The first thing you do when you go to someone's house is ask for the wifi network and password. For me, it's always amusing to watch the look on people's faces when they see that my family's wifi is called "Dinosaurs Aren't Real 5Gz."
Most kids have security blankets to cozy up with at night. Well, my little brother used to carry this giant plastic T. Rex around. At the age of 4, he was convinced that he would grow up to be one; that was his dream job. Abe, the T. rex. From daily games of Excavation (a spin-off of the game Operation) to the pterodactyl costume my brother wore every Halloween, I was constantly dealing with dinosaurs.
The only difference between the movies I watched as a kid about dragons or the ones about dinosaurs was the suspension of disbelief. Mockumentary about mermaids? Definitely not real, yet hilarious. But, dinosaurs wandering planet earth and befriending humans? That totally could have happened. Dinosaurs warranted credible documentaries, research, and an entire scientific field. The fictional stories were backed up by facts, and therefore people didn't see them as quite so fictional, after all.
Where was all of this information coming from? When I was in fourth grade, I did a research project on a subject of my choice. I got the opportunity to look into any subject that interested me. I decided to study paleontology. What I mean by this is that I literally read books about the study of paleontology. I didn't look for fossils or analyze their carbon levels, rather I looked up how scientists got their information.
What I learned was this: scientists don't actually dig up bones and suddenly remember that the particular specimen came from a lizard-looking creature that ate mammals. The way they learned about these creatures (millions of years dead) was by comparing their body structure to that of animals who live today. If a fossil resembled bones of a chicken, that must have been an ancestor of a bird, which meant it ate worms and bugs. My interpretation: scientists know nothing about fossils except for how old they are.
The more I looked into it, the less I understood, and the less I believed.
Let me ask you this: can you actually imagine an animal larger than an elephant wandering around? I'll admit it, I cannot fathom the concept of a world filled with creatures as large as the ones we see at the Natural History Museum. The AMNH in New York gets five million visitors per year. I think they're being lied to.
Half of what I saw of dinosaurs was in museums or scholarly books. The other half was in films, board games, and toys. Dinosaurs are a multi-billion dollar industry.
As a kid, I watched every Land Before Time movie, episode, and I even owned the PS1 game. Jurassic Park grossed $900 million in the box office, and every follow-up movie thereafter made record profit.
Consider this: every image of a dinosaur you have ever seen has been animated. When you go to a museum and see the fossils or the bones all laid out, they're not the real deal. They're plastic molds of casts from rocks.
When dinosaurs died out, how come the ones with wings didn't fly away from the infamous asteroid? Why didn't mosasaurus swim deeper into the ocean or a little further east and away from the dangers of climate change or whatever people are claiming killed off these powerful monsters? How could prehistoric mammals survive volcanic eruptions but the giant lizards couldn't fend for themselves? If there were dinosaurs in the Americas, but also in Africa, how did one flaming sky rock kill them all?
So many questions, so much money, so few answers. Poke fun at me all you want, but I'm just not buying it.
I think it's all just a conspiracy.
