Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?
I enjoyed Philip J. Senter’s thorough explanation of why claims of fire-breathing dinosaurs are unrealistic (July/August 2017). The idea that such an article should be necessary seemed almost comical (akin to Skeptical Inquirer running a cover story on “Why Reindeer Can’t Really Fly”) until I read that claims about fire-breathing dinosaurs appear in some seventh-grade biology textbooks. The fact that home-schooled pupils should be using such textbooks is bad enough, but the idea that they are employed by any school in receipt of state funding ought to be a source of national shame. Of course it isn’t hard to believe such propositions are held by the same people who claim Earth is 6,000 years old. As Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, “To get an idea of the scale of this error, it is the equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 7.8 yards.”