Sea Monsters

We went to the 3D movie Sea Monsters. It is about dinosaurs and fish that lived "millions" of years ago. It is intended for kids and is under an hour long. I have to say that the 3D was pretty cool and held our kids' attention. Some dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs, but the film makers did a good job of not making it graphic. There was little to no blood and no chewing or tearing of flesh, just a chomp and a gulp. Gabriel and Andrew were mesmerized by all the animals, (crustaceans, fish, dinosaurs, birds, etc.). However, the actual story was fiction passed off as fact. The movie starts with finding the fossil of a dolphin-like dinosaur. The story follows the life cycle of the female offspring of this creature by going back and forth between real fossils and a fictional story that links them all. This presents a problem because scientists cannot and will not ever be able to study these animals, so there is no way to accurately say how they interacted with one another or if they did at all. Since we don't believe in the old earth theory, that presented another problem. The writers had to come up with credible sounding explanations for why there are fossils within fossils. What I mean is, they had two examples of fossilized dinosaurs that had eaten either a fish or another smaller dinosaur and both sets of bones were fossilized. So their explanations were that one dinosaur ate a fish that was too big for it and it died of gluttony and the other died in a territorial fight with another dinosaur just like it right after eating. Both of those rationalizations seem ridiculous to me. First of all, most animals know what they are capable of eating and there is no way to know if an extinct animal was territorial by looking at a set of bones. Pure conjecture. I think there is a very easy explanation, they both died at the same time in a global flood. Rapid burial in large amounts of sediment would allow them to fossilize completely intact along with their lunch. Plus when an animal died in the movie, they showed it sinking. We know that as the carcass decays, sea animals bloat and rise to the surface, they don't sink. Also, as most people know, when an animal dies in the ocean or on land, for that matter, scavengers devour it immediately and scatter the bones. So it is highly unlikely that the fossils they found had died of natural causes and then sank to the bottom in tact and stayed that way for millions of years. So what is my point? Why am I tearing apart a seemingly neat movie? It is because children are not critical thinkers and when you tell them something happened and show them pictures of it happening, they believe it and it becomes ingrained in their minds. My kids are too young to really understand what I have described. Gabriel just knew he saw cool animals. But a slightly older child would get it. If your children are older, you could use this film as a discussion piece, I guess. For all of you out there who believe in evolution and millions of years, you'll probably love the movie. But really, even if I believed in evolution, I could not believe their scenarios.