obsolete dinosaurs – Lee Duigon

Marx Trachodon Second Type | The revised Trachodon from 1959… | Flickr

Marx Toys’ classic Trachodon

Today’s science is tomorrow’s poppycock.

Poor Trachodon! One of my favorite dinosaurs. And they’ve drummed him out of the corps.

Alas! Poor Trachodon! I Knew Him, Horatio…

I had the books, I had the toys, I saw the skeletons–waddaya mean, “No such thing as Trachodon”? But then they always do this, don’t they? In fact, we wouldn’t have any science if they didn’t. Science requires constant revision.

The problem crops up when scientists pontificate to the public and suddenly you have this Settled Science that must never be questioned.

And then they base public policy and law on Settled Science that will be laughed at 20 years from now.

Marx Trachodon Second Type | The revised Trachodon from 1959… | Flickr

Marx Toys’ classic Trachodon

I’m in a retrospective mood today–maybe because 2020 is racing by so fast, even with the Great Quarantine to paralyze it.

Behold the mighty Trachodon, the pre-eminent “duckbill dinosaur,” as faithfully rendered into plastic by the Marx Toy Co. I still have a troop of these in my animal and dinosaur box. Nor was there, when I was acquiring those toys, a dinosaur book that didn’t mention Trachodon.

I don’t wanna hear it, that there never was a Trachodon! I don’t care if all they ever had was a few teeth somebody dug up in 1850–Trachodon was in all the books, I had the toys, I’d even seen the straight-up-standing skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History–and now you want to tell me there was no such thing? Away wi’ ye!

We will never be able to see live dinosaurs, so we will never know just how wrong we were about them. Which icons of today’s Settled Science will follow Trachodon into oblivion?

“I knew him, Horatio: he was a dinosaur of infinite jest. How his broad duck bill would gape with laughter!”

I’d like to know what we’ll be laughing at twenty years from now.