This article was originally written for Question Evolution Day 2020.
Whether or not dinosaurs and man co-existed is a major point of contention between Christians and Evolutionists. Whereas Christians believe dinosaurs and man were created together, Evolutionists mock any claim that remotely resembles the Biblical model.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that dinosaurs and man co-existed. For example, there are images of dinosaurs that pre-date both the modern formation of the modern Evolutionary fairy tale, and the re-discovery of the dinosaurs in the early 1800s.
One example is depicted in the header image. This is obviously an image of a sauropod, and yet it was carved by an Anasazi Indian before the 13th century. This means the artist had no access to modern palaeontological research, concept art, media, and of course Evolutionary stories. Thus, Evolutionists must come up with another reason this petroglyph exists.
And they do try. Some posit that ancient artists merely discovered fossils and figured out what the creatures looked like, but that doesn't explain why A. we have no record of this occurring or B. why they didn't make similar mistakes to ours. Look up early depictions of the iguanodon, you'll see that the thumb spike was originally believed to be a horn on the nose. Or, more topically, sauropods were originally thought to have their legs sprawled out with their tails dragging on the ground, like lizards. The silly mistakes we made in the past are not present in ancient depictions of dinosaurs, the artists just lacked modern artistic techniques.
Perhaps more hilarious is Sagan's theory that, since humans are descended from animals that lived with dinosaurs, we simply "remember" them. Apparently, despite there being no evidence that memories are passed down, it makes perfect sense that our ancestors retained a near perfect knowledge of the dinosaurs until a few hundred years ago, just in time for us to discover their bones and find out about them again.
So we see that Evolutionists do have some explanations for why we see dinosaurs so readily depicted in ancient art. One explanation that rarely seems to come about is that these depictions are actually an accident. In my entire career as an apologist, I have heard of only one Evolutionist who tried to make that claim about the petroglyph, and it's been so long since I heard it, I can't even find that example again. Everyone else pretty much universally accepts that this is a real, man-made image that at the very least seems to depict a sauropod dinosaur, centuries before man re-discovered their bones. No one posits some silly story about how it rained on the rock, and that eroded a pattern sort of like a sauropod. No one suggests one of the Anasazi Indians threw a spear, missing their target, hitting the rock, and it just happened to leave a sauropod imprint. No one suggests an animal climbed the rock, slipped, and clawed away the rock to look like a sauropod. There is near unanimous agreement that this simple petroglyph was designed.
But we never met the designer. We never spoke to anyone who met the designer. We don't have a clear historical chain connecting the designer to some curator at a museum. We don't even know who the designer is, or when they carved the petroglyph. By the same Evolutionary logic that says something as complex as life can come into existence without intelligent assistance, any explanation for how this petroglyph came into existence, even if it is as insane as an eagle flying overhead and pooping on the rock, leaving a dino stain, is at least as valid, if not more so, than that an Anasazi Indian carved the petroglyph.
An Evolutionist's ability to recognise design seems to magically switch on and off at random. Petroglyphs are obviously designed, and yet, compared to life and the world in which it exists, they very well may be accidents. If something as simple as a petroglyph is so obviously designed, there is no sensible way to deny Creationism. The real question isn't "was life designed by a god", but "which god designed life"? The Bible remains the most likely source of information about Him, given that the Bible tells the story of the only God that is real enough to actually show up in history. From Adam to Abraham to Moses to Jesus' Apostles, God has been present throughout all of human history. No other god can claim that.