Those of you who know me will not be surprised by this.  I am, at the age of 32, just as much of a Doctor Who nut as I was 29 years previously.  I also have every episode of the Children’s ITV gameshow Knightmare on VHS.  Nostalgia and the completist, collectors instinct are a dangerous pairing.

My latest whim is the 1982 animated version of The Incredible Hulk.  No, not the dreadful Bill Bixby series of the same name, which it seems everyone but me remembers fondly.  I’m so bored of hearing producers talk about how the Hulk movies are failing because they lack a resemblance to the TV show.  I’m sometimes not wholly convinced that these people realise the Hulk is actually a comic book character.  Bill Bixby has, I fear, doomed all subsequent live action versions of the Hulk to emulate his version of the character, instead of Stan Lee’s.

But I digress.

One episode of The Incredible Hulk, titled The Creature and the Cavegirl, features Bruce Banner attempting to use a “time projector” to go back in time and prevent the gamma ray explosion which first turned him into the Hulk.  As you might expect, things go awry and the Hulk ends up travelling “a million years back in time”, where he rescues a woman – the eponymous cavegirl – from a bear-like monster and a marauding dinosaur.

This is the point at which I started getting frustrated. Dinosaurs and humans living together?  Who died and made Ken Ham the script editor?  Modern humans living one million years ago? Seriously? Come to that – dinosaurs living one million years ago! Really?! You’re going to put that in a kids TV show? Irresponsible much?

Then I took a step back.

Sure, this show is telling kids (albeit indirectly) that humans and dinosaurs lived together a million years ago. But it is also telling kids that getting caught in a nuclear blast with turn you into a green, quasi-Jekyll-and-Hyde monster in magic elastic pants.  And that it is possible to traverse the fourth dimension via a device called a time projector.

These things are just as crazy, but I don’t find them in the least bit objectionable.

Why not?

So there I was, roaming ‘teh interwebs’ one last time before entering an extended Christmas weekend and going off radar, when I came across a link tweeted by a fellow Skeptic. It referred to something called ‘Project Pterosaur’. Interesting, I thought. I wonder what that’s about? So in the interest of simple human curiosity I clicked on the link.

Oh, and what glories did I behold! This site is the most fantastically bonkers and bewildering woo-stew I have ever seen. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, vacate the Earth or simply join in the fun these people seem to be having.

The main site is something called objectiveministries.org, and it is an ‘educational resource’ for Creation Science. These kinds of sites are everywhere, the most well-known being answersingenesis.org. They’re all attempts to push very skewed versions of reality onto the public under the pretense that science is some kind of ungodly blight that hides the ‘truth’. This site is no exception. The link above takes you to a particular article on the site, detailing the aforementioned Project Pterosaur.

So, what is this project? I’ll let Dr Richard Paley, the leader of the project explain it in his own words:

“The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Furthermore, the rookery facility will establish a breeding colony of pterosaurs in order to produce specimens that could then be put on display by other regional institutions or church groups.”

Yes, you read that right. Project Pterosaur is an expedition to kidnap living pterosaurs – a clade of creatures the fossil record implies hasn’t existed since the cretaceous period - and put them in a special zoo. Presumably with a big sign saying: “Nur nur! Silly Evolutionists!”

Once the sensation of being in the wrong universe wore off, I was obviously filled with questions. The main one was ‘why do they think pterosaurs even exist in the first place’, quickly followed by ‘what are they hoping to achieve by doing this, anyway’. I’ll come back to the first question - clearly the most important one! – in a moment. The second question is soon answered on the website. The three main goals of Project Pterosaur are:

1. Support Creation Theory by showing the incorrectness of the philosophy of Evolutionism.
2. Educate the population about Creation Science.
3. Create excitement about Creation and the Bible in the public.

As fantastic as a living pterosaur specimen would undoubtably be, it wouldn’t remotely do what Objective Ministries are claiming it would. It would not promote Creation Theory and it would not disprove evolution. Creationists tend to believe that dinosaurs (I know that pterosaurs are technically not dinosaurs, but I’m simplifying for brevity) lived in harmony alongside humans until ‘The Fall’, when they were promptly drowned in the flood due to a typical Yahweh hissy fit. This, they say, explains the fossil record. It doesn’t explain why there are no dinosaurs roaming around now, however. Wouldn’t they have been on the Ark? What about all the flying ones? And this, presumably, is why finding a living pterosaur is so important to them. They think it will make their ‘theory’ look more credible.

Except it wouldn’t. Let’s imagine for a moment that they’re right, and pterosaurs do exist. In terms of ‘proving’ biblical stories it is irrelevant. It just means that pterosaurs still exist. It says nothing about whether its ancestors lived on a boat, just that a particular clade of animals have survived longer than previously thought. The entire span of current scientific knowledge already disproves Creationism. Finding an animal that is unusual doesn’t change that. The existence of the Coelacanth hasn’t put biologists out of work, it just made their work more interesting.

That is also the reason it wouldn’t disprove evolution either. The principles of evolution are sound and proven. The discovery of pterosaurs wouldn’t damage it, it would just make biology more exciting. Objective Ministries seem to think that the theory of evolution would wither and die in the spiny face of the pterosaur, when in fact it would be rejuvenated. Scientists would love this kind of opportunity.

