterosaur" in print.  A Tanzanian painting that a cryptozoologist said "definitely is not a giraffe" is, Senter says, "obviously a giraffe."⁸  Three Zambian figures are lizards or crocodiles with short necks.  The Agawa Rock "dragon" in Ontario is the Ojibwe Underwater Panther, a supernatural being, painted on a panel that also shows a horse and rider and so dates from after European contact.⁸  The Piasa of Alton, Illinois, was a cliff painting that the explorers Marquette and Joliet saw in 1673 and that was later destroyed.  Marquette mentioned no wings, and the winged "pterosaur" version and its "Illini legend" come from a nineteenth-century American author.⁸  Senter's tally:  the rock-art cases in print had "dwindled from twelve to two, and those two are problematic."⁸  One of the two is a petroglyph at Wupatki National Monument, Arizona, which "has a single horn, two dorsal humps, and a forked tail.  It resembles neither any known dinosaur nor other southwestern rock art."⁸

Answers in Genesis now lists the Wupatki figure, a horned serpent at Embden, Maine, and sea monsters at Nanaimo, British Columbia, as dragons, and asks why native artists would carve a "mythological creature" beside the animals they hunted.¹  The answer is in its own examples.  The Agawa Rock panel puts a supernatural Underwater Panther beside a horse and rider, and Nanaimo's carvers named their sea creatures in their own stories.  Rock art the world over mixes animals of the hunt with spirit beings.  A horned, humped, fork-tailed serpent is not a dinosaur, and Answers in Genesis does not claim it is one.  It calls these dragons, and then needs the separate claim that dragons were dinosaurs, which Part 5 takes up.

Verdict on the other rock art:  fails.  Every rock-art "dinosaur" that has been examined turned out to be a known animal, a spirit being, a composite or a modern addition.

Part 4: Temple carvings, brasses and mosaics

These three cases are the strongest in the creationist literature, because the objects are certainly old.  None is a modern fake.  The question is only what they show.

The Ta Prohm "stegosaurus"

Provenance.  Ta Prohm is a temple at Angkor, Cambodia, built under King Jayavarman VII and dedicated in 1186.²⁶  Its doorframes carry rows of small carved roundels of animals.  One roundel shows a four-legged animal with a row of rounded lobes along its back.  Glen Kuban notes that the carving was "first brought to widespread attention" by Claude Jacques and Michael Freeman's books on Angkor of 1997 and 1999, which said that it "bears a striking resemblance to a stegosaurus."²⁷  Some critics have suggested that the carving is a modern addition, because it looks cleaner than its neighbours.  Scott Burnett, writing in Skeptical Inquirer after ten days at the Angkor park in 2011 and 2017, rejects that:  "there is no reason to think that the Ta Prohm carving is a modern hoax," and it "is only lighter than surrounding carvings because someone has zealously cleaned it for photographing."⁹  This is a point where the creationists were right and some critics were wrong.  The carving is twelfth-century work.

What is claimed.  Don Patton wrote that "the stone carvers … saw a stegosaurus as they saw monkeys, buffalo and deer."²⁶  Answers in Genesis published Kenneth Cole's argument in 2007 that "only a little over 800 years ago, some dinosaurs were likely still living in the region of Cambodia," with an editor's note that "there are some who question the authenticity of this relief."²⁸  In 2017 David Woetzel measured the carving for Answers in Genesis's Answers Research Journal, reported "a second stegosaurus carving in the portico of the temple," and proposed "that the ancient artists were seeking to model domesticated stegosaurids."²⁹  Answers in Genesis now files Ta Prohm under "Evidences That Still Need More Confirmation/Verification" and tells its readers to "be upfront and state that there is dissenting opinion on the specific creature, even among creationists."¹

What it shows.  The case rests on the lobes.  Stegosaurs had tall plates along the back and spikes on the tail.  The carving has a row of rounded lobes, no spikes, a large rounded head with what may be horns or ears, and legs of about equal length.  Burnett points out that "Dorsal ornamentation or vegetation is clearly associated with the animal immediately above the stegosaur," and reports:  "I did, however, find an image of a similar animal without the dorsal plates."⁹  The lobes are most likely the leafy background that fills the other roundels, not part of the animal.  The most detailed creationist critique agrees.  Keaton Halley of Creation Ministries International writes that "Stegosaur heads narrow toward the tip of the beak, whereas the carving shows a bulky, rounded snout," and that "stegosaurs generally had front legs that were shorter than the hind legs, but the carved creature has legs of roughly equal length."²  His conclusion:  "in my view the most likely alternative is that the creature is an Asian (probably Javan) rhinoceros."²  Woetzel replied in the same journal in 2026 that Halley's "only piece of new evidence … is a badly eroded carving that displays an indistinct quadruped."³⁰

Verdict on Ta Prohm:  fails.  The carving is genuine and old.  It most likely shows a rhinoceros, or an animal of local myth, set against foliage.  It does not show a stegosaur, and the most careful creationist reviewer now advises against using it.

