Mormons and the Utahraptor

Recent scientific discussion about the possibility of cloning a woolly mammoth has set imaginations alight, but the joyous possibility of throwing caution to the wind by tinkering with the genomes of extinct species is not placating everyone’s fears.

Some groups are understandably concerned about the ethics of bringing back creatures that were killed off in their entirety, either by nature, or the violent floodwaters of a vengeful God - so, again, nature. Others, like mathematician Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park fame, are primarily worried about the consequences of reintroducing a foreign species into the global ecosystem, and secondarily keen to note that the lack of italics means that it’s a real place.

Mormons, predictably out of sync with the rest of society, are however worried about the implications should dinosaurs return for a second round on Earth. Indeed, as it turns out, one in particular - Utahraptor ostrommaysi – features prominently in Mormon lore, and they have no wish to see it return. 

The Utahraptor, thought to have first been discovered in 1991 in the Cedar Mountains of Utah, was heralded as a great find by the scientific community. Scientists quickly became aware of its awesome ferocity after it stole the italics of the novel it featured in while refusing to become a work of fiction in return. Its classification was welcomed as filling a void in evolutionary theory between the turkey-like scariness of Velociraptor and the holy-fucking-shit-is-that-thing-real scariness of the aptly named Giganotosaurus.

According to their own endearing historical opinions, however, Mormons believe that Utahraptors were extant in the American West when they first settled the area in the 19^th Century. While this might strike some readers as laughable, one imagines that the threat becomes much more credible as one’s gullibility approaches the Mormon threshold.

It's science!

Rather than merely being amused bystanders like the rest of us as the Mormons went about setting up their fun new religion, Utahraptors were frequently openly antagonistic, to the point of nearly eating the whole lot. Apparently, early Mormons were so unwitting that they frequently did not realize they were being hunted and preyed upon. Scientists now believe that the Utahraptor was especially good at leading its quarry into a false sense of security, often toying with them and giving them false hopes of imminent salvation, before brutally finishing them off. On one occasion, a Utahraptor was even convicted of bank fraud – ok, maybe that's far enough with the allegory.

What killed off the Utahraptor remains unclear. In any case, Salt Lake City is dizzy with fear at the prospect of its return. A worried resident voiced her concerns to Frodology that “if just a single scientist prays for the raptor’s resurrection, we’re screwed.” Affirming that this is indeed how science works, she added “I got learned about it at school.”

It's history!

Frodassic Park

Dinosaurs have long been a sticking point for creationists ever since they entered stage left in the 19th Century and started taking Victorian logic for a joy ride. It’s been wildly entertaining watching Christians pour through the Bible ever since, trying to account for how these petrified skeletons could have ended up on Earth when, as everyone knows, the planet is no more than 10,000 years old.

Here is a selection of a few favorite chestnuts:

• Since God created every creature on the 6th day, He must have created Dinosaurs that day too. He was just a little preoccupied when he wrote it all down later and neglected to tell anyone about it.
  
• Before Adam & Eve’s little transgression, all animals were vegetarian and none died, making the choice of claws and sharp, pointy teeth purely an aesthetic one.
  
• Two of every kind of dinosaur found their way onto Noah’s Ark, having presumably discovered a way to improve the vessel’s buoyancy first.
  
• Having survived the flood, they sort of just, well, died out, in a manner much more precise and conclusive than that suggested by evolutionists. One possible candidate behind the extinction is hunting by man, despite the fact that the latter had just been decimated by unseasonal floodtides too, and presumably wouldn’t have risked the survival of their own species by hunting creatures with 12 inch-long teeth.

Feel free to check the accuracy of these summations at answersingenesis.org. Incidentally, if all the answers are in Genesis, presumably that makes the rest of the Bible redundant.

Frodology does not take this route. We do not attempt to squeeze a whole epoch of capricious, prickly reptiles into the pages of a book where they have no wish to be. It would be like trying to make a monkey wear a hat that’s too small. As nice as it might look, it just wouldn’t fit. The fact is that Frodo spent his time on Earth with some pretty crazy looking creatures, but we can’t conscionably call any of them dinosaurs.

Instead, what Frodologist scientists have realized is that dinosaurs are actually totally fake. Indeed, early classifiers must have agreed, as ‘dinosaur’ is Latin for ‘just a pile of bones’. Their sudden appearance in skeletal form in the 1820s seems just a little transparent. Have you ever noticed how the combination of an alligator, a giraffe, a rhino, and something with a really long tail looks kind of like a dinosaur?


Looks kind of like a dinosaur

Paleontology isn’t even a genuine discipline, as it was invented by Joseph Smith in the middle of the 19th Century following the issue of a warrant for his arrest for fraud. At that juncture in his life, Smith was between cons and beginning to despair of ever parting thousands of gullible people from their cash. He initially coined the word ‘paleontology’ to cash in on the dinosaur craze, but later abandoned it to focus on starting Mormonism, as even he felt that the deceit was a little insidious.

But no one can get away with such an ambitious hoax indefinitely. In the end, it was the Victorian appetite for the ridiculous that gave the game away to our team of scientists. In an era where all walks of life readily swallowed ideas as preposterous as cure-all elixirs, Dracula, socialism and penicillin, is it any surprise that dinosaurs were readily accepted as plausible? Of course all of those ideas are totally preposterous by modern standards, dinosaurs included. Even the names are a bit loopy. Stegosaurus? Sounds like a plastic toy. Velociraptor? Yeah, it's fast, we get it. The same goes for the megalosaurus, tyrannosaurus, and thesaurus. If those wily tricksters had set the bar of credulity just a little lower, we might still count ourselves amongst the duped.

I just thought you should know.