Review of the Book:
DINOSAURS
Dead or Alive?
Never mind what the book is not. This young author, with more writing talent than the average teenager, has put his heart into these
114 pages, pleading for a hearing: Creationism is alive and well and so are dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
From the back cover we
learn: "Phillip O'Donnell is a 14 year old Christian who
is
home-schooled. He wrote this book to bring the lost to Christ through
dinosaurs and to strengthen the faith of those who
are Christians."
The number of sighting reports impressed me: forty-five pterosaur
sightings are listed in the "Index of Pterosaur sightings in North and Central America." Also, the "Glossary of Possible Living Dinosaurs"
includes thirty species plus a few pterosaurs. The Bibliography lists 42 books, web sites, videos, and magazines, but most of the
book's brief sighting reports have no links to them. It would have been helpful to other researchers if all sighting reports had sources
listed. Still, the quick-paced, brief accounts of sightings brings up questions: Can we reasonably reject all sighting reports simply
because of standard models? Why believe in the extinction of
all things classified "dinosaur?" These accounts deserve our attention.
The breadth of the author's investigation at least partially compensates for its lack of depth. He has written a worthy introduction
to the less-well-known Creation-perspective about living dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Technical inaccuracies proclaimed by his critics
and skeptics are overshadowed, I believe, by a wider perspective than is found in standard models taught in most biology textbooks:
It is the author who has an open mind about living dinosaurs and pterosaurs, not those who insist that they all became extinct many
millions of years ago.
###
by Phillip O’Donnell; illustrated by T. M. O’Donnell (Xulon
Press, 2006, ISBN 1-60034-262-0) It is sold on Amazon and elsewhere.
The reviewer, Jonathan Whitcomb, author
of the book
Searching
for Ropens, explored part of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004, interviewing about seventeen credible eyewitnesses of the flying
creatures that are, apparently, living pterosaurs.
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