Did Dinosaurs Exist?

Excerpt from my book "An Unorthodox Truth"

Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash

The following article is an excerpt from my book, An Unorthodox Truth, where I discuss the “theory” of dinosaurs. I also have a Udemy course here as well: Learn an Unorthodox Truth to Our Reality.

I discuss dinosaurs as theories because, for one, I don’t think dinosaurs are factually accepted. Yes, we study them, but similar to evolution, which we also learn, it’s considered a theory. 

Looking into dinosaurs, I started to see similarities between both theories, which I discuss further in the book, but without further ado, please enjoy the read and let me know your thoughts. 

Feel free to subscribe so you know when the book is released.

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Dinosaurs! Tyrannosaurus Rex! Fantastic, enormous, giganteum beasts that roamed the earth 65 million years ago. Now extinct. These were life's great predecessors!

If any of that sounds remotely familiar, you probably went to a museum during your childhood years on the school field trips where you saw the large fossils of dinosaurs. From museums to media, such as blockbuster hits like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time, dinosaurs have been around – and actually – before humanity ever existed.

Dinosaurs are such a mainstay topic regarding life on earth that even Darwin claimed they were "the best support of the theory of evolution."

Going back to our visual from the previous chapter:

• One Theory leads -> To another Theory which leads to -> Another Theory, which has some Fact to it -> Then eventually, the original theory gets accepted as Fact

But twist it around and apply it to dinosaurs, it goes like this:

• If life on earth (fact) came about by evolution (theory) which gains support from dinosaurs (theory), then this is our mental perception of how humanity got here.

Problem solved, nothing to see here.

But we just reviewed the theory of evolution and found some of the theory's significant gaps, such as the transitional forms and the development of the eye. So we may as well do the same here with this theory, that of dinosaurs. As with evolution, we must look at key players at the theory's origin, their role in propagating the narrative, and the events that led to the acceptance of their story, or perception, of events across the world.

And as we take that same perspective here with dinosaurs, it's essential that we still acknowledge the science. One of the beauties of science is that if you don't know the answer, that's okay. It's okay not to know the answer. It's okay to be wrong from time to time. Not knowing leads to more research and developments in a specific area because we know what's real – factual – and what isn't.

As with dinosaurs, we will focus on the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and outlandish claims that this theory presents. Poking holes doesn't mean that we'll answer all the questions, like the bones, why they are so big, and from where they came? We don't know the answer to those questions – and we'll admit that.

But we will present a solid case as to why the story of dinosaurs does not exist in the way it's being told to us today.

As always, let's dive right in.

Man’s First Encounter

As with electricity and evolution, the theory of dinosaurs came about as well in the 1800s. From the first discoveries to the creation of the term, it all came about within the last 200 years.

(We’re going to look at everything in the last couple of centuries to see just how valid they are.)

But with dinosaurs, our first encounter with something larger than life – something recorded anyway – came in the 17th century. The first dinosaur bones were discovered, but they weren’t essentially known as dinosaurs. It was just known as something enormous. But oddly enough, this massive historical bone structure disappeared.

According to Biodiversity Heritage Library’s article on Dinosaurs, “The First Described and Validly Named Dinosaur: Megalosaurus,” we read the following:

“In 1676, the lower part of a massive femur was discovered in the Taynton Limestone Formation of Stonesfield limestone quarry, Oxfordshire. The bone was given to Robert Plot, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and first curator of the Ashmolean Museum. Plot published a description of it in 1677 in the Natural History of Oxfordshire. The illustration that accompanied the description is the first known published illustration of a dinosaur bone.

Plot first concluded that the bone belonged to a Roman war elephant, but later decided that it must instead represent the thighbone of a giant human like those described in the Bible. In 1763, Richard Brookes used Plot’s illustration of the thigh bone in his six-volume publication A System of Natural History. His reproduction of the illustration includes a caption that reads Scrotum Humanum, referencing the visual similarity between the bone and the human scrotum. Though the name is not considered valid today, its structure, following the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature, has caused some to argue that it represents the first species name ever applied to an extinct dinosaur, because this thighbone does not, in fact, belong to a giant human, as Plot concluded. It belonged to a dinosaur, probably a Megalosaurus, although, since the specimen has since been lost, it’s impossible to know with certainty which species it belonged to.

