A fascination with dead things usually comes with a bit of a social stigma, but you don’t have to be a geek—or a freak—to appreciate just how cool dinosaurs are. Gigantic ton-sized roaring beasts with impressive names like Ankylosaurus and Ornithocherius are real-life science fiction.

It’s the “gigantic ton-sized roaring” part that the arena show, “Walking with Dinosaurs—The Live Experience,” captures. From Oct. 1 through Oct. 5, the Des Moines Wells Fargo Arena will be transformed into a playground for hi-tech animatronic recreations of the most impressive creatures that have roamed the earth.

Derived from the BBC television series, the show combines science and entertainment by featuring 15 screeching, nimble, realistic, life-size dinosaurs that hunt, protect their young, and stomp around.

Man Creates Dinosaur

“A big difficulty was making the dinosaurs to scale,” says Cameron Wenn, resident director for Walking with Dinosaurs. “The amount of finesse and technological tweaking was a huge challenge, and I think one we’ve overcome pretty well.”

Not only is getting monster-sized models to move a huge accomplishment, but Wenn says working from research to re-create life-like movements and mannerisms in the dinosaurs was also a difficulty. No one has the recording of a dinosaur roar or knowledge of a dinosaur's skin colors or true habits, but research paints a good enough picture for imagination to use as a base.

“We can know from footprints or tracks, for example, if they were herd animals—if they hunted in packs. Again, there are a few assumptions that would have come into play, such as if they were herbivores or carnivores,” Wenn says.

The end result is a show that allows people to experience what dinosaurs could have been like in the most literal sense possible. However, with creationism gaining attention, new science is tackling old questions as Evangelicals enter the conversation. 

“The show wasn’t made by people who had the Bible in mind when they were doing research,” says Mundi Ross, associate company manager for Walking with Dinosaurs.

“Today the notion that dinosaurs walked with man is almost as outlandish as saying the moon is made out of cheese,” says Tim Borseth, a geologist and co-pastor at Stonebrook Community Church in Ames. “It’s so far from our sense of reality because all our lives we’ve been told that millions of years ago before there were humans, dinosaurs ruled the world."

Behold, Behemoth

But wait. The word “dinosaur” isn’t even in the Bible. Did God forget about them?

“There are lots of obscure animals that are mentioned in the Bible that people don’t know,” says Dr. David Menton, a teacher, speaker, and consultant at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky. “Would the Bible overlook one of the most impressive creatures?”

The term "dinosaur" actually wasn’t coined until 1842 when Sir Richard Owen described “dinosauria,” or “terrible reptile.” When the King James Bible came about in 1611, the word “dinosaur” wouldn’t have been on the radar.

With that in mind, check out Job 40:15-24:

“Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron. 

He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies, in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened; he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth. Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?" 

Most modern Bibles have footnotes saying the identity of such an animal is possibly an elephant, hippo, or an unknown mythical creature, but one must consider the footnotes are ultimately interpretations of the original text. Elephants and hippos don’t have tails like cedar trees or bones like tubes of bronze. 

“Job would have been familiar with behemoth, and this passage shows that behemoth walked with man,” Menton says. “Behemoth was a dinosaur and a sauropod—the typical dinosaur you’ll see—huge, standing on four legs. God wanted to pick a particularly dramatic animal here. I’m not inclined to say ‘Behold, behemoth,’ when I see a hippo.”

Billions of Dead Things

So what about the millions of years that supposedly separate man from dinosaur? The presupposition that life evolved slowly also drives the dating methods used to determine approximately when that life existed. Evolution drives the majority of science, and dating methods operate within its framework.

“All fossils are dead—they’re stone dead. We accept dinos as fossils; when we see man in the fossil record, he’s just another fossil, too,” Menton says.

That is to say, we know what we can observe. We have billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the world. Although no one alive today has seen how they got there or even how this all started, the Bible does offer insight.

“Evolution and creation have the same problem: No human being was there. We have, ‘In the beginning, God.’ Read Genesis as the author intended it, as a historical record. It seems like there is an intimate connection—like God verbally communicated to the author how he created the world—because no human being was present,”  Borseth says.

The Fascination Continues

Although Adam is not around to tell us about behemoth, Job 40 challenges most elementary school curricula. This is not to say a show depicting a life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex is wrong. Everyone can agree that dinosaurs did exist, that we can know a lot about them, and that they’ve been fascinating creatures to humans throughout recorded history.

“I think we all have some sort of fascination with dinosaurs,” Ross says. “We’ve learned about them from an early age and there’s something mysterious about them—that something so huge could have roamed the earth.”

“They’re so imposing and formidable, it just attracts the imagination to experience and know these creatures because they’re so creatively created,” Borseth says.

Walking with Dinosaurs offers a glimpse of what God created—behemoth or not. And, like all things God makes, no one can doubt the grandeur in its existence.