The human mind, like any database or encyclopedia, rapidly becomes outdated with the times — and yet one must treat the most current information as being true. So what happens to knowledge that we acquire at a young age, then never update for decades? Well, naturally, it becomes irrelevant and dusty, and yet we continue to spout it as if it were the current truth. It was once said that human beings are the collection of prejudices learned by the age of 18. While of course people can change after that age, it is true that we do a lot of our “general learning” before reaching maturity, and afterwards, we only bother to update certain portions of our knowledge. My understanding of biology and contemporary music, for example, are pretty modern and continue to be shaped and refreshed every day.
But today I was faced with a complete jolt to one of my older sectors of memory: dinosaurs. Deinonychus, when I was growing up, was the epitome of the evil dinosaur. It had that Sauron-like piercing yellow eye, dragon-like front limbs and of course its eponymous sickle-shaped toe claw that was used to tear viciously into unsuspecting herbivores. It was sleek, clean, brownish-gray, and altogether the definition of “terrible lizard.” See: http://www.ansp.org/museum/dinohall/deinonychus.php for an illustration.
And then today, I saw this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Deinonychus-antirrhopus_jconway.jpg. Yes, a cute fluffy feathery friend. With the evil toe claw.
What happened in just ten years? Did the extinct creature evolve through a couple hundred years of being featured in anime? No – it just wasn’t that big, and it had feathers, and the humongous sickle claws were probably unique to certain “well-endowed” individuals. It was probably warm and fuzzy. Even when in predatory mode, it looks more like a pissed-off turkey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Deinonychus_BW.jpg.
And of course I cried to the gods: how could you do this? Why would evolution select these fluffballs over my vision of giant evil bloodthirsty predators?
Brachiosaurus now has a monstrously thick neck. It looks positively ridiculous, like a giraffe on steroids. What happened to the slender, snakey necks?
The truth is that we all wanted dinosaurs to look like dragons. Of course, you could take a chicken skeleton and pretend it was all scaly and thin and looked like a dragon, too – it’s not as if the feathers have bones. But that’s just it – dragons are heavy, prone to having their necks cut off, and altogether the product of the human aesthetic, nothing more.
Dinosaurs were the product of evolution, and if you look around today, you can see that it was on the right track. No more dragons. Plenty of birds.
I challenge you to catch a pigeon with your bare hands. It’s pretty tough, isn’t it? You could probably drag down a dragon using some rope booby-trap, but you’re not going to be trapping any street-smart pigeons.
To give a creature flight, and to give it a means of keeping warm enough to be always alert and not in need to recharging with sunlight – that is pure genius. It is no wonder that the forces that be chose the cute fluffy thing over the hunkering assassin. It just goes to show that humans have a long way to go before they truly understand the world around them, ridding themselves of the prejudices of centuries of folklore and facing the truth that is being revealed – and that has been revealed already. Just the other day, I saw a pigeon with that same evil claw-toe. Okay, so I didn’t really – but you could imagine it.
Even without the legendary meteor, I bet the same evolutionary path would have occurred. The small feathery ones would have won out against the high-maintenance classic dinosaurs, and that would have opened up the land for mammals. Just a theory, of course, but it’s always good to rethink everything you learn in a textbook. And especially things you learn from Jurassic Park.