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Review of the Book:
DINOSAURS Dead or Alive? |
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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 two questions: Can we reasonably reject all of these sighting reports simply because of standard models? Why should we believe in the extinction of everything classified as a dinosaur? These accounts deserve attention.
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The breadth of the author's investigation at least partially compensates for its lack of depth. He has written a worthy introduction to a less-well-known creationist 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.
Dinosaurs—Dead or Alive? was written 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 Searching for Ropens, explored part of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004, interviewing about seventeen credible eyewitnesses of the creatures that are, apparently, living pterosaurs.
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