Scrotum Humanum notwithstanding , Megalosaurus represents the first dinosaur genus to be described and validly named (1).”

So there was a large bone discovered, and then there was a picture drawn of that large bone. But all of a sudden, the large bone — the source of this illustration, vanishes?

Yes, that’s correct. The first bone that gave credence to dinosaurs disappeared, and we have no sign or recollection of it. But we do have a picture of it. That picture is one of the essential foundations for the theory of dinosaurs, as this is the first evidence of something larger than life – even though we don’t have the physical representation of that picture.

But the subsequent two dinosaur discoveries have a similar fate to them. First, there’s something enormous – but next, the evidence of what is surrounded by mystery. Whether it simply vanishes or ends up getting blown up and put together again.

Yes – you read that right. That was the story of the second and third dinosaur findings ever recorded.

According to scholastic.com and the Scientific American article, “The 19th Century discovery of dinosaurs”, we read the following:

“Way back in 1676, Robert Plot, the curator of an English museum, described and drew a thigh bone that he believed belonged to a giant man. Although that fossil disappeared without a trace, the surviving illustration suggests that it may well have been part of a “Megalosaurus.” Later, in 1822, large teeth discovered in England by Mary Ann Mantell and her husband, Gideon (geologist and paleontologist), were thought to be the remains of a huge and extinct iguana (2).”

“A third “dinosaur-to-be” was, like Iguanodon, also from the county of East Sussex. The specimen was uncovered by workmen and blasted into fragments that Mantell later managed to fit together, and in 1833 he named it Hylaeosaurus. It is a big armored reptile with large conical spines arranged on the neck and shoulders, and has remained poorly known. Certainly it has never become as familiar to the public as Megalosaurus or Iguanodon (3).”

So let’s recap on the first discoveries that led to the dinosaurs. First, we have the Megalosaurus, which was one giant thigh bone – which we don’t have the actual bone for, just a drawing. Next, the Iguanodon was some teeth that could have belonged to a giant iguana. Finally, the Hylaeosaurus was the only one with a complete bone structure, but it was blown up to pieces by workmen and then put together. So we don’t have clear bone structures here to put together. We have remnants of different details of an unknown structure.

But in 1842, in a two hour lecture that “captivated the audience,” we see how the dinosaurs came to being. From Scientific American, we read the following:

“Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus were all remarkable discoveries, but these creatures were not regarded as close relatives until 1842, when [Richard] Owen proposed that they be united in a new group, which he called the Dinosauria. He argued that dinosaurs — the name means “fearfully great lizards” — resembled large modern land mammals such as elephants and rhinos in their terrestrial habits, reinforced hip regions, and massive, elephantine limbs.”

Ladies and gentlemen, here we’ll meet, Sir. Richard Owen. The man credited with the term dinosaurs and the madness that followed.

Sir Ricard Owen

From his Wikipedia page, we see that Owen was a man on high profile. Per Wikipedia, “Owen was the driving force behind the establishment, in 1881, of the British Museum (Natural History) in London.”

While all that sounds nice and fancy, what does that mean? According to the Britannica Encyclopedia, which we all used while we were still in elementary school before Wikipedia came along, the British Museum was the center for ancient artifacts and specimens. The museum essentially controlled and taught us about biology on earth. The museum played a crucial role in shaping our perception. From the Britannica, we read the following:

“Natural History Museum, formerly British Museum (Natural History), British natural science museum that has national and international responsibilities for taxonomic and associated research based on its outstanding collection of specimens and its extensive libraries… The museum’s collections comprise almost 70 million specimens from all parts of the world. Among these are a large number of type specimens, plants and animals from which species were first described and named. There are also highly significant historical collections, such as those of James Cook resulting from his expeditions to the Pacific and of Charles Darwin from his voyage on HMS Beagle (6).”

