So you look at this thingy carved into the sandstone wall of Havasupai Canyon, Arizona, and what do you see? I’m afraid I see a prehistoric Droodle: “Worms evicted from apple, trying to move into an olive.”
But a lot of people, over the years, see something astonishing. They think this is a depiction of… a Tyrannosaurus rex.
I’ve read about this petroglyph for years, but never until now saw a picture of it. I was expecting something that at least sort of looked like a tyrannosaur. This ain’t doin’ it for me: and once upon a time my favorite comic book was Turok Son of Stone, about a couple of Indians who stumble into a canyon where dinosaurs still live. I really wasn’t going to be that hard to please.
How many creationists have written of this petroglyph as proof positive that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time? How many have triumphantly declared that this totally overthrows Darwinism? (Hear me out, guys–I’m on your side.)
But the drawing doesn’t look like anything.
Darwinism is indeed silly, but not because of any petroglyphs. You can’t reconcile the deep conservatism of DNA with the idea that one kind of animal “evolves” into another.
God created dinosaurs, and God removed them from the earth. Why? We don’t know. The Bible tells us everything we need to know (as Rev. Mark McCreary says), not everything we’d like to know. God has left us plenty to find out on our own. All we can say for sure is that if there are any dinosaurs alive today, we don’t know about it.
We have to do better than this petroglyph. It is not proof of anything. For all we know, the thing the artist was trying to draw was no bigger than the drawing itself. He might’ve even magnified it. But I am sure I could’ve drawn a more convincing tyrannosaur than that when I was five years old.
This is not to be confused with the art we find in Ice Age caves, which depicts living (at the time) animals realistically and with great skill that wasn’t matched again until high civilizations had developed… or been re-developed. So much about the deep past that we don’t know! We give God thanks for providing us with so much to investigate.