February 18, 2010
Not Everyone is Happy With Feathered Dinosaurs
Logo of the "feathered dinosaur protest movment", from I Heart Chaos.
Time and again I have used this blog to describe what I think is one of the most fascinating recent discoveries in paleontology: that birds are dinosaurs.
Not everyone is happy with this fact, though. The blog io9 recently posted sample images from a feathered dinosaur protest group who prefer their dinosaurs to be scaly. According to the “skeptics”: “Dinosaurs are naked, leathery killing machines. They’re not Brazilian Carnivale queens.” Never mind that feathered dinosaurs are a fact (the fossils don’t lie); if you want to join the movement you can get stickers to show your support here.
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*Sigh* Some people just aren’t willing to accept that dinosaurs are not like the depictions they grew up with.
Can they not be Brazilian Carnivale killing machines? Somebody needs to acquaint them with a cassowary.
“A theory not a fact”…where have I heard this before! Come on people learn the definition of a scientific theory! I doesn’t mean some random idea! And if you do understand it then don’t spread the stupidity by using it incorrectly just because everybody else does!
I don’t have any problem at all with dinosaurs having feathers.
I do, however, have a problem with calling birds dinosaurs. Sure, they may be closely related, directly descended, whatever–but to me it’s like saying humans are rats, because at some point in the last few million years what eventually became the great apes looked like rodents.
I’ve found that making a comment like the above on a paleo blog brings out the supercilious pedants, but there it is.
“Dinosaurs are naked, leathery killing machines. They’re not Brazilian Carnivale queens.”
They aren’t serious, right? That’s a joke group…I hope.
Lol, I think it’s clear that site and their “movement” are meant to be satirical: “…express your disdain for dinosaurs with feathers and your inability and refusal to come to terms with reality.”
“Make sure you Join the Anti-Feathered Dinosaurs Facebook group to let the world know how you feel about this silly notion of dinosaurs with feathers.”
And, “The popular culture magazine National Geographic recently claimed that “scientists” have “proven” dinosaurs had feathers. Right. Next they will claim the world is round, carbon emissions cause global warming, and man evolved from apes. From APES!”
Thanks for pointing us to this, Brian! I had started writing a post about what it’s going to take for feathered dinosaurs to be accepted in the popular imagination, and this tied into it really well.
It’s clear that this is definitely a joke, and it draws on anti-evolution propaganda pretty cleverly.
I had a hard excepting it at first. But the evidence became too convincing. And people got better at depicting dinosaurs with feathers. I mean, we can now determine (to a certain extent) the color of dinosaur feathers! So i find it rather inexcusable to not except feathers on dinosaurs.
Cunninglinguine, defining Dinosauria as ‘the most recent common ancestor between Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and all of its descendants’, birds are quite literally by definition dinosaurs.
Yes, the “protest group” is most certainly satirical and not meant to be taken seriously. If you have any doubts about feathered dinosaurs, make sure to click to “Birds are Dinosaurs” category tab to the right.
And, Cunninglinguine , it is perfectly accurate to call birds living dinosaurs. If you think about the nested hierarchies of an evolutionary tree birds nest within the maniraptoran dinosaurs just as our species nests within apes, haplorrhines, primates, mammals, and so on down the family tree. The question is how far back you want to go. Birds are dinosaurs just like we are apes.
I am eagerly awaiting evidence of chainsaw arms in the fossil record.
I’ve looked at the evidence for both sides, and quite honestly I simply do not believe dinosaurs had feathers. And, this may shock you, but I don’t believe in evolution either. And, I’d like to think I’m not “stupid, ignorant or wicked” as Richard Dawkins would label me. What will probably shock you the most is I believe dinosaurs and man co-existed and possibly still do – and not as birds! There is an abundance of evidence (dragons, for a start) to suggest that humans have seen dinosaurs, and there have been many sightings in recent years. Don’t dismiss the creature the pygmies in the Congo has seen as a rhino or an elephant; these people have lived there for hundreds of years and would know the difference. Dinosaurs are reptiles.