T. rex ate giant melons

On a recent trip to a Salvation Army thrift store, I found a humorous yet disturbing book - Dinosaurs and the Bible by David Unfred. The foreword reads:

"Dinosaurs! Children love them, but all too often stories about dinosaurs are used to lure young people away from confidence in the Bible."

The book tries to deny evolution and geology and instead asserts that

"There is only one way that we can know anything for sure about the 'prehistoric' past - from an eyewitness account! Someone who was there has to tell us what happened. God, Himself, is our best eyewitness."

For those of you who learned about dinosaurs scientifically and are curious, the following is what kids are learning about dinosaurs from this book and I guess also from the Bible. Dinosaurs were made on the sixth day, along with all other land animals. Two of each kind of dinosaur were on Noah's ark during the flood (how they all fit is beyond me). All the fossils we see today were deposited during this flood. Dinosaurs, once disembarking the ark, might have then died due to cold weather, lack of food, and hunting by people. Continental drift doesn't occur, and the reason we see dino fossils in polar areas is just because the earth was a lot warmer before the flood. Dinosaurs and people lived at the same time and that's why we have stories about dragons. If you wanted to find a living dinosaur today, the African Congo seems to be the place to look as there have been sightings of dino-like creatures.

My favorite assertion, because it's just so ridiculous, is in Appendix A. In it the author claims that since in the Garden of Eden all the animals ate plants that means that dinosaurs, even Tyrannosaurus rex were vegetarians (at least in the beginning). This claim comes with a hilarious illustration of T. rex chomping down on a giant watermelon clutched in his tiny arms. While there might be some debate over if T. rex was a pure predator or scavenger, I don't think any scientist would ever say the T. rex was adapted to eating melons. And if all animals started eating plants does that mean meat eating animals that we see today have adapted and even evolved to eat meat? Blasphemous!

There is so much wrong with this book, and so much glossed over because there is no biblical explanation, it is just so funny. I could go on for a long time, but in summary to refute the points above scientifically: Dinosaurs roamed the Earth from the late Triassic (about 230 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago) and all, except for ancestors of modern birds and reptiles, died in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. One flood like event could not account for the layers of fossils of various ages that we find. Dinosaur evolution responded to changes in vegetation and the location of continents. In the late Triassic and early Jurassic, the continents were connected as the single landmass Pangea and by the early Cretaceous the ongoing breakup of Pangea led to dinosaurs differentiated by landmass. The first members of the genus Homo first arose about 2.5 million years ago, long after dinosaurs were extinct.

The best $0.49 I've spent for laughs and also to prevent others from buying and believing its claims. It's too bad I don't believe these bible stories, riding a melon eating T. rex would be a lot of fun.