8 Totally Batsh*t Things People Actually Believe

5. Humans and Dinosaurs

It is estimated that nearly half of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. Now, this presents a few problems, the first of which being that nearly half of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. The second problem is that this would mean that the likes of humans and dinosaurs must have coexisted.

One of the major arguments for this theory, aside from the whole "God says so" thing, is that the many dragon legends in cultures all over the world point to a time in which humans and dinosaurs shared an existence. There's no reason to assume, however, that these legends came from encounters with living beasts. Ancient people were just as capable of digging up fossils as we are today and the bones of dinosaurs, whales and even elephants could have given rise to the myth. In fact, people used to think that elephant skulls were actually evidence for the existence of a one-eyed cyclops, and you can kind of see why.

The biblical description of a great beast known as the behemoth is also sometimes interpreted as a description of a dinosaur. However, upon reading the full quotation, there's nothing in there that particularly screams "dinosaur" such as spines, teeth, horns, crests or (depending on who you talk to) feathers. In fact, the only real "dinosaur" quality the behemoth possesses is "big" and, as we know, not all dinosaurs are big, and not all non-dinosaurs are small.

The recent discovery of beautifully preserved dinosaur soft tissues only added fuel to the fire as it was argued that the soft tissue should have all decomposed by now. However, it is the breakdown of iron in the dinosaurs' tissues that preserved it in this way, almost like formaldehyde. Rather ironically, the discovery has led to a greater understanding of how the dinosaur evolved into modern birds. Over millions of years. Do you see where I'm going with this?