Jurassic Park Gets Overhaul
How much do we understand the dinosaurs? ABC News reported on some big-time updates and revisions being made to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History dinosaur exhibits. The title of the article is, “Getting Their Dinosaur Facts Right, at Least for Now.”
The problem is that even though the newest of the dinosaurs are 65 million years old, scientists’ understanding of them has been racing along, changing with each new find. So the Carnegie staff has decided to dismantle – and rethink – its entire collection.
Our image of dinosaurs comes mostly from what one finds in old sci-fi films – big, lumbering creatures, dragging their tails on the ground. In recent years, scientists have decided they were probably much more energetic and agile – and the way most fossils were displayed was wrong.
“Unfortunately, they don’t come with instruction manuals,” Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the museum, said with a smile.
The project requires “a small army of painters, sculptors, welders and former museum staffers” to fix the newly-found errors and set the dinosaurs to rights.
The scientists back then certainly had the best of intentions but not the best information. Very few of the fossil skeletons they dug up were complete, so they made educated guesses, sometimes based on their knowledge of other species.
This may satisfy the purists for now. But the article speculated that “years from now, as the scientists learn more, they say they’ll probably have to change the exhibits all over again.”
Evolutionists insist that some of their theory’s greatest strengths are the very driving forces of the theory itself: change and adaptation. However, when an idea that you defend constantly changes, very few would consider that a strength. Indeed, Charles Darwin himself would scarcely recognize his own theory today.
This is illustrated in scientific interpretations of dinosaurs. When putting the bones together, they had to place the backs out of joint merely to fit with their beliefs of dinosaur skeletal structures – literally, forcing the evidence to match their theories.
Notably, the Carnegie collection itself has not changed. Those old bones remain the same, and it is only evolutionists’ understanding that has changed. And as ABC aptly pointed out, it will probably all need to be changed again mere generations from now – which means that even this updated display is probably wrong in ways we cannot recognize. So what is racing along? Understanding? Scientific progress? Human imagination? The bones aren’t saying. —DM