Science Wants to Ruin All Dinosaurs

Remember when historians discovered a reference to Abe Lincoln's voluptuous breasts? No, of course not, because historians aren't assholes. They know how to forget the bad parts.In the great scientific effort to ruin all things awesome, the paleontologists at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich have struck a blow for lameness. Based on the unusually well-preserved fossil of an ancient German theropod, the theory is now gaining acceptance that virtually all dinosaurs possessed feathers. Not a few. Not some chicken raptor squawking around the Jurassic. All dinosaurs had feathers. They are taking our dinosaurs away.

Feathers didn't start with birds. Plumage of various sorts - from simple fuzz to the complex structures used for flight - adorned dinosaurs first, and was only later inherited by birds. And if a beautifully preserved juvenile dinosaur unearthed in the Jurassic strata of Germany is any indication, it is possible that all dinosaurs bore patches of filamentous feathers.

They might as well have found a fossil of a dinosaur wearing a party hat and a sequined cape. When the scientists came for Pluto, I said nothing. When they told me the sun did not revolve around the earth, I bought new calendars. I understand that our skepticism must be coupled with a willingness to adapt to new understanding of our universe, but I have to speak up. Science dudes, no. Come on. All of them are birds?

I was cool when alligators were the closest living ancestor of dinosaurs. Alligators are scary and dangerous. They seem to embody the dinosaur total package of cold-blooded, mean and totally alien. If you tap them on the nose they will bite off your goddamn arm. I figure if crocodile's dinosaurs forebears were looking down on him from the meaty-walls of dinosaur heaven, they would see him floating around like a log getting ready to bite some noodler's hand off, and they would say, "Heck yeah, bro."

Birds, on the other hand, are bullshit. They're all over the place. They fly into windows over and over until they die. They build nests in basketball hoops. If it's daytime I bet you can look out your window and see birds right now, hopping around doing lame bird stuff like eating seeds and cocking their heads. They don't lurk. They don't menace. What is the most badass bird? The eagle? The bald eagle?

Let the mighty eagle soaaaaaaar (over diaper dumps).Bald eagles hang out at trash dumps and smell like diapers and eat diapers and lay their eggs in diaper piles. They are filthy and stupid. Benjamin Franklin knew it.

"For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly."

Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be America's national bird. Hardly a dinosaur, but I guess at least they don't eat literal garbage.

Owls are pretty badass, right? I had a stupid friend who had an owl as a pet. All it did day and night was scream and tear out its feathers and crap everywhere, because only some kind of stupid asshole has an owl as a pet. What a bad idea.

He took it to a wildlife place and they said they could take care of it. They rehabilitated it from my fucked up, stupid friend and got it all ready to release into the wild. We checked in on it periodically. Eventually it was ready to be released and they put a tag on it and two days later it was dead. It drowned in a swimming pool.

Way to be, owl dude.

If an animal looks like a dandelion stalk mated with Liza Minnelli it is not related to an apex predator.Even dangerous birds are lame. The ostrich, which is giant and can run like hell, can tear your guts out with its talons. Territorial males are often aggressive and must be handled carefully. They sound almost like a worthy descendant of dinosaurs, until you get to a passage on Wikipedia about how they are farmed for feathers to make feather dusters:

During molting season the birds are gathered in a pen, burlap sacks are placed over their heads so they will remain calm and trained "pickers" pluck the loose molting feathers from the birds. The birds are then released unharmed back onto the farm.

I don't care how dangerous ostriches are; if you can put a bag over their head and pull off their feathers they are not scary.

It gets worse. Scientists now believe that the closest living relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex is the chicken, and that's just too awful to accept. The T. Rex stomped around tearing the spines out of lesser dinosaurs, eating skulls and crapping out skeletons, and he ends up packed into a sweltering farm with ten million other birds getting speed-decapitated on a conveyor belt. It's the animal we say every strange meat tastes like because we are so used to eating it. That sort of fate is like a Twilight Zone episode where the last humans end up in an alien zoo, only worse, because we're eating the zoo animals.

I don't need all of the dinosaurs. Science, you can have 3/4ths. You can have all the comb-headed, long-necked dicks who sat around swamps chewing moss. You can have those dinosaurs with the giant skulls that used to ram their heads together. Take any dinosaurs that didn't have teeth.

If scientists continue to find evidence of feathered, lame dinosaurs, eventually we will have to accept the new reality. Let's say when it is so widely accepted Spielberg edits plumage into Jurassic Park. Until then, I will stick with my skepticism.

Dinosaurs are not birds.

Zack Parsons is the author of the novel Liminal States and frequently contributes to The Huffington Post under the pseudonym Arianna Huffington.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)