28 March 2014

A temple in Cambodia hides a dinosaur (maybe)


Ella Morton has a Slate article about a temoral impossibility:
Stegosaurs roamed Europe and North America during the late Jurassic, roughly a hundred and fifty million years ago. Judging from a small carving in an Angkor temple, one or two may have spent some time in Cambodia, too, in the twelfth century AD.
A carving on the wall of the Ta Prohm temple (photo, top), built in the late 1100s, bears more than a passing resemblance to the round-backed dinosaur. Since a 1997 guidebook first pointed out the strange carving, creationists have held up the Ta Prohm dinosaur as proof that humans and stegosauri once co-existed in Cambodia. There is even a replica of the carving on display at the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.
While the carved animal does seem to have a row of plates along its spine, it's not the most compelling argument for revising the prehistoric timeline. The bas relief could be a depiction of a rhino or chameleon, with the "plates" forming a stylized version of foliage. But the curious carving adds another element of intrigue to the gorgeously ruined Tomb Raider temple.

Rico says there are any number of lizards (photo, above) that would serve as models for this... (And where's Indiana Jones when you need him?) And if the Creation Evidence Museum isn't enough reason to disbelieve this, Rico doesn't know what is...

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