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June 8, 2007
Raptors
From Slashdot:
A Field Trip To the Creation Museum
Posted by kdawson on Friday June 08, @10:19AM
from the dinosaurs-were-vegetarians dept.Lillith writes
"The anti-evolution Creation Museum opened last weekend and Ars took a field trip there and took lots of pictures. 'There were posters explaining just how coal could be formed in a few weeks as opposed to over millions of years, and how rapidly the biblical flood would cover the earth, drowning all but a handful of living creatures. The flood plays a big part in the museum's attempt to explain away what we see as millions of years of natural processes. There was also an explanation as to why, with only one progenitor family, it wasn't considered incest for Adam and Eve's children to marry each other.' (Myself, I liked the picture of the velociraptor grazing peacefully next to Eve, who is wearing some kind of dirndl, in the Garden of Eden.)"
The reporter posted more photos from the museum on Flickr.
Here is the picture of Eve with a so-called "Velociraptor":
There are three things wrong with this picture, two of which have been pointed out by the Slashdot crowd:
But for a group of people rightfully complaining about the anti-science theme of this museum, nobody has pointed out that the dinosaurs in the pictures are not Velociraptors (at least nobody who has been modded up enough to have their comments visible).
Velociraptors were about two feet tall.
When Steven Spielberg was filming Jurassic Park in 1992 - 1993, he decided that two-foot tall dinosaurs weren't scary enough. Using artistic license, he made the Velociraptors about six-feet tall.
As coincidence would have it, six-foot tall raptor fossils were discovered in Utah shortly before the movie was released. What was actually depicted in the movie, and in the Creation Museum, are Utahraptors, not Velociraptors.
But by then, it was too late to change the movie. And thus the confusion between Velociraptor and Utahraptor has been entrenched in popular culture.
At least Walking With Dinosaurs got it right.
Posted by Robert Racansky on June 8, 2007 at 9:40 AM
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