One of the best parts about being a major superstar celebrity of skepticism (what? You doubt me? Good!) is that I get to travel to way cool places and give talks about antiscience (and sometimes real science too).
Last week, I trekked to Bozeman Montana to talk about Mars at the Museum of the Rockies. They have an astonishing collection of dinosaur fossils there (as befits a museum whose curator is the guy they based Sam Neil’s character in “Jurassic Park” on).
The Hall of Horns and Teeth is an incredible place, with literally tons of triceratops bones as well as other big menacing beasts.
I ran across this guy while wandering the halls…
which was bad enough (look at those teeth!), but when I went around to the other side and took a picture, I saw this…
… and I swear that twinkle in his eye is hunger. And it followed me as I walked around*.
I was treated to a fantastic behind-the-scenes tour as well. My host, Molly Ward, made sure I got to see two amazing things. One was the room where they hack away (delicately!) at fossils embedded in stone. I saw a triceratops tibia, T. Rex teeth, a diplodocus (or was it a hadrosaur?) shoulder, and lots of other cool stuff.
It’s funny– you watch movies and see the dinosuars, and you know they’re not real. And you see the bones, and it’s hard to see them as actual animals. But then one of the techs pointed out that the side of a fossil shoulder blade had been gnawed on. Evidently after that dinosaur died, some scavengers took advantage of the free meal. You could see where their teeth had gouged into the bone… and suddenly that bone was not a piece of rock, but the remains of a magnificent creature that walked the Earth a hundred million years ago. The sense of time, of age, came over me, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Then I was taken to a back room where one of the paleontologists was constructing a T. Rex skull from fragments. That was totally cool. He had to use a lot of plaster to replace missing parts, but it was still pretty amazing. The skull was easily four feet long, and full of horrifying teeth. It was sleek, streamlined, and clearly belonged to a beast that was meant to kill. It was not hard at all to imagine that skull sitting on top of a multi-ton carnivore, prowling the Montana riverside for prey. I wish I could have taken pictures of it, but it’s still proprietary work. I feel bad now for stealing that occipital bone, but really Molly should have kept a closer eye on me.
After all that, I had a great time talking to staff about the infection of Intelligent Design (I would sure hate to be a dinosaur exhibit docent right about now with that garbage on the rise), and then I gave my Mars talk to about 150 enthusiastic Montanans.
What a place! I hope to go back, and soon. I need to get my creationist astronomy debunking talk prepared so they’ll invite me back. And this time I’ll make sure I have more time to just stare at the fossils… and imagine trying to run away from a 20 foot high monster that’s all teeth and claw…
* OK, fine, that hole is actually a nasal/sinus cavity and not his ocular orbit. But still, yikes.
October 14th, 2005 at 1:30 am
I believed you, about the twinkle in his eye. But actually I think it’s a reflection of the light from your guardian angel…
October 14th, 2005 at 5:20 am
No no no… those are a pair of orbs from disembodied dinosaur spirits. Also, if you take the image, save it as a jpeg at 5%, invert the colours, despeckle it, crop the area around the orbs, apply an ink outline effect, solarize it, and enlarge 100% you can see the intricate detail of alien design that isn’t apparent in regular photographs. See for yourself:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v471/dcowan38/Club_Hell_postings/bs.jpg
Actually, that looks like a cool design for a tie-dye shirt.
*ok I am making light the woowoo crowd
There’s actually a web site by a guy who does that kind of photographic “analysis” to reveal alien conspiracies though.
October 14th, 2005 at 7:10 am
Glad to see your broadening your scientific horizons, Phil! Dino stuff is more my bag than astronomy, so I can actually relate to this blog entry better than many of your others. I’ve had the privilege of working with several-million-year-old dino bones myself, and it’s always awe-inspiring to me (even something as simple as just holding a single apatosaur vertebra…those things are friggin’ huge!). Kudos, also, for pointing out that the light is shining through the antorbital fenestra and not the orbit.
October 14th, 2005 at 7:39 am
After reading this I remembered that T. Rex soft tissue they found a few months back. I decided to Google it and see if any new information was available about it. Unfortuantely the Anti-Science crowd has jumped on the find as “proof” of thier “young Earth” idea (I say idea ‘cuz it definately isn’t a theory). If you Google “Dinosaur soft tissue” about half the entries on the first page will be from Anti-Science snake oil salesmen. It’s too bad really, such an amazing find, to bad if one were searching for information on it, one is bombarded by junk and nonsense.
October 14th, 2005 at 8:57 am
Don’t let Jack Horner hear you say all that T-Rex hunting stuff. He is one of the key proponents that T-Rex was strictly a scavenger.
It is an excellent museum. I was there a couple of years ago. (I didn’t get a behind the scenes tour though…) Lots of cool stuff to see, and good science being done there too.
October 14th, 2005 at 9:04 am
As someone in the audience in Bozeman I want to thank you for your talk. We have a quite a few “conspiracy types” out here (remember the Freeman? — they are still with us), and it was good to get some insight in how to apply critical thinking to some of these outlandish ideas.
