Conspiracy theories are now all the rage it would seem, with everything from flat-earthers to Q-Anon becoming more popular than ever, in large part down to the dissemination of information on the internet.
It seems a little rich to look back at Medieval Europe and, wrongly, call it unsophisticated and ignorant because they believed the Earth is flat (they didn't), when more people than ever now believe this to be the case.
You would think that landing on the Moon would have resolved that particular question, except that's a conspiracy as well.
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But one conspiracy theory takes things in a whole different direction, as a conspiracy theorist has taken to TikTok to express her fervent belief that the dinosaurs were not real.
And her reason? Because their bones are not buried everywhere.
Yes, you did indeed read that correctly.
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Now, if we are being completely true to the science this is not technically incorrect. It's not the actual bones themselves that we now dig up.
In the simplest terms, because the chemicals in the bones had a different chemical structure than the mud they were buried in, they reacted differently than the surrounding mud over millions of years. The result is fossils!
So they're not bone in the same way that you would get a bone from the butcher, they are the geological impressions left by bones when an animal died in very particular circumstances.
But of course, that's not what the conspiracy theorist - TikToker @queenofeverything0003 - was actually referring to.
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She literally just meant why don't we find them, saying: "Why is it that the average Joe has never dug them up?"
The answer to that, is that 'average Joes' often do find and dig up fossils. It actually happens all the time.
In 2013, a farmer in Montana became an overnight millionaire when they stumbled upon the skeleton of a T-Rex and triceratops.
And this year in 2023, farmers in Australia unearthed a fossil identified as the skull of a sauropod, one of the enormous grazing dinosaurs.
In 2020, a farmer in Queensland happened upon a skeleton being to a previously unknown species of Tyrannosaur.
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So yeah, people do find them.
But, the TikToker then pondered about the meteor that killed them all, claiming 'nothing would be left from that'.
She said: "There wouldn't be anything left, let alone bones. It's easy to connect the dots once your eyes are open."
Except, it wasn't the explosion itself which caused the extinction. It was the conditions that resulted from the impact such as lack of food, and climate change.
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Oh boy, there's a whole other can of worms for conspiracy theorists.
Topics: TikTok, US News, Viral, Science