Fringe paleontology gets weird fast
Tier 1 of an iceberg guide covers hoaxes, pseudoscience, and Chickenosaurus, a real bird-development experiment turned spectacle.
Paleontology already gives us giant carnivorous lizards, five-eyed sea creatures, and enough weird fossils to make science fiction seem boring. So, obviously, fringe paleontology has to start off the rails and then dive deep.
This entertaining first installment of a fringe paleontology iceberg descends into the theories, hoaxes, and pseudoscience that revolve around the study of prehistoric life.
My favorite ideas are the ones that sound like fringe science but aren't entirely. Meet the Chickenosaurus! Grown out of genuine research in manipulating bird development to produce ancestral dinosaur-like traits, fantasized into spectacle.
Oddly, fringe paleontology's recurring theme is less about dinosaurs than people. Give humans ambiguous evidence, offer something we desperately want to believe, then bake. Humanity'll build an entire lost civilization out of it.
These guys apparently find the actual fossil record insufficiently exciting.