Genesis "kinds" may be Nested Hierarchies.

A description of a fire-breathing monster ("leviathan") is given in the book of Job 40:20 - 41:25. Sounds pretty much like a dragon to me.Job 4020 Canst thou draw out the leviathan with a hook, or canst thou tie his tongue with a cord?21 Canst thou put a ring in his nose, or bore through his jaw with a buckle?
22 Will he make many supplications to thee, or speak soft words to thee?
23 Will he make a covenant with thee, and wilt thou take him to be a servant for ever?
24 Shalt thou play with him as with a bird, or tie him up for thy handmaids?
25 Shall friends cut him in pieces, shall merchants divide him?
26 Wilt thou fill nets with his skin, and the cabins of fishes with his head?
27 Lay thy hand upon him: remember the battle, and speak no more.
28 Behold his hope shall fail him, and in the sight of all he shall be cast down.Job 41I will not stir him up, like one that is cruel: for who can resist my countenance?
2 Who hath given me before that I should repay him? All things that are under heaven are mine.
3 I will not spare him, nor his mighty words, and framed to make supplication.
4 Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can go into the midst of his mouth?
5 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.
6 His body is like molten shields, shut close up with scales pressing upon one another.
7 One is joined to another, and not so much as any air can come between them:
8 They stick one to another and they hold one another fast, and shall not be separated.
9 His sneezing is like the shining of fire, and his eyes like the eyelids of the morning.
10 Out of his mouth go forth lamps, like torches of lighted fire.
11 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, like that of a pot heated and boiling.
12 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame cometh forth out of his mouth.
13 In his neck strength shall dwell, and want goeth before his face.
14 The members of his flesh cleave one to another: he shall send lightnings against him, and they shall not be carried to another place.
15 His heart shall be as hard as a stone, and as firm as a smith's anvil.
16 When he shall raise him up, the angels shall fear, and being affrighted shall purify themselves.
17 When a sword shall lay at him, it shall not be able to hold, nor a spear, nor a breastplate.
18 For he shall esteem iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.
19 The archer shall not put him to flight, the stones of the sling are to him like stubble.
20 As stubble will he esteem the hammer, and he will laugh him to scorn who shaketh the spear.
21 The beams of the sun shall be under him, and he shall strew gold under him like mire.
22 He shall make the deep sea to boil like a pot, and shall make it as when ointments boil.
23 A path shall shine after him, he shall esteem the deep as growing old.
24 There is no power upon earth that can be compared with him who was made to fear no one.
25 He beholdeth every high thing, he is king over all the children of pride.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.

The Hobbit has a far better description of a dragon, certainly one more believable then thinking Job is talking of a dragon.

Exactly!I pointed out the same thing just upthread in Message 158.But there was no response to my comment. Maybe your's will draw a response.Edit to add:

It does not pay a prophet to be too specific. ...
L. Sprague de Camp

Edited by Coyote, : Add quote re: prophets

Trolling apart, it's sort of interesting to compare the standard of evidence required to form a view.A book - or rather a section of a book - written by unknown people somewhere around 2,500 years ago based on spoken legend mentions a mythical beast and this becomes good evidence for the existence of fire-breathing, flying dragons.But 300 years of evidence-based endeavour by science building the physiolgical structure of life on earth from real, objective, reproducible tangible fact is dismissed in a hand wave.That's the end of it really, non-overlapping magisteria.

A leviathan is a sea monster. The Bible uses the term "dragon" to refer to Satan.But you are drifting off-topic and ignoring the point under discussion. You said, "When one of their fossils is discovered, evolutionists will have to fit it somehow into their mythical Tree of Life," and the answer remains the same. When the fossil of a dragon or minotaur or griffin or crocoduck is discovered then it will throw a major monkey wrench into the theory of evolution. Just finding a rabbit fossil in the Cambrian would do the same.--Percy

Fossils of dragons have been found. They are called ...

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Pleisiosaurs (wiki):

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Restored skeleton of Plesiosaurus

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Fossils of griffins have also been found. They are called ...

