I give you points for honesty. However, I think it's worth giving weight to the general agreement of so many scientists. You admit you don't know, and that's okay. You didn't focus your life on that. But some people have.

You say you are or were an attorney, so you understand records, surely? Documentation? Historians work with records and context to fill in where records fail. Detectives and crime scene investigators do the same.

Archeologists do the same on a much larger time table. We don't know the exact time and date that things happened, we know they happened a long time ago. We can estimate how old dirt is. We can use that to guess when this water horse lived and died. We see that the fossilized water horse was NOT the same creature as the ones we have, but that the creatures have similarities. We can look at how the bones of a whale match the bones of a horse with some modification. We can see the same sort of bone shape changing in different breeds of dog.

I will say this: I offer my apologies for calling you dumb.

I will ask: simply consider?