TIME SPENT (PALEONTOLOGY) 



481 



their gradual downfall and elimination, naturally calls for more than 

 the work of a day. 



When one visits a museum, like the American Museum of Natural 

 History in New York City, and there encounters the unbelievable 

 genuine framework of some towering dinosaur, he is compelled to 

 admit that it must have taken a great deal of time to evolve such a 

 creature by any possible process of slow successive adaptations. 



I8fc- 



Comparative sizes of man and dinosaur. 



Moreover, not one kind of dinosaur alone but many diverse kinds, 

 which have taken time enough to branch o& from the original stock, 

 whatever that was, have, without the least shadow of doubt, also 

 lived and died. Probably the slow processes that have led up to such 

 bizarre manifestations of former life in many cases ran concurrently, 

 like jail sentences, but even so, enormous quantities of time must 

 have been demanded for the accomplishment of these known results. 

 It does not seem likely that a sane and reasonable Creator ever made 

 one of these dinosaurs de novo, "out of whole cloth." They bear every 

 mark of having been repeatedly cut over and reassembled out of 

 preceding garments. There is no evidence, moreover, that dinosaurs 

 came to a sudden catastrophic end all at once. It took long periods of 

 additional time finally to undo the gigantic task, and to bring about 

 the wreckage and gradual extinction of these elaborate creatures. 



The age-long episode of the rise and fall of the dinosaur dynasty, 

 for example, which endured for some millions of years, has been 



