Oh, the confidence of the ignorant…
I didn’t know about the Kingdom Dinosaura before.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Oh, the confidence of the ignorant…
I didn’t know about the Kingdom Dinosaura before.
isn’t Kingdom Dinosaura a creationist theme park?
The chief dinosaur ain’t called T. REX for no reason!!11
Dinosaur Kingdom II
This is a tourist exhibit in Virginia that has a fanciful tableau of dinosaurs with Civil War era soldiers which some Creationists have mistaken for a historical exhibit.
I had to look up Thomas Holtz since I didn’t know who he was. Based on wikipedia, the commenter is absolutely right about educating Holtz. It would have been like lecturing Stephan Hawking that we live in a donut-shaped universe.
@neptis:
I had the exact same thought!
When her mummy and daddy took her to the zoo, Dinosaura bald eagle.
This is a little off topic, but I was just at a local park that has a lot of wild turkeys, especially over the last few years. It struck me that if they had been explained to me first as small, feathered dinosaurs rather than birds, I’d probably accept that without much argument.
I was also recently reminded of the Gallimimus scene in the original Jurassic Park. Remember, “OMG, they’re flocking just like birds, just like I thought!” That was on a drive where I had a pretty amazing view of deer on a hill in the distance. I am not sure what was compelling them, but I saw this tiny figures moving fast and jumping. OMG, they’re flocking! this proves that deer are actually dinosaurs!
No, I guess not, but it strikes me that for any animal believed to live in large numbers together, you’d expect some kind of flocking, herding, or swarming behavior. The JP scene just seems a little ridiculous to me in retrospect (not that I was bowled over at the time).
(None of this means I disagree with the increasing consensus on the connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, I just think that “flocking” is probably not the place to go for evidence.)
Didn’t “the Flintstones” prove that “dinosaura” are like dogs?
I didn’t know about the Dinosaura Kingdom, but now I know about the Ignorama Kingdom.
Oh my, this doofus ‘broke out the science’ to claim that dinosaura are somehow not members of the animal kingdom. To a paleontologist. Who writes about dinosaurs.
My grand daughter knows better, and she is only 2 years old. She loves ‘saurs. We sing about baby t t t t T. rex every day. Stomp and roar.
Color me confused. If “the science” proves that dinosaurs weren’t animals, what kind of vegetable or mineral were they?
I had no idea that Animalia and Dinosaura were kingdoms. Apparently my biology teachers conspired to hide that key truth from me….
Sigh. This kind of stupid makes one despair for the human race.
wzrd1@11 Mineral, obviously. Have you ever seen more than the bones?
Clearly they were mineral, since their bones were made from fossil.
Birds being dinosaurs is perhaps my favorite dinosaur fact. That they’re specifically part of the so-called reptile-hipped dinosaur lineage and not of the extinct bird-hipped lineage might be my second favorite.
Couldn’t find Thomas Fucking Holtz on the interweb ,i think he meant Thomas Holtz .
There used to be a group of ornithologists who held that birds are not dinosaurs ,BAND .
Don’t know if they are still holding to that point of view .
There is a nice book called Bones Of Contention ,about the discovery of Archaeopteryx fossils ,and the
whole debate about BAND ,and other stuff .like Nat Geo being made to look foolish by a Chinese fossil
faker .
CreationistsCretinists are perhaps kingdom dinosaura — authoritarians with no actual idea what they are bellowing about.I really miss the late Ed Brayton.
He and his posse of regular commenters were masters of sark, targeting BS just like this.
.
The author is a bit dull , no creative misspellings, no rants about the jews being behind the ungodly evolution idea. Like mediocre films , his comment fails to reach “so bad it is good” status.
I just realised, Mecha Godzilla may qualify as “mineral”. Is he a dinosaur?
And Biolante is definitely a vegetable….
