Let me take a wild guess: 
Which exhibit at the natural history museum is your favorite? The dinosaurs, right? Well, even if you like another even better, you wouldn’t dream of skipping the hall with the giant skeletons!
When you walk through there, what else do you see besides the dinosaurs themselves? Unusual trees and plants forming a strange sort of jungle. (Actually, many of these plants are still around today, I’ve got one in my kitchen!) How do they decide which plants to put in?
“Scientists track the appearance and evolution of plant life by analyzing fossils,” Prehistoric Plants, KidsGardening.org
They assume whatever plants got fossilized near the dinosaurs were the ones around with the dinosaurs. If no fossils of a certain type of plant were found nearby, they think it’s because those plants hadn’t evolved yet.
You can see the whole time chart they’ve developed for plant evolution based on this thinking on the Kids Gardening page. All a museum builder has to do when designing a new dino exhibit is check out a list like that and plug in the ‘right’ kind of plants to fill in the background.
Easy enough, but does it really work?
One thing you probably won’t see in the dinosaur hall is a green lawn. Why? Because grass fossils haven’t been found with dinosaur fossils. Grass only managed to leave behind fossils higher up in the layering system. Or, did it?
As you can guess from the title, dinosaurs left some rather interesting fossils behind. Their stinky. I’ve not heard of any of it still being soft, like other tissues we’ve found, but we can still learn a lot from it.
Back in 2005, scientists were studying the waste from what was probably a sauropod (longneck) dinosaur. They were amazed to discover it had bits of grass in it. The remains were so well preserved they were able to tell it was rice, and not just that, but a modern kind of rice we grow today.
“We may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums,” palaeobotanist Caroline Strömberg told Nature News at the time.– From ICR’s Dinosaurs Ate Rice
Growing rice field
I looked around for “new dinosaur exhibits” images online and couldn’t find any photos of one with a nice patch of grass alongside.
I wonder why.
Maybe it’s because if kids see dinosaurs in a familiar environment, they might just get the idea dinosaurs and people could have met each other. I don’t know. But, those of us who trust the One Who Was There have no problem with this. We know the Age of Dinosaurs only started a few hours before the Age of Man!
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. ~Jesus Mark 10:6
For more, check out:
Institute for Creation Research: Digging Into a Fossil Outhouse on more things we’ve learned from dino doo
Creation Ministries International: Grass-eating dinos
I was alerted to the importance of this discovery by Bruce Malone of Search For The Truth. You can get a taste of his presentations HERE
2 Comments
Lou Ann Keiser · at
Fascinating! I never thought about the plants around the skeletons, but you’re right. They are always exotic tropical plants, never grass. They also seem to like steaming waterfalls. Great point about maybe they don’t want children to get the right idea about coexistence! Thank you, once again, for pointing out the obvious, yet not seen.
Cheri Fields · at
I hadn’t thought about it either until the other night. When it clicked I knew it was time to share. Glad you enjoyed it. 🙂
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