Something I am curious about with the whole "man and dinosaur never shared the world" theory, how then would the men who wrote the Bible several thousand years ago be able to describe, in detail, creatures they refer to as "leviathans," "dragons," "behemoths," or simply "great beasts?" Those actually study these accounts found them to be describing what could only be dinosaurs. Before archaeology, before skeletal reconstruction, before simulated motion and "prehistoric study," these people described what modern scientists only felt comfortable stating after years of studying bone structure and assumed musculature.
You have to realise that the modern Bible (the King James version) is a reconstituted version of texts translated in the 17th Century by scholars wishing to make a more accessible Bible for the general masses. These texts were in produced from Greek copies of 'original' texts, which were in turn copies of lost letters and poems written in Hebrew over a span of time
after Jesus' supposed life, by forty or so people. You're essentially reading a book that's been re-written and mis-translated over the course of 1600 years or so (notice that in 2 Kings 2:17/25 it mentions some foreigners being killed by lions - lions come from Africa, which I'm assured that people in the 17th Century would have known about). That's a
lot of leeway given for a book that's supposed to be the direct word of the Lord.
It's therefore not fantastical to assume that 'dragons' come from a fanciful insert by a scribe, or that 'dragons' are an allegory/euphemism.
-gumph about carbon dating-
Carbon dating works by taking a known quantity of a radioactive isotope - Carbon-14. We know full well that Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5700 years - that is, if we had a 1Kg lump of Carbon-14, we could expect to be left with 500g after 5700 years. This is reasonably accurate, since we can carbon date anything up to 62,000 years old. For older materials, we look at isotopes with longer half lives, such as potassium-argon dating, uranium-polonium dating or rubidium-strontium dating (which we mainly use to date igneous rock strata stretching back millions of years). I must remind you that these are
known quantities that are lab-replicable - we're not just throwing science at the wall to see what sticks.
Everything in the world absorbs these isotopes in small amounts while it's exposed to them. When it gets buried, it ceases to absorb these isotopes, and so becomes a little bubble of the time it was trapped at. When we uncover it, we're able to date the item using a reasonably known value.
So then you fall back on the strata, where these fossils were found in the rock layers. Now assume for a moment that the Biblical flood did, indeed, happen (countless cultures other than the Jews and Hebrews refer to a great and cataclysmic flood, so it seems safe to assume that it did indeed happen). As the Bible and other texts describe it, it was not merely rain falling from the sky ,but the Earth itself being torn open and pouring forth water from the depths. Put that all together and there's one simple conclusion to draw: total and absolute upheaval across the globe. All the scientific theories to date can't explain why there are marine life fossils being found in land-locked plateaus and even up in the mountains, certainly they couldn't have crawled up there. But if the entire world was flooded as the Bible states then those mountains and plateaus were under water for a significant amount of time, and when the flood waters rapidly receded, well it most certainly is entirely likely that not only would marine life be stranded, but the bodies of the creatures that were caught and drowned by the flood would likewise be scattered.
We already know that the oceans have risen and receded - take a look at the chalk cliffs of Dover as a great example. Chalk is the remnants of millions of minute calcite plates from organisms called coccolithophores, that builds up over millions of years and is compressed by the weight of deep sea conditions. Eventually the water recedes (circa 66million years before present), and erosion forms these natural chalk landscapes - and I'll remind you that the cliffs at their highest reach 110m. This is before taking into account the depth of ocean required to begin forming chalk - we're not simply discussing a few pleasant shallow metres of water. You need a lot of water pressure and a lot of time to form discarded calcite into rock.
This may account for your 'Biblical flood', but I don't think I need to remind you that we've no records surviving 66 million years to verify that some old guy got a voice in his head telling him to knock together a boat before it hit. As it stands, the fossil records are remarkably well-ordered for such a supposed time of geological upheaval - you'd have expected such a great, scouring body of water from above and below to have made quite a mess of things down there, and yet there's no evidence to support that theory. We can still discover ancient waterways, petrified trees, and the like. That's before we even begin to ask where all this water comes from - forty days of constant,
global rain would have required more water in the atmosphere than the atmosphere can (under current known pressure and temperature conditions) actually hold without turning the planet into one large pressure cooker. Likewise, underground aquifers don't just suddenly breach on such a global scale, even accounting for cometary/meteoric impacts, requiring the only other method of releasing that water be pressure - which would force the water out like
steam, thereby turning the entire planet into a steam cooker.
We
do know that global ocean levels were much higher in the past, we
do know that plate tectonics can account for fossil records being moved. This isn't fanciful thinking - these things happen. It's why we can find fossils of similar, or even identical, species, at points across the globe from each other.
Among other resources, I would suggest taking a look into the "Answers in Genesis" website, as you just might find answers and in better detail and with better references than I have been able to provide on my own.
I wouldn't take so much stock in Genesis, personally.