Bishop Bell's brass, Carlisle Cathedral

Provenance.  Richard Bell was Bishop of Carlisle from 1478 and died in 1496.  His memorial is a brass set into the cathedral floor, with a narrow border of small animals.³¹  The brass is worn by centuries of feet, and "only a few years previously, the brass pieces had been professionally removed and reset because they were coming loose from the underlying stonework," as Creation magazine reported in 2003.¹⁰

What is claimed.  Philip Bell wrote in Creation magazine that "On one engraving the creatures have an unmistakable resemblance to certain dinosaurs."¹⁰  The Institute for Creation Research's Brian Thomas visited and wrote:  "I cannot deny the clear dinosaur decor on Bishop Bell's tomb."³¹  Answers in Genesis lists the brass first among its "Most Reliable Evidences."  It argues that one creature's tail ends in spikes like those of the Chinese sauropod Shunosaurus, described in the late 1980s, so that the brass "included accurate anatomical information that was not known to science for another 500 years."¹

What it shows.  Two long-necked animals with entwined necks, in a strip that also holds an eel, dogs, fish, a bird, a pig, a bat and other creatures.  The cathedral has an opinion.  Its canon warden, David Weston, wrote in 2002:  "These motifs include various sorts of vegetation, birds, dogs, fish, a bat, an eel and several mythical beasts.  I do not think that the word "dinosaur" is appropriate in this context.  The decoration is typical of the period, and is in no way unusual or unremarkable."¹⁰  Creation magazine printed that letter;  the Institute for Creation Research's article does not answer it.  The Shunosaurus argument also has a problem that Answers in Genesis itself reports.  Its second example of a spiked sauropod tail, Spinophorosaurus, lost its "spikes" when they were reidentified as "remnants of the clavicle."¹  That leaves one sauropod with a tail club and small spikes, matched against a small, worn, reset brass figure whose tail Answers in Genesis describes as "either clubbed or appearing to end in a cleft."¹  For a picture to carry "accurate anatomical information that was not known to science," the detail has to be clear on the object, and here it is not.

Verdict on the Carlisle brass:  fails.  The brass is genuine.  Its long-necked creatures are best read as the "mythical beasts" the cathedral sees, in a decorative tradition that had them long before dinosaurs were known.

The Nile mosaic of Palestrina

Provenance.  The Nile mosaic is a large Hellenistic floor mosaic from Praeneste, near Rome.  Meyboom dates the public buildings it decorated to about 125 to 120 BC.  Its upper register shows "a rocky landscape populated by Aethiopian animals labelled in Greek and by groups of native African hunters."³²  Its later history matters.  It was cut up in the 1620s and taken to Rome, and "The composition was then damaged, restored and consolidated on several occasions over the following centuries, with the result that its appearance today is different from its original appearance in antiquity."³²  "Parts of the mosaic resemble a patchwork quilt, and bear obvious signs of having been cut into very square sections.  Some of these were not reassembled in the correct places."¹²  The standard scholarly study, by Paul Meyboom, reads the labels and identifies the animals:  "Two giraffes with their Greek name kamelopardalis 'spotted camel' are depicted in section 5."³³

What is claimed.  A web page archived in 2014 says that the hunters "are pursuing what appears to be some type of dinosaur."  The same page gives the Greek above the animal as "KROKODILOPARDALIS which is literally translated Crocodile-Leopard," and admits that "some had suggested the dino was just a badly drawn croc."¹¹

What it shows.  An animal the mosaic's makers labelled as a kind of crocodile, in a section of exotic and partly fabulous beasts of the far Nile.  The label is the strongest evidence of what the maker meant, and it names a crocodile.  The mosaic's other animals include real ones such as giraffes, hippos and crocodiles, and composite ones.  Meyboom discusses one hippopotamus drawn with crocodile features and compares it with an Egyptian religious monster, "a creature that combined the backpart of a hippopotamus with the forepart of a lion and the head of a crocodile, i.e. the Eater of the Dead."³³  The labels are not always accurate either:  section 7 has a bear, labelled in Greek, though bears do not live in Africa.³³  A Hellenistic artist working from travellers' reports of a crocodile-like predator would draw something like this.

