The Persistance of Dinosaurs

My promises are clearly not to be taken as gospel. I have had every intention of establishing a regular program of updates to this site, and to tell my story through it, but so far have been unable to make any significant progress. Yes, it is true that internet archiving must be of a lower priority than some more pressing activities, yet it behoves me to achieve some sort of credibility and such irregularity is clearly not the way to do it.

Never mind. I was hoping that by making a start and committing myself in this way, it would facilitate my revelatory ambitions and if that is not to be the case, I must be content merely to do what I can.

I came across this image the other day, which is supposed to have been taken in the Ta Prohm Temple, located deep in the Cambodia jungle.

The temple was apparently built in 1186 and this relief sculpture of what appears to be a Stegosaurus is being touted by some within the web community (not to mention creationist believers) as "proof" that dinosaur survival into modern times -- some 155 million years after the species supposedly became extinct -- is a definite possibility and a blow to evolutionary science.

Even abandoning the application of Occam's Razor, which would suggest any number of more likely explanations for this image -- not least of which is sheer unadulterated digital fakery -- the idea that prehistoric species have continued to live for all that time without undergoing any change whatsoever, evolutionary or otherwise -- merely to adapt to climactic differences, if for no other reason -- seems ridiculous.

Now, no doubt you are waiting for me to quote some incident from my great grandfather Hugo Drakenswode's diaries to indicate otherwise. But no! In fact I have come across few references that bear on the issue of direct prehistoric survival, and though I am far from having comprehensively scoured his records, I do not expect to. Why not, you ask?

Well, he does have this to say:

I read Mr Conan Doyle's tale of prehistoric survivors existing in the then modern world [he's referring to The Lost World, of course -- DO] with some amusement, being particularly curious in regards to the naturalistic air he attempts to give to what would be, if true, a vastly unnatural phenomenon. I do not here refer to the mere existence of dinosaurs in modern times, but how all evolutionary trends appear to be suspended in his land of antediluvian throwbacks, as different species from different periods seem to exist therein with very little evidence of genetic change having taken place in the creatures there despite the passage of many millenia, in which time survival would have dictated, in the natural course of things, much necessary adaptation. Still, this is fiction and though anti-evolutionary movements in the modern world would no doubt hail such a discovery as proof of their misguided belief that the natural world is not driven by evolutionary forces, I must state that in all my years seeking the hidden species of the world, I have never come upon evidence of such a survival. Oh, I have seen reptilian monsters of vast size. I have seen creatures apparently out of their time and place. But none of them could be considered to be natural creatures -- whether Dinosaurian or some other long extinct species -- at a genetic level. They are all patently unnatural, born not of the natural course of things. Just what they are, what their genesis entailed is the subject of my life-long work. Anyone reading my notes and other records seeking evidence of dinosaurs as such will, I fear, be greatly disappointed.

Despite this declaration -- which is, I must add, of great significance for understanding not only Drakenswode's work but the nature of reality itself -- he also wrote the following memorandum, some two decades after having penned the first.

I have found what appears to be a dinosaur and analysis of its cellular structure offers no indication that it is not a genuine member of that ancient family. I was able to have it forensically examined because I brought it down... I hesitate to say that I killed the beast as I suspect that it was never alive, not here in our time, not as we understand the term alive at any rate. I believe what I have here is not evidence of a prehistoric continuity, but of a profound discontinuity, and it is this which means that my long-developed theories regarding the nature of the majority of cryptobiological finds need not be abandoned. I contend that in this "prehistoric survival" I was not dealing with a natural survival, but with an unnatural phenomenon.

I was particularly drawn to this statement of Drakenswode's in the aftermath of the attack upon Cryptonbury, as accounted here.

But more on that at a later time.