This information goes a along with information about the Manti Temple that I have spoken of before about the Temple’s images of Native Americans, HERE. The Manti Temple continues to be one of my favorite temples.
The few articles I found about the dinosaurs painted in the Manti Temple are very interesting and exciting to me. I am one who believes the dinosaurs existed during Adam’s day and are not millions of years old. I can’t even fathom how scientists could date dinosaurs as old as they suggest. I believe the simpler answer is that dinosaurs were destroyed during the great flood.
Read the book “Universal Model” by Dean Sessions for a complete understanding of the geology and anthropology about dinosaurs and many other things. The New Millennial Science Book will amaze you.
Dinosaurs—Part of God’s Creation
“The Bible begins with a statement that is so simple a child can understand it, yet so inexhaustibly profound: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” —Dr. Jeremy Lyon, “Genesis: Paradise Lost.”
It is the most dramatic and important opening of any chapter of any book. Given as a declaration of fact, the first verse of Genesis covers the creation of time, space, and matter in a single sentence; a solitary breath. Thus began the world and everything in it.
Genesis 1:24 “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: And it was so.”
Today, we continue to discover physical evidence of many creatures that no longer exist, including reptiles known as dinosaurs. Their skeletal remains give us a glimpse into the structure and size of these remarkable animals. Yet the controversy rages: Did these creatures evolve into existence and eventually become extinct millions of years before humanity stepped onto the scene of world history? Or were humans and dinosaurs created by God; co-existing for centuries before saurian extinction?
Why Aren’t Dinosaurs Mentioned in the Bible?
If dinosaurs were part of the original creation and taken on board Noah’s ark with the rest of the land dwelling animals, why aren’t they mentioned in the Bible?
Since the word “dinosaur” wasn’t actually coined until 1841, the creatures we now refer to as dinosaurs were simply called dragons throughout most of history. Not only does the Bible use the word “dragon” repeatedly, 21 times in the Old Testament and 12 times in the Book of Revelations, the Book of Job describes creatures called Behemoth and Leviathan, which seem to indicate large, reptilian beasts, like dinosaurs. (See the Book of Job, chapters 40 and 41.)” By Eric Hovind
Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple
By Edje Jeter August 4, 2013
Afew weeks ago, I worshipped in the Manti Utah Temple for the first time. My parents were endowed, married, and sealed there, so it is a special place to me. Amidst my devotions and pondering, I was somewhat taken aback to find paintings of Mesozoic reptiles on the wall of the Creation Room. [1]
In 1886-87, Carl Christian Anton Christensen (usually CCA Christensen, 1831-1912) painted a 4.9-meter-high mural stretching completely around the Creation Room of the Manti Temple. The mural shows elements of creation up to, but not including, humans. The sequence is clouds and a sphere; volcanoes and storms; sunrise, mountains, and rivers; plants; earliest animals; fowls; non-domestic animals; domestic animals; and water creatures. [2] The Earliest Animals, centered on the back wall, are what caught my attention (see image below). [3]
The animals in this image seem to be, respectively, (starting at top, moving clockwise) two pterosaurs, a plesiosaur, a mosasaur [ichthyosaur; see end of post], and a crocodylomorph. Note that these groups are only dinosaurs in the popular sense of extinct reptiles, so my post title is imprecise. [4]
I dont have much to say about the mural itself beyond: My religion is (was) so cool that we paint(ed) dinosaurs on the walls of one of our most holy buildings!
I’d like to make a few other points, though. First, Christensen was painting the mural right in the thick of the Bone Wars, 1877-1892, a personal conflict between two paleontologists that led to intense exploration for Mesozoic reptile fossils in the American West, with attendant publicity. One of the two scientists even searched for fossils in Utah in 1870.
Second, I don’t know anything about the mural other than its existence. That is, I don’t know about Christensen’s intentions, doctrinal interpretations, sources, consultations with church leaders, etc, nor about any reactions to the mural then or any time since. I am happy, however, to see the Mesozoic represented in the Creation Room and not in the Garden Room, and to have reptiles preceding birds. [5]
Third, Christensen wasn’t the only one. John Hanson Beadle’s anti-Mormon Polygamy: Or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (1882) includes the image below. [6]
The caption says: The Salt Lake Basin, as Geologists Represent It Thousands of Years Ago. Present-day geologists would agree that much of present-day Utah was, in fact, at one point (actually, more than once) part of an inland sea though they would amend the thousands to hundreds of millions. Beadle’s comment was:
in the geologic age, an inland sea, in aboriginal times, the retreat of the most abject savages—long a region of misconception and fable—then the chosen home of a strange religion, and but yesterday found to be of use and interest to the civilized world. [7]
Some images of other Manti rooms are found here; a BYU Studies article, Minerva Teichert?s Manti Temple Murals? (Doris R Dant, 38.3 (1999): 6-44) has complete photos of the World Room and a discussion of its painting.
—— Edit, 2013 Aug 05 Mon 0030 CDT —— Mina pointed out in the comments that Christensen’s Mesozoic reptiles are pretty standard and, in fact, look like versions in Louis Figuier‘s La Terre avant le déluge (1863, French; English translation, The World before the Deluge, 1872, revised and translated by HW Bristow). Following Figuier, what I identified as a mosasaur above is probably intended as an ichthyosaur. Henry de la Beche’s Duria Antiquior (1830) shows a plesiosaur and ichthyosaur fighting, as do other nineteenth-century images. Of course, correlation is not, itself proof that Figuier was Christensen’s source, but the similarity of the anatomy and staging between the images are, let us say, pronounced.