Verdict on the Nile mosaic:  fails.  The creature is labelled as a crocodile-leopard by the people who made it, and the panel was cut and reassembled before anyone called it a dinosaur.

Part 5: The dragon accounts, and the fossils people really did find

What is claimed

Creation Ministries International's case for dragons as dinosaurs was put in 1992 by Russell Grigg:  "Although doubtless over the years many of these dragon stories and drawings have gained embellishments, the fact of their virtual worldwide existence, and the many items of similarity between the creatures slain and known dinosaur fossils, clearly point to an underlying reality."³⁴  Ken Ham put it more simply in 2023:  "In the recent past, people actually lived with real live animals they called "dragons," and many dragon legends are just the exaggerated memory of a time when humans and what we now call dinosaurs interacted with one another."³⁵  Answers in Genesis's list of witnesses includes "an ancient historical account of serpents in Egypt with bat-like wings, the epic poem Beowulf with its account of a fiery flying serpent, and Native American petroglyphs."³⁶  The Institute for Creation Research adds that "The ancient historians Josephus (37-100 AD) and Herodotus (400s BC) mentioned winged serpents."³⁷

Herodotus's winged serpents

The "account of serpents in Egypt with bat-like wings" is Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC.  He went to a pass in Arabia, opposite the Egyptian city of Buto, "to inquire about the winged serpents," and found "bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that it is impossible to make report of the number."  The story he was told was that "at the beginning of spring winged serpents from Arabia fly towards Egypt, and the birds called ibises meet them at the entrance to this country and do not suffer the serpents to go by but kill them."¹³  He describes the animal:  "its form is like that of the watersnake;  and it has wings not feathered but most nearly resembling the wings of the bat."¹³  In Book 3 he adds that winged serpents, "small in size and of various colours," guard the frankincense trees "in great numbers about each tree" and "cannot be driven away from the trees by any other thing but only the smoke of storax."¹³  He also explains why they have not overrun the world:  the female bites through the male's neck while mating, and the young eat their way out of their mother.¹³

The bat-like wing is the one detail that fits a pterosaur, whose wings were skin, not feathers.  Everything else points away from one.  The animals are small, snake-bodied, brightly coloured, live only in Arabia, swarm around trees in great numbers, and are driven off with smoke.  Herodotus saw no living one.  He saw heaps of bones and heard a story that also explained why Egyptians honour the ibis.  The breeding story is plainly folklore.  None of this says what the bones were, and nobody has identified the site.  But the text gives no reason to think that a pterosaur was flying over Arabia in the fifth century BC.

Verdict on Herodotus:  fails.  A traveller's report of hearsay about small, swarming, snake-like fliers does not describe a pterosaur.

Medieval chronicles and Beowulf

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's entry for 793 is often cited as an English dragon sighting.  Its words:  "This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament.  These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine," and then the Viking sack of Lindisfarne.¹⁴  The chronicler lists omens in the sky:  lights, whirlwinds and fiery dragons.  Fiery shapes crossing the sky beside sheets of light read naturally as meteors or aurorae, and in the chronicle's own frame they are portents, not animals.

Bill Cooper's 1992 survey in Creation Ministries International's technical journal reads the dragon in Beowulf as a flying reptile:  "the description that they have left us fits that of a giant Pteranodon," and the poem says it was "fifty feet in length (or perhaps wing-span?) and about 300 years of age."³⁸  Beowulf's dragon breathes fire, guards a treasure hoard, and lives three centuries.  It is a monster in a poem that also contains Grendel and his mother.  Cooper's own hedge, "or perhaps wing-span?", shows how little the text constrains the animal.

Verdict on the medieval texts:  fails.  The chronicle reports sky omens, and the poem is a poem.

