autisticexpression:
autisticexpression:
beggars-opera:
autisticexpression:
beggars-opera:
I just realized that homeschooled evangelical christian kids aren’t allowed to have a dinosaur phase and made myself sad
Oh no, they are. They very much are. The stories I could tell you…
Oh no…please do!!!
Buckle up.
So most creationists aren’t what you see in Arrested Development where they think dinosaur fossils are fakes planted by Jews. Those freaks do exist, but they’re a wacky fringe even among creationists. The flat earth kind that other creationists write whole articles distancing themselves from.
The majority of creationists, the ones who sell books and open theme parks, love dinosaurs. It’s an obsession. They see them everywhere. Weird vaguely described creature in the Bible? Dinosaur. Dragon legends around the world? Also dinosaurs. Grendel? Dinosaur. Any ambiguous literary reference or ancient carving that could conceivablly be compared to a dinosaur is taken as evidence that non-avian dinosaurs lived much more recently than They want you to believe. It’s not uncommon for them to think they’re still out there, in fact. Most dinosaur or pterosaur cryptids are perpetuated by creationists. They go on missions to Central Africa to spread the gospel and hunt for living sauropods. Missions plural. They keep doing this. They bring dinosaur books as well as Bibles and have the local villagers point out which ones they recognize.
Of course, there’s a racist element to this part because an African villager pointing out a dinosaur is only remarkable if you assume they’re ignorant of paleontology or the pop culture around it. But they’re not. They have TV and internet. They’ve seen Jurassic Park. But they know the weird white people go apeshit when they draw a sauropod with a stick in the mud for their camera crew.
They’ve created a whole mythology for dinosaurs with entire museums devoted to their lore. I remember a traveling exhibit I saw as a kid that speculated about how dinosaurs were brought on Noah’s ark as babies to save space. They had a replica based on supposed eyewitness accounts of the ark on Mt Ararat. How a wooden structure survived for thousands of years, I don’t know, but that’s the least of their worries.
That’s nowhere near the most elaborate example either. There’s a whole Ark Encounter theme park where you can go inside a life-sized model of the ark and see museum quality dinosaur models in pens accompanied by completely made-up info about how Noah cared for each animal. They also have dioramas of dinosaurs fighting giants in an arena because we all remember that part of the Bible.
The guy who created this masterpiece is Ken Ham, who was also responsible for Genesis 3D, which was, as the name suggests, going to be a 3D animated retelling of the book of Genesis. Whether or not they planned on including the story of Onan is unclear, but they had people crowdfund individual scenes, and one of them was “Adam meets the Apatosaurus.”
Ken Ham is a rock star in the creationist world, most famous for debating Bill Nye. Other greats include Ray Comfort of “behold the atheist’s nightmare” fame, Duane Gish after whom the “Gish gallop” debate tactic was named, and Kent Hovind, AKA “Dr Dino” who believes peach pits cure cancer and was arrested for tax evasion. I’m not as familiar with him, but @gailyinthedark could probably fill you in. All of these people have devoted most of their careers to imaginatively reconciling the existence of dinosaurs with young earth creationist ideology.
TL,DR: most homeschooled evangelical kids are allowed and even encouraged to have dinosaur phase, if not a lifelong dinosaur obsession, it’s just going to be way weirder than most people’s.
I forgot an important piece of lore: the Chinese fake fossil trade.
See, the earliest known examples of feathered dinosaurs (except Archaeopteryx but we’ll circle back to that) were discovered in China, hence their names like Sinosauropteryx, Sinornithosaurus, Dilong, etc. So creationists don’t like that because they’ve been cheerfully maintaining for years that there is no connection between dinosaurs and birds because no dinosaur fossil up to that point has preserved any trace of a feather. So naturally, they deny these fossils are genuine. Conveniently for them, there are shady fossil peddlers in China who have sold fakes. In reality, paleontologists are very aware of this and are highly skeptical of any Chinese fossil that wasn’t directly dug out of the ground. But that ambiguity is enough for the creationists to spin a narrative that the “evolutionists” are conspiring with the evil Chinese fake fossil mafia, like how they use the Piltdown man (another famous hoax that was never widely accepted) against human evolution but probably more racist. I’m not sure how this narrative developed after feathered dinosaurs started turning up elsewhere like in Madagascar and North America. In any case, they still deny dinosaurs had feathers and the Ark Encounter’s dromaeosaurids are notably naked.
They have two schools of thought regarding Archaeopteryx: one holds that it’s a fake made by adding feathers to a Compsognathus fossil (despite the only superficial resemblance between the two), while the other accepts its existence but denies any relation to dinosaurs and chalks all saurian characteristics up to coincidence. It’s a just a bird, guys. God gave it a recognizably deinonychosaurian skeleton for the aesthetic.
Given the blatant contradictory nature of these two “theories,” this is a highly divisive issue within the creationists community with some online creationist book stores refusing to carry books that perpetuate the hoax model. I haven’t followed creationist theory in some time by now, but I’m curious as to how they’re handling the dinosaur-bird thing in light of more recent evidence.
Two more big lore drops:
1) All animals, including theropod dinosaurs, were created as herbivores.
Here is an illustration from Paul S. Taylor’s The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (yes, that is an actual title):
For those using screen-readers, it depicts two Dilophosaurus (the dinosaur that killed Nedry in Jurassic Park) munching on veggies.
At the time (1989), Dilophosaurus was thought to have thin, delicate crests and very weak jaws. The conventional explanation for this was that it specialized in small prey like fish and lizards. Michael Crichton got more creative in Jurassic Park, famously speculating that Dilophosaurus was venomous.
Creationists, on the other hand, took this as evidence that Dilophosaurus, along with all other theropods, was created as a herbivore.
See, creationists take every word of the Bible super literally (except for the ones that don’t support their theology), so when Genesis 1:30 says “and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat,” they take it as fact that all animals are naturally vegan and carnivorism is a result of Adam’s curse.
To prop up this extraordinary claim, they point to living herbivores with sharp teeth like fruit bats, gorillas, and pandas. What they miss is that only the canines of these animals are sharp. Their food-processing teeth are still adapted to chew vegetable matter. They don’t in any way compare to the blood-letting teeth of a carnosaur or the bone-crushing jaws of a tyrannosarid.
2) Fire-breathing hadrosaurs.
Let me circle back to the dinosaur-dragon connection as well as influential creationist Duane Gish.
Gish had a remarkable theory about the origin of the fire-breathing dragon myth. Leading experts hold the opinion that fiery breath originated as a symbol of the fires of hell or simply volcanic activity, but such abstract symbolism is beyond the literal mindset of the creationist. Gish set out to kill two birds with one stone and solve the mysteries of the fire-breathing dragon and what hadrosaurs did with their crests.
That’s right, he posited that the hollow chambers in these crests acted as combustion chambers like those on a bombardier beetle.
Here we have an illustration by Earl and Bonita Snellenberger from Gish’s Dinosaurs by Design of a Parasaurolophus immolating an attacking Ceratosaurus. The anachronistic nature of the encounter is the very least of our problems.
This would have no doubt been spectacular to witness in those dinosaur arena battles depicted in the Ark Encounter.
