Men and Dinosaurs
65 million years. This is the time frame that, according to science, separates our age from that of the dinosaurs. Indeed, it was 65 million years ago that an asteroid crashed into present-day Yucatan, causing the extinction of the great Mesozoic reptiles. This, at least, is the version of events provided by paleontologists, now taken for granted by almost everyone. No one wonders which elements support such a reconstruction and which, possibly, deny it.
Index
- How old are dinosaurs?
- “impossible” finds
- Depictions of prehistoric reptiles
- Modern sightings
- An alternative reconstruction
How old are dinosaurs?
According to currently accredited chronology, dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earth 65 million years ago, after an unchallenged domination of about 165 million years. But where do these dates come from? The answer is more trivial than one might think: they were established at the table. Radiometric methods often provide contradictory results and are therefore unreliable for obtaining precise dating of fossils. The chronological scale currently in force, created by arbitrarily selecting only some of the values obtained with these methods, is therefore totally unreliable.
So how old are dinosaurs? Several elements (which we will explain below) suggest that they are much more recent than paleontology claims. For man, however, the opposite is true: many megalithic constructions, in fact, could be much older than commonly believed (even more than 400,000 years); not to mention the numerous references, in the myths and works of ancient writers, to very remote times. By compressing the geological-paleontological scale and expanding the historical-archaeological one, a possible coexistence between men and dinosaurs no longer appears so improbable…
“IMPOSSIBLE” FINDS
The finds that most of all support the idea of a recent age of the dinosaurs are undoubtedly those of their soft tissues.
As palaeobiologist Jasmina Wiemannstates said,
“according to the laws of chemistry and physics, the preservation of dinosaur proteins is completely paradoxical… Within a few hundred thousand or at most a million years [my emphasis], all proteins in soft tissue structures should be hydrolysed and degraded completely”
So how is it possible to find blood vessels of a tyrannosaurus still perfectly preserved, complete with clearly recognizable red blood cells (a discovery, however, not unique in its kind)? Bearing in mind the principle of "Occam's razor", the most logical explanation is this: dinosaurs are much closer to us than we thought.
DEPICTIONS OF PREHISTORIC REPTILES
The coexistence between men and dinosaurs seems to have left traces in some ancient works of art as well. This is a theme very dear to creationists, who nevertheless tend to see dinosaurs almost everywhere, even in creatures clearly the fruit of the artists's imagination. There are, however, representations that are anything but ambiguous: among them, a place of honor is undoubtedly occupied by the engravings on the stones of Ica.
These stones were discovered in Peru in the 1960s: although among them there are undoubtedly some fakes, many others are certainly authentic. Dinosaurs stand out among the subjects of the engravings, whose representations are sometimes in open contradiction with the dominant scientific theories. For example, some sauropods appear as viviparous mammals, whereas all paleontologists have always considered them (like all dinosaurs) oviparous reptiles. This indicates that the authors of the engravings were able to observe these animals live.
But what era do the stones date back to? Thermoluminescence dating, performed on two stones found during a special expedition in the Ocucaje desert (therefore certainly authentic) has provided an age of about 100,000 years for one stone and 60,000 for the other. But it is likely that their creation goes back considerably, perhaps as far back as 1 million years ago. In any case, we are far from the "65 million years" of the official chronology...
The stones of Ica are certainly the oldest evidence of coexistence between men and dinosaurs, but - apparently - there are also much more recent evidence. I specify "apparently" because, although some creationist sites report a large number of them, in my opinion very few are worthy of consideration. Among these, one of the most interesting is undoubtedly that of the so-called "Mosaic of the Nile", from the Roman era (II or I century BC).
The mosaic depicts the regions of Upper and Lower Egypt, including various animals typical of those places. Among them, however, a strange creature appears, indicated as krokodilopardalis (a term that we could translate as "crocodilepard"). What animal could it be? Some have identified it with an otter or monitor lizard; however, its characteristics are rather reminiscent of those of the therapsids, reptiles considered even more ancient than the dinosaurs, from which mammals would have descended. Its very name would seem to allude to a mixture of two natures, reptilian and mammalian.