The fossil explanation, and its critics

The main secular alternative to the young-earth reading is that ancient people found fossils and imagined the animals.  The folklorist Adrienne Mayor made the best-known case:  that the griffin, a gold-guarding lion-bird of Greek legend, grew from travellers' tales of the beaked dinosaur Protoceratops, whose skeletons weather out in the Gobi.  She states it as her own hypothesis, about the Central Asian dinosaurs "whose fossils I suggest influenced the image of the griffin," and adds that "Not everyone accepts my griffin/dinosaur hypothesis."³⁹

In 2024 the palaeontologist Mark Witton and Richard Hing tested it and rejected it.  They argue that it ignores the established history of griffin art and myth, that "Protoceratops fossils occur hundreds of kilometres from the nearest gold deposits," that ancient texts read as describing Protoceratops are "unconvincing," and that the anatomical matches "are selectively identified."  Their verdict is that the link is "an 'ex post facto geomyth'."¹⁵  Ken Ham also rejects the fossil explanation, on different grounds:  "the legends probably aren't based on ancient peoples finding fossils.  Rather, they are based on actual human-dinosaur interactions."³⁵

People did sometimes draw fossils.  A Greek vase of about 575 to 550 BC, found at Caere in Italy and now in Boston, shows Herakles, Hesione and the sea-monster of Troy, and among them an animal skull.  The skull has often been identified as a fossil giraffid.  Stephen Croft argued in 2025 that it "belongs to an equid," a fossil horse "discovered in the Corinthia during clay collection in antiquity."⁴⁰  The readings disagree on the animal and agree that the painter drew a fossil skull.  So the fossil explanation is real for some images.  It does not follow that it explains dragons in general, and the griffin case shows how easily a neat match can be read into a legend.

Verdict on dragons as a class:  the origin of dragon legends is unresolved, and the dinosaur-memory explanation has no case that holds.  Every dragon account examined here is either hearsay about small living animals, a sky omen, a literary monster, or a composite with no anatomy that only a dinosaur had.  The fossil explanation works for a few images and fails for the griffin.  Neither the creationist nor the secular "dinosaur" reading has a dragon text that requires it.

Part 6: Behemoth and Leviathan

Behemoth and Leviathan are the only "dinosaurs" with an unbroken provenance.  Job 40 and 41 are certainly ancient, and nobody doubts what the Hebrew text says.  The question is what animals it describes.

What is claimed

Answers in Genesis summarises Job 40:15–18 and concludes:  "The beast the passage describes fits well with something similar to a sauropod dinosaur like Brachiosaurus."  Of Leviathan:  "Read Job 41 and see if you picture a ferocious marine reptile, like a Kronosaurus."³⁶  Lee Niermann's 1994 paper in Creation Ministries International's technical journal is firmer:  "These descriptions fit precisely all that we know about certain dinosaurs, the giant sauropods, but no other animal that we know of."⁴¹  Both lean on the tail.  The King James Version reads:  "He moveth his tail like a cedar."⁴²  A hippopotamus has a stubby tail.  A sauropod had a long, heavy one.

What the text says

The Hebrew of 40:15–24, set out in the Westminster Leningrad Codex, says this, verse by verse.⁴³

1. 40:15: בְהֵמוֹת, behemot, "whom I made with you," eats ḥāṣîr, "grass," "like an ox." Behemot is the plural of the ordinary word for a beast. The verbs are singular, so most readers take it as a plural of majesty, "the Beast." The Greek Septuagint simply translates θηρία, "wild beasts."⁴⁴
2. 40:17: יַחְפֹּץ זְנָבוֹ כְמוֹ אָרֶז, "he bends (or stiffens) his tail like a cedar;" and the "sinews" of his פַחַד are knit together. That last word is rare. The Latin Vulgate reads it as "testicles," "nervi testiculorum eius perplexi sunt," and the King James follows with "the sinews of his stones."⁴⁵
3. 40:19: "he is the first of the ways of God." The Hebrew רֵאשִׁית means first, beginning or chief, not largest.
4. 40:21–22: he lies "under the ṣeʾĕlîm," in the covert of reed and marsh, and "the ṣeʾĕlîm cover him with their shade; the willows of the brook surround him." The standard Hebrew lexicon, Brown, Driver and Briggs, defines ṣeʾĕlîm as "a kind of lotus," more exactly the thorny lotus, Ziziphus, "not sacred Nymphaea Lotus."¹⁷ That is a shrub.
5. 40:23: "if the river rages, he is not alarmed; he is confident though a Jordan rushes against his mouth."

