This is a bit of a diversion from Missed the Ark Monday. As you can probably tell from last week, I’m getting a bit bored. I’m not running out of discrepancies in the Ark Encounter list, but posts about obscure extinct animals not being on a long list of animals just aren’t all that interesting. […]
The one living species of tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, is on the Ark list. It is the only kind listed as a single species. That presumably means that it’s the only species that belongs to that kind! I have no idea why this species would deserve this distinction. The paper classifying the extant ark kinds notes […]
On the Ark Encounter poster, the families Protarchaeopteridae and Caudipteryidae are found on the list of Ark Kinds, but both are classified as reptiles. This is interesting because Answers in Genesis has repeatedly discussed these creatures, and I certainly got the impression they saw them as flightless birds. Their earliest article on the subject, posted […]
Messelornithids are one of the best represented bird species in the fossil record. We have hundreds of preserved specimens, many of them preserving the full body and even details like stomach contents. Yet they seem to be inexplicably unpopular. Not only are they missing from the Ark Encounter’s list of extinct bird kinds, but I […]
This little guy was about the size of a chipmunk, so two of them would not have taken up very much space on the Ark anyway. He was an insectivore and appears highly adapted for eating termites out of their mounds. Termite mounds would obviously have been problematic to store on the Ark, but presumably […]
Ark Encounter holds that primarily aquatic species are not on the Ark. The sign listing the species even lists examples of kinds not required on the Ark in the bottom right, and Chelonioidea is on there, with examples “Green Sea Turtle, Loggerhead Sea Turtle, Leatherback Sea Turtle”. So I was rather surprised to find Protostegidae […]
The family Strigidae (true owls) is missing from the poster on the Ark Encounter. The Barn Owl family (Tytonidae) and three extinct families of owls are on the list, but the true owls are missing. I assume this one is a simple oversight, particularly because I believe there are representations of true owls on the […]