How did Noah get species from other climates? Penguins, for instance?
The "babies" hypothesis makes it seem more probable (otherwise, adult elephants, hippos, bovines, seems like it'd get awfully crowded). Thanks for posting that, I don't know if it ever occurred to me.
I appreciate the civility of this discussion (so far). It's good to chat about different perspectives/theories/explanations without being attacked.
Scripture suggests that the environment pre-flood was very different from the current environment, largely because of a water canopy encircling the earth high in the atmosphere ("firmament" in Scripture). This canopy may have kept temperatures fairly consistent from location to location, and blocked harmful solar rays (hence people living so long pre-flood).
Pre-flood, the environment at the north pole may not have been much different from that in the Middle East. The ancestors of penguins, then, may have lived anywhere. I'd be interested in seeing fossil evidence of where penguin ancestors lived....
It's interesting to do a google search on "noah ark size" to get a better sense of how large the ark was and how many animals could have fit comfortably on it, as well as to read discussions of how Noah's family could have fed and cared for so many, and so on....