Leviathan's fire is in 41:10–13 of the Hebrew (41:18–21 in English):  "his sneezes flash forth light … out of his mouth go burning torches, sparks of fire leap out.  Out of his nostrils goes smoke … his breath kindles coals, and a flame goes out of his mouth."⁴³

Three readings and their reasons

A real Nile animal, described with poetic exaggeration.  Since the French Protestant scholar Samuel Bochart's Hierozoicon of 1663, most commentators have read Behemoth as the hippopotamus and Leviathan as the crocodile.  Driver and Gray's standard commentary of 1921 calls these identifications "now commonly accepted."⁴⁶  The reasons are the grass, the marsh and reeds, the shade plants, the river, and the pairing of the two greatest animals of the Nile.  Older Christian readers, who also took the animal to be real, often chose the elephant.  Matthew Henry did, in 1710, and he saw the tail problem plainly:  "though his tail be not large, yet he moves it like a cedar."  He also noted that "Some understand it of the trunk of the elephant."⁴⁷

A mythic beast.  Marvin Pope's Anchor Bible commentary argues that both are monsters of Canaanite myth.  He points out that the supposed Egyptian source of behemot, "the ox of the water," has never been found:  "no such word has yet been found in Coptic or Egyptian."  And he notes that "the long recognized mythological and supernatural character of Leviathan," now "clearly established by the Ugaritic myths," makes it "in order to question again the interpretation of Behemoth as the hippopotamus."¹⁶  Leviathan appears elsewhere in the Bible in mythic language.  Psalm 74:14 speaks of "the heads of leviathan," plural.  Isaiah 27:1 names "leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent."⁴²  Texts from Ugarit, written centuries before Isaiah, describe the same creature in nearly the same words.  In Pope's translation, Baal is told:  "When you smote Lotan the fleeting serpent / Annihilated the tortuous serpent / The tyrant (?) with seven heads."¹⁶  The lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs reflects the range.  It glosses Leviathan as a crocodile in Job 40:25, a whale in Psalm 104:26, a mythological "dragon producing eclipses" in Job 3:8, and a figure of Egypt in Psalm 74:14.¹⁷

An extinct reptile.  This is the young-earth reading above.  It explains the tail better than the other two.

Weighing the three

The tail is a genuine point for the sauropod reading.  The commentators who hold the hippopotamus reading admit the strain.  Driver and Gray call the verse "A hyperbolical description of its tail.  This is short, similar to that of a pig."⁴⁶  Pope is blunter:  "As applied to the tail of the hippopotamus, the hyperbole is extreme since the tail of this animal is absurdly small in proportion to its massive body."¹⁶  Some readers, ancient and modern, have taken "tail" here as a euphemism, given the next line's "testicles."  Pope reports that the medieval theologian Albertus Magnus already said so:  "Caudam vocat genitale membrum," "he calls the genital member a tail."¹⁶  That reading is possible and unproven.  On the plain reading, a sauropod fits verse 17 better than a hippopotamus does.

The rest of the passage fits a sauropod worse.  Behemoth lies under thorny lotus shrubs and is covered by their shade.  A hippopotamus can do that.  An animal the size of Brachiosaurus, the comparison Answers in Genesis chose, cannot.  He lives among reeds and marsh and stays calm when the river surges against his mouth, which is how a hippopotamus lives.  And he is paired with Leviathan, whose description includes fire.

The fire shows where each reading puts the poetry.  No animal, living or fossil, is known to have breathed flame.  The young-earth writers take the fire literally too.  Answers in Genesis calls Leviathan "a fire-breathing sea monster."³⁶  Niermann answers the objection that "not even dinosaurs breathed fire" by saying that "no one knows what dinosaurs could do," that "all the text observes are 'sparks'," and that some insects, such as the bombardier beetle, can produce heat and light.⁴¹  The Hebrew says more than sparks:  "a flame goes out of his mouth."  So the young-earth reading is consistent, and it reads both the tail and the fire at face value.  It pays for that with animals no fossil shows:  a marine reptile with a flame-making organ, and a sauropod that shelters under thorn bushes.  The hippopotamus reading pays instead with hyperbole in one verse, the kind of exaggeration the same speech uses when it says Behemoth's "bones are as strong pieces of brass."⁴²  Every reader of Job 40 and 41 has to decide where the poetry is.  The young-earth reader who puts none in the tail has to put an unknown organ in the fossil record.