Above is “Ideal Scene of the Lias Period with Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus” (Plate XV, p 231 [English, continuous HTML or individual page PDFs] and 169 [French]).
Above is “Ideal Landscape of the Liassic Period” (Plate XVI, p 241 [English, continuous HTML or individual page PDFs] and 177 [French]). Not shown here is Plate XIII, p 192, which shows an animal (identified as a Nothosaurus) similar to the crocodyloform.—— End Edit ——
[1] The endowment includes representations of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall. In most present-day temples, the settings and events are portrayed by a combination of video and murals in different rooms or exclusively by video. The Manti Temple has no video. Initiates start in the Creation Room and move, respectively, to Garden, World (or Telestial), Terrestrial, and Celestial rooms.
[2] The sphere/clouds are at front house-left and then proceeds house-right. The sequence is not rigid; there are some domestic and non-domestic animals mixed together. The sequence generally follows Genesis. I got a bit spatially disoriented by time I reached the Creation Room, but I think the congregation / company faces South, which puts the Mesozoic reptiles on the North wall. I am following Richard L Jensen and Richard G Oman’s naming of the Creation of the Plants, Earliest Animals, Creation of the Fowls, Creation of the Non-domestic Animals, Creation of the Domestic Animals, and Creation of Water Creatures. Richard L Jensen and Richard G Oman, C. C. A. Christensen, 1831-1912: Mormon Immigrant Artist, an exhibition at the Museum of Church History and Art (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1984), 58-62.
[3] Jensen and Oman, Christensen, 60.
[4] The word ?dinosaur? dates to 1841 and was invented specifically to distinguish ?dinosaurs? from the animals represented here, which were among the earliest Mesozoic fossils recognized by modern science. ?Mesozoic Reptiles in Manti? just doesn?t roll of the tongue the way I?d like.
[5] Jensen and Oman also point out the preponderance of fern-like plants in the Mesozoic part of the mural.
[6] Bureau of Illustration Buffalo, ?The Salt Lake Basin, As Geologists Represent it Thousands of Years Ago,? illustration in Polygamy: Or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism by John Hanson Beadle and Ovando James Hollister (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co, 1882), 359. I haven?t done a careful comparison, but Polygamy seems to be an updated and expanded version of Beadle?s Life in Utah: The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co, 1870). Life in Utah does not have the discussion of geology / paleontology.
[7] Beadle, Polygamy, 360.
Prehistoric Mammals in the Manti Temple
By Edje Jeter December 5, 2016
Three years ago I wrote about prehistoric reptiles in a mural in the Manti Temple: Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple. This past summer I went back and, this time, noticed some prehistoric mammals.
I was not able to find images of the particular murals [1], so… with the usual caveats about memory and eye-witnesses of a mural I saw in from across the room in July while doing something else, the animals I saw were:
- Deinotherium (looks like an elephant with downward curving tusks),
- Megacerops (looks like a rhinoceros with forked horn),
- Xiphodon (looks like a camel)
There was also a goat in the same panel, but I didn’t notice anything to distinguish it from a present-day male Alpine ibex (Capra ibex).
The murals in question were painted by Carl Christian Anton Christensen (1831-1912; usually CCA Christensen) in 1886-1887 and depict facets of creation up to, but not including, humans. Below I have included images from Louis Figuier?s La Terre avant le déluge (1863, French; 1872, English), which seems, upon casual inspection, to be a candidate for one of Christensen’s sources. [2]. (Hat-tip again to Mina for pointing out Figuier when I posted about Mesozoic Reptiles.)
The Deinotherium is related to modern elephants but, among other differences, were somewhat bigger and had downward-curving tusks. The name means terrible beast (deino is an alternate spelling of dino as in dinosaur (terrible lizard). They (including the known but not-yet-distinguished as different Prodeinotherium) lived in Eurasia and Africa from about 20 mya to about 1 mya (mya = million years ago).
English: Fig 159, Dinotherium, p 340; French: Fig 274, Dinotherium, p 289.
English: XXIV.Ideal Landscape of the Miocene Period. French: Fig 290, Vue idéal de la terre pendant la période miocène, p 301.
The Megacerops big horn ?) looks like a rhinoceros but is more closely related to the modern horse. I don?t know exactly which animal CCA intended, but if you’re Googling, some other useful names for this or similar creatures are Brontotherium thunder beast) and Titanotherium (Titan beast or—with 19th-century meaning of titan—very large beast). They were present in North America from about 38 mya to 34 mya. Figuier does not have an image of a Megacerops. Two Brontotheres appeared in Ice Age (Blue Sky Studios, 2002).
(Presumed brontotherium on the left, embolotherium on the right.)
The Xiphodon (sword toot?) looks like and is closely related to the present-day camel. Christensen put it in the background. It and close relations lasted from 40 mya to 34 mya.
English: Figure 155, ?Xiphodon gracile, p 324; French: Figure 256, Xiphodon gracile, p 275.
English: Plate XXIII, Ideal Landscape of the Eocene Period, p 328; French: Fig 271, Paysage idéal de la période éocène, p 281.
[1] I started with Richard L Jensen and Richard G Oman, C. C. A. Christensen, 1831-1912: Mormon Immigrant Artist, an exhibition at the Museum of Church History and Art (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1984). The blog, Historic LDS Architecture, has several of the Jensen/Oman images.
[2] The images included here are from the 4th edition (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et cie, 1864); the linked English translation is The World before the Deluge, revised and translated by HW Bristow (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1872).
Article filed under Miscellaneous