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Protoceratops (wiki):

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Mounted P. andrewsi skeleton, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

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Earlier reconstructions made some errors ...But these creatures fit neatly into the nested hierarchies, complete with homologies with ancestral species and descendent species (note that these are families, so there are a few varieties/versions of each).EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Hi RAZD, hope you are well.I have to sound a note of scepticism here; I don't think that stories of dragons and griffins are based upon fossils.The notion that dragons were inspired by dinosaur or marine reptile bones has little to no evidence for it. Insofar as dinosaur fossils were associated with dragons, it seems just as likely that it was the other way around, i.e. someone looked at a fossil and it reminded them of pre-existing stories about dragons.The protoceratops origin for griffins is extremely dubious. The usual version of this tale is that griffins were based upon the protoceratops fossils found by Scythian gold-miners and that griffin-lore entered Greek culture when those cultures first came into contact. The problem with this is that griffin iconography pre-dates this by some thousands of years. Lots of ancient Near East cultures depicted griffins and they definitely weren't inspired by Mongolian fossils.There's a good essay on this topic here; Why Protoceratops almost certainly wasn't the inspiration for the griffin legend.Personally, I find the dragon connection tenuous and I definitely don't believe the griffin theory. I think that these are simply imaginary monsters, exaggerated, mythic versions of real animals. The griffin in particular seems to be just an animal chimera. I don't see any particularly strong to need to explain these stories beyond the fact that people have very rich imaginations. As a keen Dungeons and Dragons player, I know just how hard it is to imagine a new monster that isn't essentially some combination of elements taken from existing organisms and I think that's all that's going on here. I think that people have been creating imaginary animal mash-ups for a long time and I think that when the Greeks said that a griffin was a combination of a bird and a big cat, they meant exactly that.Mutate and Survive

I tend to think the same thing. Large animals in distant countries seems like a much better source for these legends. For example, here is an early depiction of St. George slaying a dragon: It isn't much of a stretch to conclude that dragons could have been influenced by 5th hand stories about large snakes or crocodiles.

Nowadays, the "elemental spirits" are playing the game of strictly scientific reality, but it's not so in those old times, there could well be unscientific dragons and things.

Just down the road from me you can see the skull of the dragon slain by George. It's in a castle where it has supposedly been displayed as such since the Middle Ages. It looks similar to this: (although to be fair the skull's provenance is a little unclear, and there's a school of thought that the story of it being displayed as a dragon's skull centuries ago is itself a modern myth).

Hello Dredge, I've been away for a while. First, Creationists are not Literalists! Rather, the key to a correct understanding of any part of the Bible is to ascertain the intention of the author of the portion or book under discussion. This is not as difficult as it may seem, as the Bible obviously contains: Poetry, Parables, Prophecy, Letters, Biography, History, Wisdom, etc.
The author’s intention with respect to any book of the Bible is usually quite clear from the style and the content. The key to understanding the biblical text is to take into account the historical and literary context. This can be done by employing historical-grammatical exegesis.Should Genesis be taken literally - creation.com
The Bible and hermeneutics - creation.comNext, biologists have trouble defining what a species is! There are many definitions of Species ( 26+). Similarly there can be several different definitions of Kind. Creationists have given definitions of Kind but no definition will please everyone; especially if they're looking for something to criticise. Here is one definition;

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Groups of living organisms belong in the same created "kind" if they have descended from the same ancestral gene pool. This does not preclude new species because this represents a partitioning of the original gene pool. Information is lost or conservednot gained. A new species could arise when a population is isolated and inbreeding occurs. By this definition a new species is not a new "kind" but a further partitioning of an existing "kind".
Bible Search and Study Tools - Blue Letter Bible

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Yes. The species belonging to one kind will form a nested hierarchy rooted at the original created kind (Genesis Kind). The group of all living and extinct forms of life descended from an original created kind will form a holobaramin.The mistake that many evolutionists make is to extrapolate beyond this to infer universal common ancestry. Edited by CRR, : add ... (Genesis Kind).

So, do you mean that all tetrapods belong in the same holobaramin?Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

Hi CRR.In your definition I saw the following: Could you tell us how you measure genetic information to know whether genetic information is lost or conserved?

You should have trouble defining what a species is if evolution is true. The Species Problem is a strong piece of evidence in favor of evolution. Because of evolution there is no sharp dividing line between species which makes it problematic when you try to define species in a non-arbitrary and objective manner. All vertebrates form a nested hierarchy, so does that mean all vertebrates, including humans, share a common ancestor? We are interpolating since all species fit into a nested hierarchy.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

All of the evidence shows that not one of the Biblical Kinds existed for many billions, of years after the Earth was created.Creationism is just plain stupid as well as being totally refuted by all the available evidence.