Verdict on Behemoth:  unresolved between a real animal and a mythic one, and the dinosaur reading is the weakest of the three.  It fits one verse best and the rest of the passage worst.  Verdict on Leviathan as a marine reptile:  fails.  The Bible's own uses of the name, and the Canaanite texts it echoes, mark Leviathan as a figure of poetry drawn in the imagery of the old sea-monster, whatever real animal lent it traits.

Christians who read Job as true have held the hippopotamus, elephant and crocodile readings for centuries, as Henry's commentary shows.  Nothing in the inspiration of the book depends on Behemoth being a sauropod.  God's point in Job 40 and 41 is that Job cannot master even the creatures God made, and that point stands on any of the three readings.

Part 7: What the creationist organisations themselves say

The creationist organisations have already sorted much of this material, and they disagree with each other.  The table gives what each has said in print about each case.  "None found" means no statement turned up in the research for this article, not that none exists.  Creation Ministries International's list of "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" names none of these cases, though it does name the Paluxy tracks and live plesiosaurs.⁴⁸

Two things stand out.  First, the organisations disagree:  Answers in Genesis keeps Kachina Bridge and the Carlisle brass at the top of its list, while the most careful creationist review of Ta Prohm comes from Creation Ministries International and runs the other way.  Second, the pattern of withdrawal is the same as for the Paluxy tracks.  The cases with the least provenance were dropped first, and the cases that remain are those where the object is genuine and only the reading is in dispute.

Objections and responses

1. "Thousands of Ica stones are too many for one farmer to have carved."  Answers in Genesis argues that "one farmer could not have produced the stones in such a short time."¹  Cabrera's own figures say otherwise.  At the rate one confessed carver gave, three stones a day, two carvers make Cabrera's 11,000 in about five years.²⁰  The larger stones would take longer, and nobody has counted the collection by size, so that part is open.  But the number alone does not make the stones ancient.

2. "Uschuya only confessed because Peruvian law would have jailed him as a grave-robber."  That is Cabrera's argument, and it is a fair one as far as it goes.  It cuts both ways.  A carver who can be jailed for digging has a motive to say he carved, and a carver who sells to collectors has a motive to say he dug.  Uschuya said both.  The way out of a contest between motives is evidence that does not depend on him:  find-spots, layers, and anatomy.  The stones have no find-spots, and some carry twentieth-century anatomy that Answers in Genesis itself calls "a tip-off."¹

3. "Senter and Cole only looked at the Kachina petroglyph.  They did no paint or weathering tests."  True.²³  The same is true of the original identification, which was made from photographs.  The only published close examination found stains for legs.  The fair resolution is a close-range record of the pecking, which either side could publish.

4. "Why would native artists carve a mythical creature beside the animals they hunted?"  Because rock art all over the world does.  The Agawa Rock "dragon" is the Ojibwe Underwater Panther, a supernatural being, on a panel with a horse and rider.⁸  Answers in Genesis's own Nanaimo example has a traditional name, Sisiutl or Wasgo, from the carvers' stories.¹  A spirit being beside a deer is the normal content of such panels.

5. "Woetzel measured the Ta Prohm plates and found they stand out three times further than the background flourishes."  Answers in Genesis reports Woetzel's "three-times-greater relief depth" on the plates.¹  A deeper carving shows that the lobes were cut boldly, not that they belong to the animal rather than to the frame.  And the eroded roundel of a similar animal with no lobes at all, which Burnett found, is the test case.  Woetzel calls it "a badly eroded carving that displays an indistinct quadruped."³⁰  That is fair, and it is also true of every carving in the argument.

6. "The Carlisle brass shows tail spikes like Shunosaurus, which nobody knew about until the 1980s."  That is the right kind of argument, as Part 1 says.  But it needs the detail to be clear.  Answers in Genesis itself describes the tail as "either clubbed or appearing to end in a cleft," on a worn brass that was lifted and reset, and its second supporting example, Spinophorosaurus, lost its "spikes" when they were reidentified as collarbones.¹  A detail that can be read two ways is not new information.

7. "Dragon legends are worldwide.  Something real must lie behind them."  Something real may.  Russell Grigg grants that the stories "have gained embellishments."³⁴  But a story told everywhere tells us that the experience behind it was common, not which experience it was.  Snakes, crocodiles, large cats and birds of prey are known everywhere, and fossils weather out on every continent.  A worldwide legend does not single out dinosaurs among these.

