I always start this conversation with my friends like this, "When did you first learn about dinosaurs?" The answer is unanimous, first grade. Since most of my friends are in thier thirties this means sometime in the 80's.
Science is science and it is always changing. New theories and new evidence constantly causes the way we teach sciences to be altered. So, having said that it has been twenty plus years since we were first introduced to the world of giant lizards. Surley some new things have been discovered and the way we teach children about dinos has been changed also.... Has it? Has the way we teach children in fact changed along with the new evidence we have discovered.
I remember watching "Jurassic Park" and thinking to myself, who decided that the dinosaurs looked that way. Who is getting paid all that money to decide what all those dinos acted like, what they ate, fur, hairless, brown, grey, green, big small, mean, or gentle. It was a great movie, but was it acurrate? I am about to make you think really hard about that question.
When humans die in murders, the CSI unit is sent out to put the pieces together. They somtimes come across bodies that have been torn and mutilated. Pieces of these bodies are sometimes scattered across fields and buildings. No problem....you know why? We can put them back together. We can put them back together very accuratly because we have seen a human before. Not sixty million years ago but sixty seconds before we found them dead. So in argument here we go. When we find dinosaur bones we leave the task of putting them back together to paleontologists. These are the people that spent somewhere between eight and twelve years at a university learning about dinosaurs the same way we did. The only difference is that they get a shiny paper to say they know more than we do. Paleontologists go out to dig sites and find fossils. After finding enough of these fossils they begin the process of putting the pieces back together. When they are all done we have a dinosaur that was put together based on theories of bone structures and wieght displacement. Lets say that the skelatons are put back together correctly. Then how do we explain what thier skins looked like. How do we know how they acted. Just because they had scary teeth doesn't mean they had to eat meat. Scientists can't tell us thier temperments based on bone study. Remember the paleontologists have never seen a real dinosaur, they have been extinct for some sixy million years. They have nothing but theories.
So you ask what are the bones then? I think they are simply remnants of beasts that used to live a long time ago that resemble what we have today. Big elephants, tigers crocadiles, hippos, birds of all kinds are what I feel are being represented by these fossils. Show me a fully preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex or Brontosaurus....I don't think so! Now show me a fully preserved pre-historic elephant..... no problem. Check this out. http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Frozen-Woolly-Mammoth-Lyuba-Heads-To-Chicago-For-Exhibit-In-Field-Museum/Article/200910115399522?f=rss. Forty thousand years old!!!!!
I'm not saying that the bones don't exsist, what I am saying is that they were probably put together wrong and taught wrong. I want children to get the most accurate teachings of these pre-historic animals they can possibly get. Ask yourself, " when did I first learn of dinosaurs and have I been fooled too?"
