Addenda 3 The Number of Animals
In these verses are contained the instructions for the preservation of the animals in the Ark. A male and a female of each "kind" were to be brought into the Ark, "to keep them alive." The scope was quite comprehensive: "two of every sort." God had a purpose for each created kind, so He intended that all the kinds be preserved through the Flood. In addition to this general rule, seven animals of each "clean" kind (evidently those intended for use as domestic and sacrificial animals) were to be taken on board [7:2].
Most land animals are small, of course; so this did not by any means present an impossible task. Authorities on biological taxonomy estimate that there are less than eighteen thousand species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians living in the world today. This number might be doubled to allow for known extinct land animals (that is, those known from actual fossil records, not the imaginary transitional forms that never existed except in the minds of evolutionists). Allowing then for two of each species, there might have to be a total of about seventy-two thousand animals on the Ark -- say seventy-five thousand; to allow for the five extra animals in each "clean" species.
Since, as we have already seen, the Ark could have carried as many as one hundred and twenty-five thousand sheep, and since the average size of land animals is surely less than that of sheep, it is obvious that no more than 60 percent of its capacity would have to be used for animals. Actually, it would have been less than this, since the Biblical "kind" is probably considerably broader than that of the arbitrary "species" category of modern biology.
There were a few large animals (elephants, dinosaurs, giraffes, etc.) to be carried on the Ark, but many more small ones (mice, robins, lizards, frogs, etc.). Even the large animals were probably represented as young (therefore small) individuals, since they had to spend a year in the Ark without reproductive activity and then go out to repopulate the earth.
Thus, the specified size of the Ark seems ideally appropriate for the animals it had to carry. There was of course also ample room for the approximately one million species of insects (many of these, no doubt, could have survived outside the Ark), as well as food for the animals, for living quarters for Noah and his family, and for any other necessary purposes.
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Henry Morris, p. 185.
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