So, back to the first question. Why do they think pterosaurs still exist? It seems to be a mixture of wishful thinking, the twisting of myths and some blatant weird assertions. An example of the latter would be statements like this one:

“[Pterosaurs] were a constant presence in the skies over Eden, where they peacefully ate fruit and plants. After the Fall, many of their descendants degenerated to a carnivorous diet and became feared by man. … Various Pterosaur kinds were common throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa up until the early Middle Ages and interacted extensively with Man. Today, although Evolutionists falsely insist that they are extinct, pterosaurs can still be found, hidden away in the unexplored wilds of our world.”

So now we know. They’re so confident! Personally, I’d love to know the biblical verse that states:

“And Eve was again left hungry when the twelve foot pterosaur stole her apple.”

All I see in Genesis is Adam and Eve and some trees. No massive flying reptiles like in this picture:

Notice the conveniently placed wing and beak

I also don’t seem to remember pterosaurs cropping up in history lessons on the middle ages either. Maybe I was ill that week.

Other sources of ‘proof’ include Hebrew/Egyptian myths of a creature called the Saraph, the works of Cicero and Aristotle (!), the Native American Thunderbird myth, Mayan myth (Quetzelcoatl) and of course, the Bible. They even claim that mummified pterosaurs were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb only to be promptly and conveniently stolen, possibly as part of an Evolutionist conspiracy!

Their use of the Bible is hilarious. It’s not worth me paraphrasing, as this is pure gold on its own:

“The danger of these creatures is evident when Moses — later leading his people out of Egypt — was unable to use the protection of ibises, resulting in the Jews being tormented by pterosaur attacks throughout the 40 year Exodus. The attacks were brought under control only after the Lord instructed Moses to create a pterosaur effigy on a pole to scare them off (Numbers 21:6-9, Deuteronomy 8:15).”

I’m pretty sure that never happened in the Bible. I’ve read it. I’d remember Moses scaring off pterosaurs with a special shining staff! It really is unbelievable. I recommend after reading this blog you go away and look at the whole site for yourself. Believe me, I am only giving you a taster of the sheer wealth of nonsensical wonders that site contains.

Charlton Heston didn't do this!

One thing which caught my imagination on this site was their  belief that the Native American myth of the Thunderbird was based on sightings of pterosaurs. Now, I’m going to be slightly less dismissive for a moment and go out on a limb. It is not impossible that in extremely remote environments creatures may exist which are very similar to their distant ancestors. They would most certainly have to exist in a remote environment if they are as large as these creatures are supposed to be, otherwise we would know about them (new species are discovered all the time, but tend not to be large animals, most of them have been already discovered). In addition, it’s not impossible that local myths may reflect sightings of these creatures. I can completely understand people becoming fascinated with these myths and can even appreciate people believing it. That doesn’t make it likely to be true, however. What I found really interesting with regard to the site’s tying together of the pterosaur with the Thunderbird myth, was this picture of a photograph, supposedly from about 1860:

After cartoons of Moses and Adam and Eve, this one did startle me a bit. I had not seen this photograph before. I am not an expert in photography and am completely unable to offer any suggestions regarding how it was created. It purports to show American Civil War servicemen standing proudly around the corpse of a ‘thunderbird’ that they have shot down. I was really intrigued by the photograph so attempted to do some research (yes, this means surfing the net. Buggered if I’m going across the water to the Liverpool library in this weather!). It turns out that there is a couple of these photographs knocking about. At least one is known to be fake, and one is talked about but doesn’t seem to actually exist in reality. This photograph in particular doesn’t seem to be traceable, and as such I could find no information on whether it has been debunked or analysed in any way, although it is not given much shrift by skeptics. It is also apparently similar to a fake photograph created for the series FreakyLinks, by the makers of The Blair Witch Project, which certainly doesn’t bode well for it being a genuine photograph. So, as interesting as the photograph is (even if it’s fake, it’s a great photograph), given the lack of any other evidence whatsoever, I’m going to have to wield Ockham’s Razor like some maniacal ‘thirties gangster and move on.

It doesn’t stop with pterosaurs though…

Dr Paley and his fellow Creationists also believe that apatosaurs are living in the jungles of the Congo, claiming they would attempt to bring back a specimen, except that they are too large for the proposed enclosure. Aswell as apatosaurs, they also believe plesiosaurs exist (they’re probably thinking of Nessie), trilobytes and velociraptors. They claim that velociraptors are actually the fabled chupacabra and that – I’m serious here – they guard the remains of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

At this point, I’m thinking the website must be a hoax. So I researched that, too (yes, the internet again – leave me alone, I’m sensitive), and it seems that no-one else is quite sure if this is a piss-take or not either! If it is a hoax, it is the most detailed and thorough hoax I have seen, and a lot of time and effort has gone into making it look real. Yes, it is ridiculous, but only slightly more ridiculous than genuine Creationists I’ve met!

That said, there  is that other part of the site about putting a giant cross on the moon… and the man who fights Satanists along with his cat, Milton…  oh, and the Youth Rock Ministry containing songs such as “Who Let The Praise Out!”… the bit about catching the pterosaurs by disorienting them with a frankincense smoker was a bit weird, too…

Can it be real? I’m not sure I recognise this universe anymore! Help! I recommend you all go and visit the site right now to see for yourselves the genius of Objective Ministries’ Project Pterosaur!