I didn’t get the chance to ask if you think it is possible to actually change the mind of someone who already believes in any of these various junk science ideas? It seems like someone who believes in this stuff is going to be too suspicious of real scientist to take what they say as anything but more goverment-sponsored coverup subterfuge. It’s easy to preach to the choir, but I wonder if it’s actually possible to “convert” someone.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:00 am
That’s a right good question, DelphiMT. Not to answer for the BA, only myself, but I think it’s pretty safe to say there’s a lot of people we’ll never convince (that’s one of the reasons I sometimes think mortality is a good thing–it helps clear out outdated ideas we all accumulate over the course of our lives, but I digress). I think we have two major hopes, really.
One is to convince those on the fence that biology, like other sciences that have been shown to be valid by bringing us useful things (automobiles, electricity, modern medicine, etc. etc.), really is competent to build explanations for our origins that can be considered convincing over centuries-old speculation.
The other is that maybe, if we work hard at fighting this ID nonsense, we can get science taught with more vigor in the classroom (what it is, why we use it, why it works, why it’s important, etc.). If the next generation grows up with the kind of confidence in science that we had back in the ’50s, that just might solve the whole problem.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:02 am
Ah, Marc Bolan. “Electric Warrior” was a classic, but I personally prefer “Tanx”, because it has ’20th Century Boy’ on it. I was only one year old when Bolan was killed in a car crash, but the legacy of T. Rex lives on.
Boh! But seriously, if you’d quoted ‘Get It On’ or something you could have called the article “Treks and T.Rex and T. Rex”.
A while back it came to me that if there was a newspaper article about Stevie Nicks’ underwear stealing Snickers bars from the New York Knicks the headline could be “Stevie Nicks’ Knickers Nick Knicks’ Snickers”.
Sorry if this is off-topic; I’ve been a lurking reader of the site for years, and along with Skepdic.com and Snopes.com it’s one of my ‘daily round’, and I’ve also just had some brandy.
Dinosaurs.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:25 am
Brandy is good.
Prefer whiskey myself. Or beer.
October 14th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
Ashley : bottoms up!
Leon, I’m with you – I prefer a good single malt scotch. Recently bought a bottle of 1966 Glen Albyn (bottled 2005) in Glasgow. Mmmmmm.
But, back to the topic. I love dinosaurs. This is because they are so cool. I think dinosaurs and moon landings turned me on to science in the first place. When I was, I don’t know, maybe 7 years old, I had a sticker book on prehistoric animals, and it had a diplodocus (don’t know the more correct modern name) that came as four separate stickers, and the picture depicted it next to three double-decker Routemaster buses (the classic image of the London bus) to the same scale. That was one big animal.
Beer’s good, too.
October 14th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Ah, children & dinosaurs–great stuff. I miss the days when the image of humans and dinosaurs conexisting was universally considered laughable.
October 14th, 2005 at 6:14 pm
My family and I have visited the Museum of the Rockies, too, vacationing through the region. But, if you all like them dino’s, there is a bimonthly magazine called: Prehistoric Times
* * * * * * *
Researched some excellent articles in the Journal of Geoscience Education at http://www.nagt.org/nagt/jge/abstracts/index.html
“A Biblical Critique of Creationism” by Dennis O’Leary in May 2003 issue;
An editorial by Carl N. Drummond: “Intelligent Design and the Future of Science Education”. March 2002 issue;
“Who Believes What? Clearing up Confusion over Inteligent Design and Yound-Earth Creationism” by Marcus R. Ross in the May 2005 issue.
October 14th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
“But then one of the techs pointed out that the side of a fossil shoulder blade had been gnawed on. Evidently after that dinosaur died, some scavengers took advantage of the free meal. You could see where their teeth had gouged into the bone… and suddenly that bone was not a piece of rock, but the remains of a magnificent creature that walked the Earth a hundred million years ago.”
This is eeriely similar to an experience I had in the Grand Canyon Caverns. In them, there are the preserved remains of a giant sloth, which fell in when the ground broke open thousands of years ago (the humidity in the caves is about 2%, which is great for drying and preserving tissue). On the rock wall, you can see the deep scratches the sloth made trying to get back up (which it never did).
Just think about it: for millions of years, the cave was silent. Then, with absolutely no warning, the ceiling breaks and a now extinct animal falls though. It struggles to climb back up, but within a few hours, it is too dehydrated to continue and dies soon thereafter. You can almost see it right there in the cave.
Even though the sloth is about ten thousand times younger than your dinosaur, it still is amazing to be completely awed and humbled by nature and time.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:18 am
Hey, that’s interesting…I wonder if that’s part of why people cling to the Biblical timeline, because they find the incredible age of the Earth disconcerting.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:44 am
I wish that I had known you would be in Bozeman giving the speech. It is only 3 hours from where I live. Heck Bozeman is where I started college and where I had taken my first astronomy classes at MSU.
Any way, if anyone gets a chance to go through the Museum of the Rockies, take it. You won’t be dissappointed.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:48 am
Sorry, Jasmt. But I do post my calendar on my website (under “Calendar/Events” on the menu) and it’s on the right hand side of the blog main page too!
October 17th, 2005 at 5:42 am
BA,
Did you REALLY pocket an occipital bone?
CJSF
October 17th, 2005 at 8:06 am
Or are you just glad to see us?
October 17th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Christopher Ferro, yes, I violated several federal and local laws, as well as dearly-loved scientific principles, and then admitted it publically to thousands of people on my blog.
October 18th, 2005 at 11:47 am
I knew it! Shame on you! Lol!