I want to show you some of the various “Tyrannosaurs” that have passed for true and scientifically accurate reconstructions. I’m finding the logistics a bit tricky, so wish me luck.
This was Settled Science in the 1800s. The statue is supposed to be Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be given a scientific name; but it belongs to the same general group as Tyrannosaurus and one could be easily mistaken for the other. This was the monster featured in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
In the 1940s we had Rudolph Zallinger’s T. rex in his mural at the Peabody Museum, and toy makers stuck to his reconstruction–complete with huge beer-belly. Zallinger’s mural is awe-inspiring. I’m afraid the toy was not.
In the 1950s and 60s, T. rex shed his beer belly and learned to stand bolt-upright like a human being. Here he is in The Land Unknown (1957), one of my absolute favorite movies when I was eight years old.
Jurassic Park and its sequels gave us a Tyrannosaurus that was really scary, it could’ve eaten all the earlier models for breakfast. The science kept changing; and movie-making special effects technology changed even fast. However, T. rex was not going to be allowed to rest on these laurels
I call this the Skid Row Tyrannosaur. To me it looks like a giant wino. Slathering greasy, shabby feathers all over it doesn’t help at all. But if history is any guide, this monstrosity will be superseded–hopefully by something better. Or at least less unsightly.
There’s observational science; things we can observe, and it’s pretty hard to disprove something we can observe in our day. If pigs sprout wings and start flying around, then we know that pats can fly.
Then there’s historical science, which can’t be observed in our time. If we see a boulder at the bottom of a cliff, and an indentation where it had rested, at the top of the cliff, if doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to piece together what happened, but, if someone wants to explain why it fell, it could be factual, such as evidence of an earthquake, or it could be blamed on flying pigs. No one was there to confirm, or refute, such a claim.
If there are no winged pigs in the fossil record, you can claim that they just haven’t been discovered as of yet, and your license to tell the tale is secure. Darwin stated that his transitional species were yet to be discovered, and he even admitted that without these, his theory falls apart, but over 150 years later, the transitional species are conspicuous in their absence I’m not certain that even Darwin would agree with neo-Darwinism.
The fact is, we have little to go on, with many fossils. My personal favorite, the State Dinosaur of Colorado, the Stegosaurus is known by relatively few fossil examples that are anywhere near complete. I’m not suggesting that all dinosaur representations are somehow false, but if all you have is hard tissue, or mineralized copies of bones, while they can piece together some ideas of the soft tissue structure, from muscle attachment points, etc. there is still some surmising that is bound to happen. They are welcome to it, but presenting this as settled science doesn’t strike me as honest.
Sometimes I think honest scientists are as extinct as the dinosaurs.
They aren’t even honest with themselves.
There is nothing honest about these reports. These people dedicate their whole lives to pushing these fantasies. It is just not worth considering. If there is no proof for things
I, for one, am not the least bit interested in their stories.
And that’s just what a lot of this has become. They make up stories to fit what scant evidence they have, and expect people to take these as fact.
I can’t help loving dinosaurs–always have, life-long. But I think I know whistling Dixie when I hear it.
That’s what they are doing. I think that they fear the facts.