Bigger Than Dinosaurs
My conversation with local amateur paleontologist, Dick Wills, and a reminder of the bigness of God.
Last week I read in the news about a man who pulled a mammoth femur out of a Missouri riverbank. It was ninety pounds of Ice Age bone just sitting there in the mud like it had been waiting patiently for someone with a shovel and decent upper body strength to take it home.
If you have seen the images, there is something about a bone that big that messes with your timeline. You can say “Ice Age” in a casual voice, but when you picture an animal that massive walking around thousands upon thousands of years ago, it stretches your sense of reality.
And of course, it sent my brain straight back to Orlando and the field trips I used to do with middle schoolers.
Years ago, when I was teaching at Sarasota Christian School, we took our seventh graders to The Holy Land Experience. If you never made it before it closed and demolished, imagine if Walt Disney and a Sunday School flannel board had a very earnest child. Roman soldiers in costume. Jerusalem facades with air conditioning. Gift shops where you could buy a shofar next to a refrigerator magnet.
One particular trip, I had a small group of antsy boys who were very underwhelmed but endured it because we were out of school. We were herded into the Scriptorium, a dimly lit room where illuminated Bibles glowed behind glass as if reverence could be achieved through strategic lighting. Gold leaf shimmered. Latin calligraphy curled dramatically across parchment. It had a DaVinci-meets-Epcot energy that was trying very hard to be solemn.
Our guide pointed to the oldest Bible in the collection and explained how scribes copied every page by hand and added intricate artwork. The Bible was open to the book of Job. Right there beside the text was a ferocious, dinosaur-looking beast woven into the margin with scales, teeth, and drama.
She gestured toward it and began explaining the Bible confirms that dinosaurs absolutely existed. The earth, she informed us, was 6,000 years old. Behemoth and Leviathan were biblical evidence and they walked among people. Whales and sharks somehow entered the chat. The fossil record in her mind was apparently handled.
Now, you cannot mention dinosaurs to a group of twelve-year-old boys and expect silence. That is not how twelve-year-olds work. They are not thinking about medieval manuscripts. They are thinking about carnivores.
The hands went up immediately.
What happened to the dinosaurs? Why did Noah skip the T-rex? If he brought all the animals, why not velociraptors? Are Komodo dragons technically dinosaurs? Were they on the ark too? And where do you get this 6,000 number? What about carbon dating?
You could almost see the tour guide’s script dissolve in real time. The careful story about scribes and sacred text had suddenly become a conversation about geology, and geology does not fit neatly inside a museum script. After a long pause, she said, “You can save those questions for your teacher.”
Gee. Thanks. I guess inherited the dinosaurs that day.
For a long time, I did not think much about that moment. It was just another field trip. But when I read about that mammoth bone in Missouri, it came back to me. Not because of the answers, but because of the posture. In Orlando, the dinosaurs had to prove something. They had to fit somewhere quickly before the timeline unraveled.
Here in Knoxville, we have a different dinosaur story.
Our friend Dick Wills runs the Prairie Fossil Museum, and when I say small, I mean fifteen by twenty feet at most. It is one room. There are no velvet ropes and no dramatic lighting. He never charges anyone to visit. Adults and children can pick up a fossil, turn it over in their hands, and feel the weight of something that has been buried for eons. Nothing is sealed behind glass. You can touch the history.
Maps and geological diagrams cover the walls. Inland seas sketched in blue. Tilted strata marked in careful lines. If you ask him about any dinosaur, his face lights up in a way that feels almost boyish, even now. He does not simply show you a bone. He walks you through where it was found, what layer it came from, how the earth shifted, how the land slowly lifted what it had been holding. He pours out not only his love for the remnants of creatures he has uncovered, but his love for the entire process.
If you listen closely, you realize his love is not just for what has been hidden under the earth. It is for the place itself. The prairie in Wyoming and the Dakotas is his emotional home. When he talks about it, the affection is unmistakable. It is not simply about finding something. It is about being there. Standing under a sky so wide it makes your arguments feel small. Watching sunsets drop behind mesas while sage bends and shimmers in the wind. Walking ground that was once an inland sea and feeling the sweep of time without needing to tame it.
He goes hoping to uncover a piece of prehistory, yes. But he also goes to stand inside creation and take it in as it is. All of God’s brushstrokes in one place: the color of the rock, the tilt of the layers, the quiet, and every so often, the land gives up a bone. Even when it does not, he considers the trip a gift.
Yesterday I asked him how he knows where to dig. Knowing Dick you would think he has some dinosaur radar and gets a certain dino-vibe. He laughed. “Maybe at first,” he said. “But now I use geology.” Then he explained how South Dakota was once covered by an inland sea that divided what is now the United States. As tectonic plates shifted, the layers of sediment tilted upward. What had been buried deep beneath the surface eventually fractured and exposed petrified bones from animals that died eons ago. He used the word exploded, not theatrically, but descriptively, as if the land had finally decided to tell its story.
Standing there in the middle of fossils, I slipped right back into my own seventh-grade self and fired off questions. Were dinosaurs around when Noah was collecting animals on the ark? Is the earth old or new? Are Leviathan and Behemoth evidence that dinosaurs lived among people? How do you connect the dots between the Bible and all of these bones?
He did not hesitate. “I don’t,” he said.
Then he added, “Who am I? I am just a man, and how incredibly arrogant it would be to think that in this lifetime I could understand the mysteries of God, let alone the artistry of God.”
That is when it clicked. The answer is not about how small our Earth is or how neatly we can line up historical timelines. The answer is about how big God is. It is about how deeply humans crave control over sociology, science, history, and even the way Scripture must relate to all of it. We want charts. We want columns. We want the comfort of knowing exactly where everything fits. But God should not be reduced to atomic parameters.
It does not matter a hill of beans whether the earth is 6,000, 60,000, or 60 trillion years old. Whatever the number is, God is not constrained by it. The real temptation is not to deny fossils. The real temptation is to domesticate God.
We shrink Him into timelines we can defend. We try to secure Him with arguments. We measure Him against our comfort level with ambiguity. But a God who can shape tectonic plates, fill inland seas, tilt layers of earth, and paint sunsets across a prairie sky will not be boxed into our preferred chronology.
God will not be put in a box. Perhaps Isaiah said it best:
“Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you been listening?
God doesn’t come and go. God lasts.
He’s Creator of all you can see or imagine.
He doesn’t get tired out, doesn’t pause to catch his breath.
And he knows everything, inside and out.” (Isaiah 40:28, The Message)
A mammoth bone can surface. A prairie can tilt and reveal the fossils. The timelines can stretch beyond anything we can comfortably diagram. God lasts. And that, strangely enough for me, is the most comforting thing of all.