this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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xkcd

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Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

Transcript:

[Three squid-like aliens in a classroom; one alien stands in front of a board covered with minute text and a drawing of a T-Rex skeleton. Two aliens sit on stools watching the teacher alien. The teacher alien on the left is on a raised platform and points at the board with one tentacle.]
Left alien: Species such as triceratops and tyrannosaurus became more rare after the Cretaceous, but they survived to flourish in the late Cenozoic, 66 million years later.
Left alien: Many complete skeletons have been discovered from this era.

[Caption below the panel:]
It's going to be really funny when our museums get buried in sediment.

https://www.xkcd.com/2990/
explainxkcd.com for #2990

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)

If you go to a museum and see an impressive skeleton of a dinosaur, you're not actually looking at dinosaur bones. And no, I don't mean because they've calcified and become "rock". I mean the real bones are in a drawer somewhere, if they even exist. What you're looking at is plaster, often with many of the pieces wholly created from scratch in order to produce a full skeleton.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

You’re getting awfully close to sounding like the psychos who say that all fossils are invented or placed on earth by the devil to confuse humanity about the age of the earth.

Most mounted dinosaur skeletons contain real fossils. Many museums have diagrams showing which are real and which are recreations of fossils that were missing or too damaged to mount for each specimen.

Paleontologists can determine what the missing fossils looked like based on other specimens and looking at what they have in context of other similar species that have more complete skeletons.

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