To support their claim that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, numerous antievolution publications—including grade-school science textbooks—assert that dragon legends were inspired by human encounters with fire-breathing dinosaurs. Here’s why that’s unrealistic.
Mainstream geologists and biologists accept the abundant physical evidence that the Earth is billions of years old; that all organisms are evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor; and that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct sixty-five million years ago (e.g., Gradstein et al. 2004; Prothero 2007). In contrast, young-Earth creationist (YEC) authors have long maintained that the Genesis account of creation and the biblical timeline are literally correct, placing the creation of the Earth and all types of organisms at approximately 6,000 years ago. A corollary of this position is that dinosaurs and humans were created on the same day and must therefore have encountered each other. The claim that dragon legends are based on such encounters has long been a mainstay of YEC literature, and in 1977, biochemist and YEC author Duane Gish took this concept up a notch in his children’s book Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards, by positing that dinosaurs breathed fire. Other YEC authors followed suit (see references below), and dinosaurs now breathe fire in seventh-grade biology textbooks from BJU Press (Batdorf and Porch 2013; Lacy 2013).