Posts share false 'dinosaur hoax' claim in bid to discredit Darwinism

This article is more than one year old.
Published on January 3, 2024 at 08:14
3 min read
By Joseph OLBRYCHT PALMER, AFP Australia

A graphic titled "The Dinosaur Hoax" has been shared repeatedly in social media posts that falsely claim dinosaurs were invented in the 19th century to validate Darwin's theory of evolution. The posts -- shared in multiple countries including Australia and the United States -- baselessly claim that no one has ever discovered a complete dinosaur skeleton, and no dinosaur fossils were unearthed before the 19th century. The term "dinosaur" was coined nearly two decades before Darwin's theory was published, and dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world for millennia.

"Builders should be finding dinosaur bones during excavations - every single day. But they don't," reads part of the caption to the graphic shared on Facebook here on November 20, 2023.

"Only people within the field, happen to find these elusive dinosaur bones - that somehow became fossil fuels," it says.

The attached graphic claims dinosaurs are a "hoax" because "nobody has ever excavated a complete dinosaur skeleton".

It goes on to claim that before the 1800s, nobody had ever heard of a "dinosaur", nor had anyone discovered a dinosaur fossil, as the "whole dinosaur industry" is merely propaganda to validate Darwin's theory of evolution.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on November 20, 2023

The content of the graphic is identical to other graphics that have been shared globally since at least 2019, with variations popping up in Australia here and here; the United States; Canada; and the Netherlands.

But experts told AFP the claim contradicts hundreds of years of scientific research.

19th-century classification

British scientist Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of evolution by natural selection was introduced in his book, "On the Origin of Species" -- which was published in 1859, nearly two decades after renowned British comparative anatomist Richard Owen coined the term 'dinosauria' in 1842 (archived links here and here).

Owen used the term in a report following the discovery of three fossils in the south of England (archived link).

"Owen named the Dinosauria based on the similarity of various anatomical features shared by several giant extinct reptiles (Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus), most importantly the similarity of their hips, which meant that their legs were held under their bodies, rather than out to the sides, like in living lizards and crocodiles," explained Susannah Maidment, a senior researcher at the Museum of Natural History in London (archived link).

"It was simply a way of classifying similar things," she told AFP in an email.

Historian Adrienne Mayor told AFP that earlier civilisations had also uncovered and exhibited large fossils from extinct creatures (archived link).

"There is no doubt that people in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages discovered, measured and displayed fossils of large extinct animals of land and sea in their lands," Mayor said in an email.

"These bones and other fossils were buried in the ground and were found all around the Mediterranean lands, revealed by storms, floods, earthquakes and whenever ancient people dug wells and ploughed fields," she said.

"The ancient Greeks and Romans collected, measured and displayed the huge bones in temples as the relics of giants and other mythic creatures."

She went on to say that archaeologists have found "enormous fossils collected by ancient Greeks in temples and other archaeological sites".

'Thousands' of skeletons

Maidment also told AFP that while complete and near-complete dinosaur skeletons are relatively rare, "thousands" have still been discovered around the world.

"Examples include the famous 'dino-birds' which demonstrated definitively that birds evolved from dinosaurs," she said (archived link).

"There are a lot of complete hadrosaurs, the duck-billed dinosaurs."

Maidment added that archaeologists have typically struggled to find complete skeletons for older dinosaur species because of the Earth's tectonic movements and erosion.

The Museum of Natural History is home to several complete and near-complete dinosaur skeletons, including a stegosaurus, archaeopteryx, hypsilophodon and mantellisaurus (archived links here, here, here and here).

In Australia, the world's most complete triceratops skeleton is kept on permanent display at Melbourne Museum (archived link).

"Our Triceratops specimen at Melbourne Museum is comprised of real fossils," spokeswoman Alexandra Counsel told AFP in an email. "It is among the most globally significant dinosaur fossils ever discovered and the most complete dinosaur fossil ever acquired by an Australasian museum."

At 87 percent complete, the triceratops' skeleton includes a 99 percent complete skull and the entire vertebral column, as well as skin impressions and tendons, she said.

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