While many people were celebrating the 4th of July in 2009, The Sensuous Curmudgeon post Creationist Wisdumb #53 where we find The Institute of Creation Research presenting so much stupidity that it does burn. ICR's founder the Late Henry Morris became the first creationist to invent the lie out of pure ignorance of the true anatomy of dinosaurs and dragons that says the dragon legends told worldwide are nothing more than people seeing live dinosaurs. He never got it in his delusional mind that dinosaurs and dragons are two separate creatures that never looked like one another whatsoever. To help invent the lie, Morris would look to Hollywood and pop cultural caricatures depicting dragon and dinosaurs and compare them with each other and conclude that these two groups are one and the same only because their both reptilian, dangerous, have horns, scales, etc. This way they won't have to look into the fossil, historical, and archaeological records that has not a single shred of evidence confirming their claim to be fact and continue to obtain their ignorance outright.
Into the dangerous site we go. Here we find the latest article entitled Is There Some Truth to Dragon Myths? (Answer: No.) made up in direct response to the latest Harry Potter film Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. In the article, we find creationists posing as "serious researchers (NOT!)" claiming to have evidence that there's some "truth" to their claim that they're "seeing evidence that dragons were more than just fantastical creatures." No they're not. They're faking it outright only by fabricating dragon legends and taking advantage of Hollywood and science fiction artisans and even paleontologists who announce discoveries of dinosaur fossils that seem to confirm their made-up idiocy about the world being thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and dragons being one and the same creatures people saw alive in the past.
One of the dinosaur discoveries creationists take advantage of is what is to be formally called Dracorex Hogwartsia, who is nothing more than a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus that lived 65 million years ago at the very end of the Cretaceous Period. Named in honor of Harry's school in JK Rowling's fantasy series, this baby pachycephalosaur ultimately became a subject of creationist exploitation. Creationists went gaga over the dinosaur because to them this confirms their claim about dinosaurs being dragons people saw alive in legends. Never mind the creature having no fiery breaths, arrow tail, and bat wings. See Taking Advantage of Dracorex for more on the subject.
The next part of the article claims,
"Adrienne Mayor, a Stanford visiting scholar, has found solid links between certain dinosaur fossils and dragons—enough information, in fact, for her to write three books on the subject. Mayor was consulted in 2008 by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which built a dragon exhibit that presented some of her research."
Mayor wrote the following: The First Fossil Hunters, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs, and Fossil Legends of the First Americans. But only 2 books deal with how fossil remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals inspired tales of antiquity featuring dragons and monsters. The third book only deals with how the ancients use biochemical warfare from snakes, scorpions, elephants, and fire to vanquish their foes and win the battle. Thus, what the creationists spoke about is only half-truth. There is in fact a dragon exhibit now opened at the museum featuring the idea that yes, there is a connection between dinosaurs and dragons. But the truth is that this is not about people seeing dragons alive, but people seeing fossils of dinosaurs and early Cenozoic mammals and making up stories about them to help explain what kinds of creatures made those strange bones embedded in the rock.
The article went on about the discovery of Dracorex and how the skull bears an uncanny resemblance to a head of a dragon and then says,
"Dracorex is apparently a one-of-a-kind fossil that was uncovered in North America, not China or Europe. So how did the ancient Chinese, Australian aboriginal, Egyptian, Babylonian, Welsh, and so many other cultures come up with such robust dragon lore if the fossils that fueled their fancies were so rare and located on the other side of the world? There are other reasons to doubt that dragon legends arose from fossil-based speculations. Tales of dragons are almost universal and were incorporated into the historical background of virtually every people group on every continent. How could so many different cultures conjure up such similar details in their dragon legends, unless their ancestors actually encountered them?"
Both trick questions asked out of sheer ignorance of the many other types of prehistoric fossils that are rare, yet are found worldwide by ancient people living in the same counties mentioned in the article— mostly coming from Cenozoic fossils like the ones from the Miocene Epoch. Example: fossil remains of prehistoric bears that inspired the Dragons of the Carpathian Mountains, huge bones of Woolly Mammoths and mastodons that inspired legends of human giants that once made war upon the gods only to be defeated and buried under tons of rock, and a skull of a Woolly Rhinoceros that inspired a dragon tale in a village in Austria that led to the building of a fountain adorned with the dragon that still stands today.
Other inspirations behind dragon and monster tales include stories of dragons and monsters made up of only modern animal composites based on live sightings of modern animals. These were imagined up by people who heard about animals such as the rhinoceros but never saw them. Thus, leading them to attempt to find out what these creatures are like based on their descriptions by envisioning them as monsters much different than what the animal in question really look like and put them down on paper whether in word or in art form. Examples: The Bestiaries and the Chinese dragon being made up of only 9 resemblances to modern animals (and one demon) including scales of a carp, claws of a eagle, and head of a camel.
I'm not going to go through the whole article because this is another attempt to make the reader believe that all this about dragons, to which they claim "..would be easily explained if humans had actually seen living dinosaurs", is the direct result of creationists fabricating dragon and monster legends by taking in parts that seem to match the descriptions of dinosaurs and their Mesozoic contemporaries while throwing out parts that clearly reveals to them they are not what creationists claim they are— all in the effort to cast doubt on the reader in hopes of winning one more convert to their fold.
