The Ark Wasn't Big Enough For All Those Animals Was It?

Question

450 feet x 75 feet just isn't big enough to carry two of every species, Noah and his extended family, plus food and fresh water enough for all for forty days and nights (?).
Unfortunately for you believers the scribes gave the dimensions of the Ark...and they're not even close. Just look at the African species alone. It would have taken 20 arks, and crews, or more just to carry them.

And what about the dinosaurs?
North & South American species?
Australian?
Asian?
And how did arctic and equatorial creatures survive together?

Just distributing the fodder, meat and water would have been more than a hundred men could do in a day.

I mean really people, doesn't this give you a clue?

Answer 1

Really, these are the kinds of stories Christians need to forget about as scientific, historical fact. Of course, Noah's ark is mythology. Noah could never have discovered all of the world's species in a human lifetime and then collected them all to put them on a home-made boat. Not even children actually believe this is possible. This falls into Santa Claus territory. No, all those toys will not actually fit on a sled.

Answer 2

The vast majority of these are capable of surviving in water and would not need to be brought aboard the ark. Noah need make no provision for the 21,000 species of fish or the 1,700 tunicates (marine chordates like sea squirts) found throughout the seas of the world, or the 600 echinoderms including star fish and sea urchins, or the 107,000 mollusks such as mussels, clams and oysters, or the 10,000 coelenterates like corals and sea anemones, jelly fish and hydroids or the 5,000 species of sponges, or the 30,000 protozoans, the microscopic single-celled creatures.

In addition, some of the mammals are aquatic. For example, the whales, seals and porpoises. The amphibians need not all have been included, nor all the reptiles, such as sea turtles, and alligators. Moreover, a large number of the arthropods numbering 838,000 species, such as lobsters, shrimp, crabs and water fleas and barnacles are marine creatures. And the insect species among arthropoda are usually very small. Also, many of the 35,000 species of worms as well as many of the insects could have survived outside the Ark.

I could go on all night......

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Answer 3

This is so full of holes it's hard to know where to start, but I'll just focus on just one: "Furthermore, the average-sized land animal would require only a cubic foot and a half of space." I don't know who came up with that figure, but I suspect they weren't a biologist or veterinarian. That's an area of 1 foot by 1 foot by 1.5 feet - roughly about the size of a VERY small terrarium...even a gerbil might feel a bit claustrophobic in a cage that small. Just how many animals could survive in such a tiny space for 6+ weeks? Maybe by including all insects to come up with the size of the 'average' land creature, it works...if you exclude them, it'd be a far different story. As Mark Twain put it, there are lies, damned lies and statistics...

Answer 4

Actually, the biblical kind is higher on the taxonomic scale than the species. Most species have arisen only recently. The biblical kind is probably at the genus level, or even the family. This would mean a maximum of 16,000 animals. In addition, they probably were young animals, so they're smaller, most likely just about to enter puberty so they'd be able to breed after exiting the Ark. The Ark was huge, about 1.5 million cubic feet.

Answer 5

I got into an e-mail exchange with someone who took the bible literally, even the story of noah and his ark. He believed that dinosaurs were around then because the world, according to the bible, is only six thousand years old. When I asked him your very question, he responded that noah took only pairs of baby dinosaurs and the rest perished in the flood. Oh brother!

Edit: I see you already got a response like this. And people wonder why Western Europeans laugh at us!

Answer 6

According to Genesis 6, the Ark was in excess of 1.5 Million cubic feet inside. That's a lot of space for critters!

At the time of Noah's flood, the Earth's land mass had not yet been divided into different continents, it was all one land mass.

Nobody said the animals were full size adult specimens.

Answer 7

This was a miracle! Of course it is not going to seem possible to us as humans. But how else do you think all the animals survived the flood? There is proof that the world was covered in water at one time, you know. Explain the seashells on top of Mount Everest or the water erosinon of the Sphinx???

Answer 8

If Harry Potter can fly around on a broom then Noah can use his holy shrink ray and fit all the animals on the ark.

Answer 9

so let me see....

if you minus the panthera, acinonyx,neofilis and felidae, as they evolved from the smilodon, then that's many down.

if you take away the african and asian elephants and the mammorth, you get only the common ancestor, the mastadon, left

now lets see: original spider, original locust/grasshopper, original dragon/damsel fly, original leviathan/croc/alligator....


if you take into account that many of the animals we see today are the result of genetic variance and micro-evolution, the list shrinks significantly. the dinosaurs were probably extinct at the time. again, genetic variance, micro-evolution and migration. the contenants drift at a slow pace; I'm sure there would have been plenty of time for kangaroos to cross the mediterrainian into the asian continent and into oceana.

again micro-evolution and adaptation. there are australian penguins. what does that tell you?

you don't take much into consideration.

Answer 10

This reminds me of when little kids ask how big fat Santa can fit down the chimney. Believers, explain to me how this is one bit different than explaining how two of every species on earth fit into a boat.