Not quite. if the animal was clean the ark took 7, if it was unclean, two were taken. Many animals cannot properly grow up without the supervision of parents so many kinds would have has to come onto the ark as adults. The ark was big, but not really huge.
How big was Noah's Ark? What were the dimensions?
According to the link above, the ark was 450 ft long, 75 ft, wide, and 45 ft high. That does not seem to be a super large boat and certainly not even big enough to hold even a fraction of the animals required. (note: the real Noah's ark is 5 times bigger than the replica below)
You how, even juvenile dinosaurs are several meters long. There was also a huge plethora of different dinosaur species.
Even without them think of how much space the elephants, wolly mamoths, rhinosaurus, hippos, giraffes, tigers, giant sloths, saber tooth cats, gorillas, and humans would have taken up alone.
Mammals at the Cofrin Center for Biodiversity
Species: Reptile species, number
A genus is a category above speces and can contain dozens of species in it. There are still 1117 genera of mammals alone although most are small. Thing of all the other mamals that are now extinct. There are millions of bug species, and 8000 lizard species (not counting the vast majority who are extinct. I really doubt an ark would be able to hold all these animals.
Nimitz class aircraft carrier - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Answers.com - How tall is a Nimitz class aircraft carrier
An aircraft carrier is 1000 feet long, 252 feet wide and 240 feet tall. Of course it was triangular shaped so its volume is 252*240*1000/2=30,000,000 ft^3. The ark's area assuming it was a rectangle was 450*75*45= 1,500,000 ft^3, 1/20 the volume of an aircraft carrier.
I'm not even sure that even an aircraft carrier could have carried quite as many species as was necessary.
A good analogy for the size of the ark is Walmart. The average AREA of a walmart is 108,000 square feet. The area of the ark was 450*75= 33,000 square feet. So the ark took up about 1/3 of the area of an average Walmart. Not very good. From the looks of it, a walmart store is 20-30 ft tall, and the ark is 45 ft tall. So the ark is about 1.5 times as tall as a walmart. Do you really think a ship that has a far smaller volume than a walmart could really hold the majority of the land-dwelling biodiversity in this entire planet living and extinct.
Walmartstores.com: Walmart
Even now we see impressive migratory behavior of animals, birds, whales, and fish traveling hundreds and even thousands of miles. I find it amazing, but not hilarious. If God directed the animals to migrate to the ark it seems feasible to me that they could get there.
You are talking about a good percent of species migrating across huge oceans. Why didn't any kangaroos decide to stay in Asia? Penguins cannot survive in warm weather. This is a fact about the species. They certainly could not have made it all the way to Antartica in such destructive conditions.
You are making assumptions and guessing which animals were on the ark or what conditions they required in your attempt to make it seem ridiculous or impossible, but you do not actually know. It is also possible that animals were stronger and able to tolerate changing conditions, not being as specialized as they are today because of natural selection over time, including the fish. Amphidromous fish (such as salmon) travel between fresh and salt water.
What you are taking about is major macro-evolution in a matter of only a few thousand years. This is super-evolution for which we have absolutely no evidence for. If the number of adaptations that you are arguing for actually happened and in such a short period of time, this would derail quite a few creationist arguments.
One thing to note is that many animals have bodies that require very special diets. How did noah take care of this? Where did he get all this food. Did he have to carfully organize this food? How much space did he use to store it? Many animals required tons of food every day you know.
What did Noah do to promote cleanliness among animals? How did he displose of waste? You know, tons of feces and urine everywhere is going to get a lot of disease going.
What about all the plants? Many plant species would have been destroyed and the world would have been mostly barren for decades.
What's the difference between freshwater and saltwater?:: FreshMarine.com
Freshwater fish in salt water
Freshwater fish - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Would a saltwater fish die if put in freshwater? - Yahoo! Answers
Fresh water fish need to keep salt in their bodes and require different body strutures including more scales, and gills that disolve gasses while keeping water in. If you put them in salt water, they will lose too much mass (due to loss of body water) and die. Salt water fish don't need to keep the salt in so much because their environments have way more salt. If placed in fresh water, they would lose too much salt and die.
Some fish migrate from fresh water to salt water and back again. This requires timed physiological adaptations through a fish's life cycle. E.g. at the first stage a salmon has the body of a fresh water fish, at middle age it adjusts to have a body of a salf-water fish, and at old age it goes back to being fresh water. As wikipedia says below:
"Species migrating between marine and fresh waters need adaptations for both environments; when in salt water they need to keep the bodily salt concentration on a level lower than the surroundings, and vice versa. Many species solve this problem by associating different habitats with different stages of life. Both eels, anadromous salmoniform fish and the sea lamprey have different tolerances in salinity in different stages of their lives."
So even anadromous fish are salt-water some of the time, and fresh-water other times. If the fish before the flood were anadromous, amd if some species were in the fresh water stage at the time that the flood hit, they would have been killed by the salt water of the flood. The flood would have disrupted many fish species' body changing cycles, and those who were naturally turning into fresh water fish in preparation for another period of their lives would instead of safely migrating to a river, they would be killed by the flood waters which were still covering the earth.
When the flood ended, those fish in a salt-water state would have been killed off if they found theselves on dry land or fresh water. In summary, even if your unproven conjecture about all fish ancestors in the past being anadromous is true, they flood would have still destroyed most fresh water species. I just leaned all this stuff about fish today so I am open to any corrections to my arguments forum members are willing to give me.
There is also zero evidence that there was ever a global flood. Where did the flood waters come from? Where did they go? It is obvious that the great flood story is a Middle Eastern myth and not science at all. It has no evidence, and all points trying to defend the flood from refutationd don't have evidence either. They are simply conjecture.
Another problem with your hypothesis is why would natural selection make hundreds of thousands of species pickier than they were in the past? Why make diets more restricted and specialized? Why make thousands of species' choice of livable environment more restricted in such a short time scale and why make diets more restricted and specialized? Is this even feasible in only a few thousand years? I simply don't see they natural selection pressure for this to be strong enough. There is also no evidence of this evolution even happen. Show me the transitional species!
In summary, the ark is simply not big enough to fit even a bare minimum skeleton number of the species on earth living and extinct, and all the food they would require. Such a proposition is unproven and highly unfeasible. The theory of evolution is a far better explanation because it makes more sense looking at the natural world, and has way more evidence.