Also dating back to Roman times is a mural painting, found in Pompeii, depicting a hunting scene for two strange reptiles. Again, the representation of a well-known animal (the hippopotamus) together with the two creatures makes it unlikely that the latter could be fictional animals. On the contrary, it is easy to recognize two sphenacodonts, synapsids traditionally placed in the Permian period (285-250 million years ago).
The existence of even relatively recent representations raises a question: is it possible that some "prehistoric" animals survived until a few centuries or millennia ago? But we could also go further and ask ourselves if some specimens are still alive today. The notorious "Loch Ness monster" is not an isolated case: as we will see in a moment, in fact, there are many other testimonies of similar sightings. Although caution is required, these testimonies certainly deserve attention, also because their number is by no means small.
Modern sightings
There is a surprisingly large literature on alleged sightings of Mesozoic creatures (particularly of pterosaurs). Here we will report only a few testimonials, chosen from among the most significant and - in my opinion - the most reliable.
Plesiosaurus, Peru
On January 11, 1911, the New York Herald reported the sighting of a "prehistoric monster" in 1907 in a swampy area in Peru. According to two witnesses, the traveler Franz Herrmann Schmidt and Captain Rudolph Pfleng, the creature was over 11 meters long; it had a head similar to that of a tapir, "as big as a beer keg", a serpentine neck and fins equipped with claws, the latter characteristic making it similar to a plesiosaur. Their bullets had had no effect on the animal.
Camptosaurus, Brazil
In the book Rio Amazonas, published in 1966, the Swedish naturalist Rolf Blomberg reported - even though he was somewhat skeptical - the testimony of an old Brazilian Indian, Alvaro Mesquita, who claimed to have come across an animal similar to a camptosaurus some timebefore. The encounter had taken place at night, in a swamp between the Rio Purus and Rio Juruá, two tributaries of the Amazon River. Mesquita described the animal as larger than a cow, bipedal, with green skin and red eyes. When he fired (missing), the creature fled into the water and disappeared.
Pterosaurs, Cuba
In 1971 the US soldier Eskin Kuhn, serving in Cuba, sighted two pterodactyls in flight in Guantanamo Bay, of which he also made a drawing. This is an excerpt from his story:
“It was a beautiful, clear, warm summer day… I was looking towards the ocean… I saw two pterosaurs… They were flying together at a low altitude, maybe 30 meters, very close to where I was, so that I could have a perfect view clear of them…The rhythm of their large wings was very graceful, slow…The structure and texture of the wings seemed to be very similar to those of bats”
Curiously, a few years earlier (in 1965), the same area had been the subject of another similar sighting: also in this case the witness, Patty Carson, made a drawing of the creature, very similar to the pterosaurs sighted by Kuhn.
Therizinosaurus, Papua New Guinea
Since the 1990s, there have been several sightings of a creature possibly identifiable with a therizinosaur in Papua New Guinea. According to the descriptions of witnesses, the animal would be 10-15 meters long and would resemble a huge kangaroo in appearance, with brown skin and a long tail. Its head would be similar to that of a turtle; it would also have amphibious habits and feed on plants. Of note, since no therizinosaurus fossil skulls have ever been found, this dinosaur's head shape and diet were both unknown to paleontologists.
Other interesting sightings:
- In 1906, prospectors along the Aikora River in Papua New Guinea claimed to have encountered hairy reptiles. This is significant if we consider that some dinosaurs (for example thelaellynasaurus, which lived in nearby Australia) were probably covered in short hair.
- In 1952 Adrian Conan Doyle, son of the famous Arthur, reported in the book Heaven Has Claws the story of an African hunter who, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan, had come across a large reptile, about 3 meters long and equipped with a dorsal crest. The animal had gray skin and paws with three toes, equipped with claws.