So, Richard Owen, the man credited with establishing the Natural History of London, essentially oversaw the international responsibility of informing the world on the taxonomy of species. It would appear that Owen had a lot of power and influence under his belt. 

But there’s another side that we must explore with Owen, and that’s the side of plagiarism and controversy. Pulling from his wiki page, we read the following:

“His career was tainted by accusations that he failed to give credit to the work of others and even tried to appropriate it in his own name. This came to a head in 1846, when he was awarded the Royal Medal for a paper he had written on belemnites. Owen had failed to acknowledge that the belemnite had been discovered by Chaning Pearce, an amateur biologist, four years earlier. As a result of the ensuing scandal, he was voted off the councils of the Zoological Society and the Royal Society (7).”

We must understand what’s currently happening and consider how this affected our modern-day science books. At the time, the head of the world’s museum, who happened to be a known plagiarizer, created a new animal species based on a thigh bone, some teeth, and fragments from an explosion. This background surrounds how Richard assembled the dinosaur class, and soon, we’ll see how the Bone Wars lit the blaze for Dino Fever everywhere.

Bone Wars

To truly understand what Sir Richard Owen was about to unleash on the world, we have the following passage from the library of Eastern Illinois University:

“The class Dinosauria was originally defined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842 in a two hour speech that reportedly held the audience captivated. The original dinosaurs of this new group were Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. However, each of these animals was known from fragmentary specimens. It wasn’t until the discoveries of dinosaurs in North America in the mid-19th century that people began to get a clearer picture of what dinosaurs looked like…Dinosaur skeletons were found for the first time in abundance in the Garden Park area of Colorado and at Como Bluff, Wyoming, in the late 1870s. These specimens initiated the First Great Dinosaur Rush in North America… (9)”

With the establishment of America in the 1770s and the migration out west, no one makes any discoveries of dinosaurs or – heck, large bones or anything, right? But with news of a new species, fossils are found all over the western plane in the United States. But what’s interesting to note is that only two individuals were prominent in the sudden discoveries of dinosaur bones and if you think Sir. Richard and plagiarizing was bad enough; you haven’t seen anything yet. Two students – Cope and Marsh – who heard the news of this new class known as Dinosauria were about to change the landscape of our perception of reality.

According to the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, we read:

“By the 1870s the hunt for dinosaur skeletons was on in earnest. American colleges and museums vied with wealthy private citizens like Andrew Carnegie to finance digging expeditions to the American west. Two men emerged the clear winners of a drive to discover the most dinosaur skeletons in the shortest amount of time. The two were Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Both were professors and paleontologists, both were associated with the U.S. Geological Survey, and each bitterly disliked and distrusted each other. Before this rival pair began their excavations, only nine dinosaur species had been discovered in North America. Between them they added 136 species to the list and were responsible for the splendid dinosaur-skeleton collections that can be seen today in Yale’s Peabody Museum and in the American Museum of Natural History in New York (8).”

Cope and Marsh are responsible for taking Owen’s captivating concept of dinosaurs and running with it. In only a short amount of time, they single-handedly increased the species from nine to 136, a 1,411% increase!

This dinosaur boom is how Cope and Marsh formed our perception of dinosaurs. This boom also shows the power of the influencer, as we’ll see when we talk about Carnegie in our chapter on billionaires. Rich, powerful men, funded expeditions that turned into educational passages that made us believe in gigantic beasts. What dinosaurs you know today can be credited to Cope and Marsh.

But clearly, Cope and Marsh were genuinely scientific in their discoveries, right? Surely they didn’t plagiarize as Richard Owen did? Since this is the leading support of evolution, we can rest assured that due diligence was done in the discoveries of dinosaurs, right?

If all that were the case, I wouldn’t be writing this book.