Well, I’ll say. I’ll admit as much: I am quite envious of such invincible self-confidence in the face of no justification at all. It really takes some brass to “break out the science” to a professional in his/her field, it must be wonderful to walk a foot off the ground, in a scented pink cloud, blissfully secure that one’s opinion are always RIGHT whatever others say.
Pity that to the rest of us, they all look like perfect horse’s asses.
And @ 7, Paul BC: I had the same feeling watching some large ducks in a park. That way of strutting forward, neck at an angle, and a predatory glint in their eye… give ’em two small arms and they’ll be right unnerving.
outis@20 Geese are the ones that scare me. You definitely don’t want to corner a goose.
My chickens would occasionally catch a mouse, which then became the ball in a game of chicken rugby. It Illustrated rather gruesomely that birds are dinosaurs.
Wings are great in a scrum. No need for arms if you’ve also got a beak.
@22 There is a clip out there showing a chicken catching a mouse ,ashamed as a cat owner to say that there was a cat nearby
and it didn’t try to catch the mouse .
The Dunning-Kruger is strong with this one it is.
This level of Dunning-Kruger hurts. Don’t mess with the ignorant / arrogant. I once posted in a forum that dinosaurs are reptiles, and I immediately had two morons, in a tagteam effort, personally attacking me. No matter what evidence I calmly provided, they became more obstinate and abusive.
dudev: reptiles in common parlance are a paraphyletic group which excludes dinosaurs, birds and mammals; and similarly dinosaurs are usually a paraphyletic group that excludes birds.
Reptilia is clear these days; “reptile” not so much.
numerobis@26–
I know it’s a quibble, but I do wish people wouldn’t say things like “birds are dinosaurs” without clarifying that they’re talking about a cladistic classification system, where a paraphyletic system would usually separate them. Both cladistic and paraphyletic classification systems have their uses, but they are definitely not interchangeable!
Reginald Selkirk@3–
It is a well-established historical observation that the South would have won the Civil War if they’d fully embraced the full tactical advantage of their tyrannosaur cavalry brigades.
In the famous last words of General Sedgwick, “They couldn’t hit a brontosaur at that distance.”
davidc1 — Cat knew better than to mess with the chickens!
chrislawson:
I have in the past said “once were dinosaurs” — a reference to this story (and later, movie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Were_Warriors
—
On the topic at hand, there have been one or two instances on this very blog where experts were “corrected” by commenters — I think I may have embarrassed myself thus on one of those. <wince>
Pedantry always goes over well with people.
Separating the chickens from the microraptors sounds very prudent to me.
PaulBC, you’ve never kept chickens, have you? They fucking are raptors.
(cf. Tethys @22)
This would actually be funny if that poster weren’t so ignorant. Don’t kids learn about Clades in middle school now? That’s just scary ! . Frankly I didn’t know who Holtz was either and had to look him up. Now if that had been Jennifer Clack (RIP) or Neil Shubin or another of the early tetrapod crowd I’d have known who they were .
I agree about chickens being raptors I still remember being pecked on my bare feet as a small child .
Geese still scare me more than chickens and I have been around both.
@numerobis — I can assure you that the morons I dealt with had no ability to parse their own immediate – family trees, let alone the nuances of phylogenetic systematics. Your pedantry would not have helped the situation.
Ducks and geese will also catch and eat small animals. Watching them subdue their prey and then swallow it whole and head first is very reptilian.
It certainly made me appreciate being much larger than a mouse.
There is a widely reported story found on the web, about the time Johnny Cash got into a fight with his male ostrich and was nearly killed. His belt buckle saved him, though he suffered broken ribs and a deep slash down his abdomen.
@18 Yeah ,i miss him too ,his regular commenters have decamped to the Friendly Atheist ,Modusoperandi is still the resident POE .
@38 The bird not a Country music fan then ?
There is footage of a Pelican swallowing a live Seagull in one of the royal parks in London ,it must have fancied a change from Pidgeon.