8. "Even Carl Sagan said dragons were memories of dinosaurs."  Sagan asked, in The Dragons of Eden (1977), "Could there have been manlike creatures who actually encountered Tyrannosaurus rex?  Could there have been dinosaurs that escaped the extinctions in the late Cretaceous Period?"⁴⁹  His own leading idea, a page earlier, was that "dragons posed a problem for our protohuman ancestors of a few million years ago."⁴⁹  He was speculating about hominids millions of years ago, not about people a few thousand years ago.  A sentence that circulates as Sagan's, calling dragons "fossil memories of the time of the dinosaurs," could not be found in two copies of the book and is not used here.

9. "Bible scholars reject the sauropod only because they assume millions of years."  Niermann says commentators "have become so conditioned to think in terms of the long ages of evolutionary geology that it never occurs to them that man once lived in the same world with the dinosaurs."⁴¹  The reasons given in Part 6 do not depend on geology:  the thorny lotus, the river, the pairing with fire-breathing Leviathan, and the Canaanite parallels.  Matthew Henry chose the elephant in 1710, long before anyone dated rocks.⁴⁷

10. From the other side:  "Doesn't the lack of dinosaur art refute the young-earth view?"  Not by itself.  Art shows what artists saw and cared about, and an animal that was rare, distant or extinct early after the Flood would leave few images.  But the absence is a cost.  A model in which large dinosaurs lived for centuries beside people who carved, painted and wrote about the animals around them predicts some unambiguous depictions, and none has been found.  The Nile mosaic alone shows giraffes, hippos and crocodiles in recognisable detail, several of them labelled by name, and no sauropod.  The young-earth view rests on Genesis, as Answers in Genesis says.  This article shows that it gets no help from art, not that it is false.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Kachina Bridge legs. Whether pecking runs into the "legs" is a factual question that a close-range photogrammetric survey would settle. The 2025 Creation Research Society paper that Answers in Genesis mentions could not be identified.
2. The Palpa Museum Ica stone. Its images, excavation record and two laboratory reports are unpublished. Until they are, it cannot be judged as a picture of anything.
3. The Nile mosaic label. The "crocodile-leopard" label is reported by the web page that first called the animal a dinosaur. It was not found in a search of the OCR text of Meyboom's study, which garbles Greek. The section should be checked against Meyboom's plates or the seventeenth-century dal Pozzo copies.
4. Witton and Hing's full text. Only the abstract was read; the publisher's site blocks automated download. Their distances from fossil sites to gold deposits should be checked against the body of the paper.
5. The 1977 BBC film of Uschuya carving. It is reported by the producer through a secondary booklet. The presenter's own book on the Nazca lines does not mention Ica stones. The Mundial article of January 1975 is the better primary and was read only as Cabrera quotes it.
6. The Carlisle brass. No art-historical study of the border's iconography was read. The Monumental Brass Society's 1998 volume on Cumberland brasses, which Creation magazine cites, would be the place to start.
7. Behemoth. No young-earth writer was found who cautions against the sauropod reading. One may exist.
8. The absence of dinosaur art is a cost to young-earth models of post-Flood coexistence that nobody on either side has tried to price. A count of identified animal species in dated Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, set against the number of dinosaurs that would have to have survived, would be a start.

Verdict

No ancient or medieval image or text examined here shows that people saw living dinosaurs or pterosaurs.  The Ica stones and the Acámbaro figurines are modern.  The rock-art dinosaurs are composites, stains, spirit beings and a chalk outline.  Ta Prohm, the Carlisle brass and the Nile mosaic are genuine old works that show rhinoceroses, mythical beasts and a labelled crocodile-leopard.  The dragon texts are hearsay, omens and poems.  Behemoth's tail is the one honest point in the young-earth column, and the rest of Job 40 and 41 outweighs it.

Two cases stay open on narrow points:  the Kachina Bridge legs, and whether Behemoth is a real animal or a mythic one.  Neither leans toward a dinosaur.  Some critics were wrong too:  the Ta Prohm carving is not a modern fake, and the fossil explanation for the griffin is weaker than its fame suggests.  The young-earth belief that people and dinosaurs lived together rests on Genesis, not on art, and it should be argued there.

Sources