Both Cope and Marsh started as friends, but quickly that grew into a feud. That feud, plus an attempt to be the first – not to be correct, but the first–led to multiple errors discovered down the line. Below we see a few examples of the countless mistakes that lead to the formation of our scientific belief and perception of dinosaurs. From Merriam-Webster, we read:

“But in at least one instance, the confused situation of feuding expeditions not sharing information in the proper scientific manner resulted in the same dinosaur species being given two different names. Working in Wyoming, Marsh was the first to find two skeletons (without skulls) of a huge sauropod new to science… Later on, another sauropod was skeleton was uncovered, this time by an expedition working under Cope’s direction… It was not until the dust had settled and museums began the tedious, time-consuming job of classifying all the material that Marsh and Cope had feverishly dug up that they discovered the duplication. (11).”

According to HistoryNet.com, we begin to see the following of end of the feud between the two men:

On January 12, 1890, the New York Herald printed the first of a series of articles about the feud. Cope had been preparing his attack for years, and he let loose with everything he had. “Unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured,” Cope said, Marsh “employed American and foreign assistants who did the work for him and to which he has signed his name.” After citing a number of works that Marsh had allegedly either plagiarized or had his assistants write, Cope did give his rival credit for one work–“the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance of anatomy and the literature on the subject ever displayed (12).”

To recap, the discovery of dinosaurs was sloppy. From its creator, who had an agenda to push as leader of the Natural History, to its two students who “revolutionized” the game with a 1000% increase, only to accuse each other of plagiarism, we see that this species truly has no solid credence to stand on.

But yet, just like with evolution, we’re taught that this is the norm. According to PBS, which teaches millions of children a day with shows such as Sesame Street, here’s how both men’s discoveries to science are remembered:

“Cope left behind 13,000 specimens, and Marsh’s comparable collection proved to be “the best support of the theory of evolution,” according to a personal letter from Charles Darwin himself (13).”

The best support of evolution was one riddled with errors.

The Case against Dinosaurs

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, I can’t answer every question regarding dinosaurs. I can’t explain why do we see big heads in the museums. Nor can I tell you why fossils are so gigantuem. I simply can’t.

But I can tell you that every single dinosaur model is a replica – it’s not real. They’re all replicas. Now could something have existed? I don’t know. But just like with the very first discovery, Megalosaurus, where we have only the picture to go off of, there’s something not quite adding up.

Now, I can ask some very pointed questions that should make you think. One set of the questions posed against dinosaurs is from David Wozney, which includes one of the most referenced inquires against dinosaurs. The other is from a physicist named David Esker, who I believe provides scientific evidence proving why dinosaurs could not have existed.

From Wozney, we read the following:

“So, dinosaurs were described in 1842 before the discoveries in 1854 that were required to give a clear picture of what dinosaurs looked like! Were discoveries made or constructed to fit the descriptions?…Why were there no discoveries by native Americans in all the years previous when they roamed the American continents? There is no belief of dinosaurs in the native American religion or tradition…Why has man suddenly made all these discoveries?

The land areas of Belgium, Mongolia, Tanzania, western Germany (and the Americas as well) were inhabited and very well explored for thousands of years and there were no discoveries until the nineteenth century. Why?…discoveries and excavations most typically seem not to be made by disinterested people, such as farmers, ranchers, hikers, outdoor recreationists, building construction industry basement excavators, pipeline trench diggers, and mining industry personnel but rather by people with vested interests, such as paleontologists, scientists, university professors, and museum organization personnel who were intentionally looking for dinosaur bones or who have studied dinosaurs previously…(14)”

Wozney further questions the authenticity of some of the findings, and it’s not that we are to take Wozney’s word as fact. However, now that we know the history of the findings, this is something to consider. The history of dinosaurs is plagued with lies and deception, but that shouldn’t rule out that they could or could have existed.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, physics is here with an answer, and according to physics, dinosaurs couldn’t possibly exist in the world as we currently know it. Physicist David Esker points out the inconsistencies in the current theory and development on his website dinosaurtheory.com, but what we’re going to focus on today is how impossible it was for dinosaurs to have existed. We’ll do that with a simple formula known as the square-cube’s law.