- Explorer Arnošt Vašíček mentioned a sighting of a herd of bipedal dinosaurs in the Amazon in the early 1990s. These were similar to allosaurus, but much smaller (a fact consistent with the "scaling" of many life forms over the ages) and very aggressive.
Finally, we cannot fail to mention the various semi-legendary creatures, similar to dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals, present in the folklore of the various peoples of the world. A complete list would be too long, so we will limit ourselves to a small sample of the best known.
An alternative reconstruction
At this point we are ready to attempt a reconstruction of prehistory that takes into account the material we have collected. By now it should be clear that in ancient times men and dinosaurs coexisted: the stones of Ica are there to prove it to us. Identifying this period precisely is not easy, but taking into account the dating of the stones (as well as the findings of dinosaur soft tissues) we can reasonably place it within a few hundred thousand years ago, 1 million at most. This means that the “great extinction” must also have occurred relatively recently…
And here we reconnect with the second argument: is it possible that some Mesozoic reptiles survived until the beginning of the historical epoch, or even until today? In my opinion, we need to be much more careful about this. In fact, although such an eventuality is theoretically possible, there are several elements that make it at least risky to define it as a concrete possibility:
- By now everything on the planet has been explored, mapped and photographed by satellite: the places where any surviving dinosaurs could hide are very few.
- Furthermore, these shelters should be large enough to house a population of dinosaurs, which is essential for the propagation of the species. It is not credible that individual specimens have survived completely isolated for decades (let alone for centuries or millennia): where there is a dinosaur, there should be others nearby.
- Since the survival of a species is based precisely on the existence of a population, the chances that it remains completely hidden are further reduced. Footprints, skeletons, carcasses… Sooner or later the traces of the surviving dinosaurs should turn up in quantity, certainly not in isolated cases. Especially a large predator would soon succeed in establishing itself in a territory devoid of natural enemies.
- Larger dinosaurs could not survive on a planet with current gravity, as they would collapse under their own weight; similarly, the largest pterosaurs would not be able to get off the ground. Therefore, it is practically impossible that these creatures are still among us (obviously these considerations do not apply to smaller creatures and aquatic ones).
Yet, the sightings of prehistoric creatures are too numerous to be all classified as oversights or scams: the explanation must be another.
In my view, there are three possibilities:
- The first explanation is that the animals sighted were actually the last survivors of species widespread on Earth in prehistoric times. Although, as we have seen, this is a fairly unlikely eventuality, we cannot completely rule it out: on the other hand, the coelacanth, a fish believed to be extinct since the Cretaceous, was fished alive and well in South African waters in 1938. Perhaps creatures like the "crocodilepard" could not share its fate "by a hair", as they had become extinct a few centuries or millennia earlier.
- A second, decidedly more "exotic" explanation is that the witnesses involuntarily (and without realizing it) witnessed a vision of past scenes. In parapsychological terminology, the vision of events that occurred in the past is called retrocognition or - when referring to a particular object -psychometry. Perhaps, for still unknown reasons, certain places retain a greater measure than others of the "echo" of past events, which under suitable conditions some individuals could "pick up".
- Another "exotic" explanation is that dinosaurs (but the same could be true for other creatures known tocryptozoology) come from parallel dimensions (including past eras). The place where they were observed could constitute a "dimensional portal" in all respects, or be in proximity to it. The various lake monsters sighted in the world, for example, could enter our dimension/age right through the lake, and then return to their own: this would explain why their traces have never been found.
Of course, the possibilities we have listed are not incompatible with each other. If the first hypothesis could explain the Roman representations of unknown reptiles, the remaining ones could finally clarify why the numerous sightings of dinosaurs and related creatures are never accompanied by concrete evidence. Of course, our planet still holds many mysteries, which will be impossible to solve without taking into consideration even the seemingly absurd hypotheses.
Note
This article is an english translation of the italian article "Uomini e Dinosauri" by Merlo Bianco. You can find the original article here: https://merlobianco.altervista.org/uomini-e-dinosauri
