A still from the 1980s cartoon Dinosaucers. Are they real? Of course.
As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, a press release from the Journal of the American Chemical Society has revealed, in a study by Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow, something that is about as terrifying as the moment in Jurassic Park when the characters realize that the raptors are intelligent. Yes, time to cower in the hills: there might be monstrous intelligent space dinosaurs out there ruling other worlds with their saurian cunning. “We would be better off not meeting them,” concludes Breslow’s report. So should we all give up now?
Of course not. As usual, though, it’s a matter of a press release over-exagerrating what’s going on. Gawker noted that the press release’s “main selling point, though, is actually derived from one-off wild conjecture tossed in, kind of jokingly, as the paper’s last line. (So, while the study does, technically, conclude with the statement “We would be better off not meeting them,” that wasn’t really the main conclusion.)” Gakwer added that : “Granted, saying that cunning (gregarious?) space dinosaurs could exist is not the same as saying they do exist. … Except they definitely do exist and I forbid you all from going into space because I love you and I want to keep you safe.”
Chill out! Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow is actually concerned with something a little less exciting – it’s about why the biochemical signature of life on earth is so consistent, said Brian Switek on The Smithsonian’s website, who went on to explain that the paper concerns itself with why molecules like DNA and RNA and other amino acids have a “left-handed” orientation, whilst sugars have a “right-handed” one. This suggests that life was “seeded” from elsewhere – which means that similar sorts of life could exist in the universe. But “None of this has anything to do with dinosaurs.” Breslow does speculate at the end about what aliens might look like – as they might possesss the opposite biochemical orientations of what earth ones look like. But dinosaurs were an accident – if the Permian or Triassic extinctions hadn’t happened, then “there is no indication that dinosaurs would have evolved or come to rule the world.” So why on earth should it happen in space? And dinosaurs do still exist – birds are their descendants. And some are “quite intelligent, so we don’t have to wonder about what an especially smart dinosaur would have looked like.”
Dinosaucers! Designer Aaron Martin-Colby wrote on his blog that finally scientists have learned what 80s children have known for years. Check out the video below!
