Altered Beast: So Much From So Little

I love a good suspense story just as much as anyone. Y'know, the kind where the hero is entombed in an inescapable prison that is shortly to become his grave! But then, at the last remaining second he produces from a hidden compartment in his highly polished wingtip shoes the one weapon for which the sinister villain had composed no contingency: a paper clip! The hero somehow cracks open a circuit box, uses the paper clip to short circuit the building's electronic security system, and opens a way of escape that not even he knew was there!

There's something heroic about someone who can take nothing and nothing and make something of it. Such is the case with the latest dino-discovery in southern-Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, newest addition to America's menu of wilderness lands. When University of Utah graduate students went exploring for dinosaur bones, they came across unequivocal evidence of the truthfulness of evolution!! What was it? A new species of dinosaur (74-76 million years old) that was a clear transitional form between the raptor family of dinosaurs and modern birds. It was complete with blue feathers, a large tail-feather ploom reminiscent of Cleopatra, a large toothless beak, long arms that were destined to someday become wings, and several other distinguishing features designed to let heroic paleontologists of the future know that this dinosaur wanted to be a bird, but surgical options weren't available (or no health insurance).

So what must it have been like, there at the dig sight as these UofU graduate students hushed to silence as one young Darwinists brushed aside the red-brown dirt with a super-delicate paint brush-looking-thing to reveal the never-before-seen blue feathers? I can almost hear the gasps for air as a handful of dirt was swished aside to reveal the bright-yellow toothless beak, a huge, newly-evolved advantage in an age of huge meat-eating predators because...er...uh. Anyway, I wonder if anyone expected the array of colors or radial arrangement of the tail feathers that comprised the great animal's tail?

Er...what? They didn't find any blue feathers? Oh, not any feathers at all? Well what about the yellow beak? No??! Well, surely the long arms, then? No!!??!! Just hand and foot bones? Well how do they even know they were from the same animal? Oh, they don't?

Well, this story seems to have been a non-starter folks. Sorry for the alarm. It seems they only found a few hand bones and a few foot bones and decided to heroically conjecture (see "pulled out of shoe") the rest into existence. I too am embarrassed at this much-ado-about-nothing. It seems that our paleo-psychotic friends were again suffering from exposure, can easily happen down there with the highest UV index in the country. Seems they used the hand bones and a cross-reference to some bird uncovered in China to assert that they were, um...related. Apparently they weren’t any better at border enforcement 75 million years ago.

So I wonder what they intended to prove with all that conjecture and bone-reading? Ooooh. Evolution again. But I thought it was already proven? Why are they still trying to prop up that old theory? Why don't some of them fork off and try to prove something more useful, like gravity or entropy or something?

The lesson, kids is this. When scientists claim to have discovered some huge thing that finally shows the Bible to be wrong and God to be dead, read the fine print.