The square-cube law was one of the lesser-known law’s discovered by Galileo – but its importance is significant. Essentially, what it does is limit how big living organisms can get and still function. From Esker, we read the following:

“Does size matter? More specifically, can a rock, a person, a car, a planet, an airplane, or a dinosaur exist at any arbitrary size? This is a fundamental scientific question, and yet for the most part the science community has sidestepped this simple question. Since the science community has not clarified why animals cannot be any size, science fiction writers have had fun playing with the idea that animals can be many times larger or many times smaller than their normal size. While many of us may enjoy the entertaining movies showing people or other animals the wrong size, this is not helping to clarify to the public that size really does matter (16).

This statement shows the power of the mind’s perception, which is the power of entertainment. When Owen first described his theory, he wowed the crowd with ideas, stories, the imagination of these animals — huge and gigantean. But was it factually possible? On the one hand, people say yes – but from a scientific point, the answer is no. This “no” grounds us in reality and tells us what’s real and imaginary.

Here’s an image illustrating the square-cube law to help understand why size matters and what that means. The takeaway is that the bigger an object is, the weaker and slower it is. If gigantic as been told, dinosaurs would’ve been on the ground all day; collapsing from weight due to their sheer size.

From Esker, we read the following:

For most physically fit human beings we have more than enough relative strength so that getting out of bed in the morning is not outside our physical capacity. But the larger animals that have lower relative strength lifting their body off the ground can be a serious issue. Large farm animals such as cattle or horses exert all the strength that they have when they pick themselves up off the ground. Likewise the large wild animals such as elephants and giraffes need all their strength to perform this task that is not challenging for the smaller animals. As a consequence of these difficulties, it is not surprising that many of these larger animals evolved the behavior of sleeping while standing up.

Yet numerous dinosaurs were much larger than these animals. Their greater size would mean that their relative strength would be substantially less than that of the large animals of today. It is not realistic to imagine that the large dinosaurs never fell or otherwise found themselves on the ground throughout their entire lives. If a Jurassic Park was actually created, any sauropod or other large dinosaur would be stuck lying on the ground much like a helpless whale stranded on a beach.

Conclusion

To reiterate what’s been said before in this chapter, I can’t know for a certain that dinosaurs didn’t exist – but what I can say is that they did not exist in the way they’ve been told to us. Our perception of dinosaurs is flawed, and it’s thanks to science, specifically physics, that we can see past this false illusion – this puppet’s shadow against the wall.

Dinosaurs, along with evolution, are taught to us when we’re children. When we can’t rationalize or vocalize our objections to things. This subject alone may be why specific items, such as the square-cube’s law, are left out from our curriculum – it eliminates the illusion and grounds the student in reality.

From Esker, we read the following:

 “The second source of confusion is the discovery of the exceptionally large dinosaurs that appear to defy Galileo’s Square-Cube Law. How size can determine the properties of objects is an important science concept and science teachers would like to teach this to their students. However, imagine the embarrassment that a grade school science teacher must feel the moment one of their smarter students points out the incongruity between the exceptionally large dinosaurs and the idea that size matters.

The paleontologists who claim that there is nothing odd about dinosaurs being so large have placed science teachers in the awkward position of either explaining to their students that the paleontologists are wrong or simply skipping over this lesson, which is what happens most of the time. The consequence of this is that most people never learn about Galileo’s Square-Cube Law and how size matters (16).”

If we truly understand reality, which is what science is supposed to be, then we can tell fact from fiction. Our current sciences are based on evolution, which is supported by dinosaurs, appears to be something based on a science fiction movie.

And that’s the takeaway of this chapter — science helps us understand our reality. But if our reality is based on lies and deceit, what does that say about our existence, our perception?

So far, we’ve talked about the puppets (evolution and dinosaurs) that cast the shadow on the wall. We’ve talked about how electricity or technology acts as the chains, weakening our mental and physical bodies, making those puppets seem more prominent than they appear.

Next, we’ll address the puppeteers – the individuals pulling all the strings. Then soon, we’ll talk about what climbing up that ladder looks like and how the world actually might be like outside the cave.

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