Dinosaurs Getting Makeovers

My prospector friend Stormie Waters and Ruby Slippers wanted a break from working on the upcoming nuptials for Ruby, so they stopped by my spread. We were talking about this and that, when what to our wondering eyes should appear but Rusty Swingset.

Rusty is the foreman at the Darwin Ranch, and he even brought his lady friend Jacqueline Hyde (who was not herself again). Like I have said before, creationists and evolutionists can meet up, visit a spell, then shake hands and part friendly. They were in the area, and Rusty wanted some firearms advice.

Velociraptor skeletal cast, WikiComm / Jens Lallensack (CC BY-SA 4.0)

After we talked about that and cleaned his shootin' iron, discussions turned into just chin music. My ears pricked up like a cat's when Jacqueline idly mentioned that Rusty was helping evolutionary scientists give makeovers to dinosaurs.

While paleontologists can learn a great deal from fossils and skeletal remains, there are serious limitations. Some fossils are very incomplete and a great deal of imagination is used. Far too often, Just-So Stories are invented and passed along as empirical research. In addition, weasel words are used to help keep things vague so they are less likely to be embarrassed by later contrary evidence.

It has known for many years that Jurassic Park movies had Velociraptors wrong because they were about the size of turkeys, and the pattern was after the Deinonychus. Fine, fine, the movies are for entertainment and profit, not documentaries. A more recent retooling of their image is that those wicked claws were probably not used as weapons.

Artist conceptions were made to represent another discovery of modern birds living alongside dinosaurs — a fact that feral evolutionists and angry atheists conveniently ignore. Also, despite modern reworkings of artwork of velociraptors, there is no real evidence that they had feathers. Darwin's disciples desperately want feathers because they ignore the above fact and claim that dinosaurs evolved into birds anyway. If the Creator gave some or all feathers, fine. But we need evidence, not storytelling.

Some previously unknown dinosaur eggs were found and scientists think those critters nested in colonies. Nice story, Stanley, but the popular version left out how there was nothing like an orderly colony found at the fossil site. Also, they got a mite ambitious by "identifying" more egg-species than is justified.

You can read about these items and more by visiting "Rethinking Dinosaurs."