Ask Slashdot: How Do I Explain That Humans Didn't Ride Dinosaurs? 278
p00kiethebear writes "I have a wonderful and beautiful girlfriend who treats me right in every way. We've been together for almost a year now and everything seemed to be going perfectly until this morning. Over breakfast we were discussing dinosaurs and she told me a story about how her grandfather, fifty years ago, dated footprints of a dinosaurs and a man that were right next to each other to be within the same epoch of history. I laughed when she said this and then realized that she wasn't joking. She believes dinosaurs and humans walked at the same time together. The odd thing is that she's not religious, it's just what her archaeologist grandfather taught her. More important than just backing up evidence to the contrary, how do I explain this to her without crushing her childhood dreams? Is it even worth discussing it further with her?"
Re:Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nooooooo! Just shut up and buy a dinosaur saddl (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh. Some years back, I saw a video of a person "riding a dinosaur". It wasn't faked. The person was riding a (tame) ostrich, and since the birds were (finally) reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs back in the 1980s, it qualifies.
Actually, I have a dinosaur sitting on my chest, trying to get my attention, as I type this. Her name is Lydia, and she's a blue-crowned conure. She's a really cute little flying dinosaur, of the parrot branch. I have a nice picture of her after she took a bath, and had a spiky "punk" look to her wet feathers, which I use as my avatar on various online forums. She's a bit small for a human to ride, though, weighing in at 185g.
It's too bad that the large dinosaurs were all wiped out 65 million years ago. But that did open the path for our ancestors to develop intelligence, and for the avians to occupy most of the flying niches. Now we can keep members of the few remaining dinosaurs as pets, but only a few are big enough that humans can ride them. Some of the others can make very charming pets for us upstart primates.
It's probably worth noting here that the idea that birds are dinosaurs was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin, along with various of his colleagues. The problem was that birds don't fossilize well, so biologists just said "That's interesting; can you find some good evidence?" It wasn't until the late 1970s that we found pre-KT-disaster bird fossils that verified the connection. So now it's sorta fun to read all the ignorant media comments about the "extinction of the dinosaurs", showing ignorance of the fact that there are roughly 8,000 dinosaur species alive today, about twice the number of mammal species.
(Hmmm ... Maybe I should wait until April 2 to post this. Nah ... ;-)