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131. Was There Room?
Could the Ark have held all the animals? Easily. [See Figure 39.] A few humans, some perhaps hired by others, could build a boata large enough to hold representatives of every air-breathing land animal—perhaps 16,000 animals in all. (Of course, sea creatures did not need to be on the Ark. Nor did insects or amphibians. Only mammals, birds, reptiles, and humans. Much plant life survived the flood in a surprisingly simple way.)b The Ark, having at least 1,500,000 cubic feet of space, was adequate to hold these animals, their provisions, and all their other needs for one year.c
Since the flood, many offspring of those on the Ark would have become reproductively isolated to some degree due to mutations, natural genetic variations, and geographic dispersion. Thus, variations within a kind have proliferated. Each variation or species we see today did not have to be on the Ark. For example, a pair of wolflike animals were probably ancestors of the coyotes, dingoes, jackals, and hundreds of varieties of domestic dogs. (This is microevolution, not macroevolution, because each member of the dog kind can interbreed and has the same organs and genetic structure.) Could the Ark have held dinosaurs and elephants? Certainly, if they were young.
Figure 39: Ark in Football Stadium. This sketch shows how the Ark would fit into a football stadium. The Ark is frequently depicted as a small boat by those who have not bothered to check its dimensions. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. While there were several ancient cubits (generally the distance from a man’s elbow to the extended fingers), a cubit was typically 1.5 feet or slightly longer. The 450-foot-long Ark would snugly fit in a football stadium and would be taller than a four-story building.
This sketch of the Ark is based on George Hagopian’s credible account (page 40). The Ark did not look like a boat. It had a flat bottom, was not streamlined, and had windows in its top. The flat bottom would have made loading on dry land possible. Streamlined shapes are important only for ships designed for speed and fuel efficiency—neither of which applied to the Ark. Windows in the side might be nice for the passengers (or for the proverbial giraffes to stick their necks out), but side windows limit the depth of submergence and the maximum load. Riding low in the water gives a boat great stability. Actually, the Hebrew word for Ark does not mean boat; it means box, coffin, or chest—an apt description unknown to Hagopian.