Dinosaurs
In April 2024, an independent researcher named Agent131711 published a five-part investigation into the dinosaur narrative. The work encompasses the history of paleontological discoveries, the institutional players involved, the physical evidence presented to the public, and the financial structures that support the endeavor. What emerges is not simply a critique of museum exhibitions or dating methods, but a structural question: what is the function of this narrative? Who benefits from perpetuating it? And what larger narratives does it support?
This essay summarizes and expands on the findings of agent131711. The expansion concerns two global metanarratives that anchor dinosaurs in the public consciousness: the origin of oil (the “fossil fuel” narrative) and the origin of species (the evolutionary narrative). Both carry enormous economic and ideological significance. Both require that dinosaurs—or something similar—exist in the public imagination. The question is not so much whether prehistoric creatures walked the Earth, but whether the specific narrative passed down to us serves a purpose beyond historical accuracy, writes Unbekoming .
I’ve written about both pillars before. In “Fossil Fuels,” I explored the abiogenic oil theory—the substantial evidence, particularly from Russian and Ukrainian geologists, that oil is not the compressed remains of ancient organic matter, but a continuously produced planetary resource bubbling up from the depths of the Earth. In “Intelligence,” I explored the problems with Darwinian evolution: the information problem, the Cambrian explosion, the lack of transitional fossils, the probability calculations that effectively rule out spontaneous protein formation, and the circular dating methods underlying the geological record.
What I didn’t fully grasp until I came across agent131711’s research was how dinosaurs function as the imaginative glue that holds both narratives together. Remove dinosaurs from the public consciousness, and the “fossil” in fossil fuel loses its hold. Remove dinosaurs from museum exhibits, and evolution loses its most dramatic evidence. The giant reptiles that supposedly ruled the Earth for 160 million years play a crucial narrative role in both stories—and agent131711’s research raises serious questions about the foundations of that narrative.
Part One: The Anomalies
The Basics: A Royal Society Decision
The story begins where the story itself begins: the late 1700s and the Royal Society. Georges Cuvier, a member of this institution, possessed what contemporaries called a “peculiar gift” for identifying species from fragmentary remains. Using a few random bones brought to him, Cuvier determined that they belonged to extinct creatures—species that no longer roamed the earth. This discovery became the foundation for everything that followed.
The theological implications were immediate. If species could become extinct, the biblical creation story would be compromised. If creatures had existed before recorded history and disappeared, the Genesis timeline would have to be revised. The bones became evidence not only of prehistoric life but also of a history longer and stranger than Scripture described.
As agent131711 puts it, “These prehistoric creatures were going to be the proof needed for the theory of evolution, thus disproving God, or at the very least proving that God didn’t first create man in his image, but instead played with enormous beasts for a while (160 million years, to be exact) and then decided to slaughter them all; either way, the Bible is wrong and science is right.”
The two discoverers
Within a few decades of Cuvier’s determination, two men discovered most of what we now call dinosaurs: Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. The concentration of discoveries between these two individuals is remarkable in itself.
Cope was an heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, the same company that would later conduct radiation experiments on mentally handicapped and orphaned children. He claimed the discovery of nearly 1,000 extinct species, including over 130 dinosaurs, and wrote 1,400 scientific papers that “have become part of history as fact.” The sheer number of discoveries begs for critical scrutiny: one man discovering a thousand species and writing fourteen hundred scientific papers establishing their reality.
Marsh’s uncle, George Peabody, was worth $20 million in the 19th century, equivalent to over $500 million today. Peabody financed Marsh’s expeditions and founded the Peabody Museum at Yale, libraries and museums at Harvard, and a natural history museum bearing his name. The town of Peabody, Massachusetts, is named after him. As agent131711 notes, if you manage the museums, you manage the content, and therefore you manage history.
Marsh became chief paleontologist of the US Geological Survey, a government position. The federal government began funding both men’s expeditions. From the outset, the dinosaur enterprise was now intertwined with government agencies and private capital.
Cope and Marsh together discovered virtually all the famous dinosaurs of their time. At one point, Marsh found 31 Triceratops skulls in less than 24 months. The likelihood of two financially motivated individuals making so many discoveries is a cause for concern.
The oil spy who found the T-Rex
The pattern of interested discoverers extends beyond Cope and Marsh. Barnum Brown discovered the first documented remains of the T. Rex and the Ankylosaurus. His biography contains a striking detail: during the First and Second World Wars, Brown worked as an intelligence agent, not for the military, but for oil companies. He was a corporate spy for Rockefeller’s fossil fuel industry.
Brown was simultaneously an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History. He discovered the partial T. Rex skeleton in 1900, another in 1902, and the director of the museum where he worked “validated” the bones and named the species. The institutional circle was complete: discovery, authentication, and exhibition all took place within the same organizational structure.
Brown earned the nickname “Mr. Bones” and became one of the most famous fossil hunters in history. His dual role—espionage for the oil industry, paleontological discoveries for the museum industry—captures the intertwined interests that run through this entire story.
The bones we can’t see
Visitors to the museum think they’re looking at dinosaur fossils. They’re not.
The bones on display are replicas. Museum professionals explain this for various reasons: the real bones are radioactive, too rare, too valuable, and too heavy (they would “break through the floor”). According to agent131711, these explanations sound like excuses made up to avoid an unwanted family vacation.
What visitors see are replicas made from chicken bones, frog bones, horse bones, plaster, and plastic—what the industry calls “real bone material.” The term is technically correct: they are real bones, from real animals. They’re just not dinosaur bones.
Even professionals are prohibited from examining the original specimens. In one case, a researcher gained rare access to “authentic” fossils, subjected them to a CAT scan analysis, and discovered they were forged—composed of fragments of small animal bones, metal, and glue. National Geographic reportedly published the story as genuine anyway. This incident helps explain why access to original specimens is now completely restricted.
The replicas themselves are made from minimal source material. Complete skeletons are rarely, if ever, found. Artists and makers work with fragments—sometimes a single tooth, sometimes scattered bone fragments found in different locations and at different times—to create the complete exhibits.
The gap between discovery and exhibition
The specimen codes assigned to famous discoveries allow for comparisons between what has actually been excavated and what can be seen in museums.
The first Diplodocus discovery (#YPM VP 1920) consisted of a handful of random bones—fragmentary remains that bear no resemblance to the massive reconstructions exhibited worldwide. More bones were found in different years and locations, all of which turned out to belong to the same dinosaur. The process is similar to assembling a Lego creation by combining pieces found in different stores, different cities, and different years, and then labeling the result as the “original” set.
Ankylosaurus was first identified by Marsh in 1892 based on a single tooth. The first actual bones weren’t found until 1906, fourteen years later.
The origin of the Pterodactylus is linked to a copper engraving. The bones were supposedly excavated in Germany at an unknown date. The discovery was never included in the collection catalog. A drawing of a copper engraving was sent to Cuvier, who, based on the artwork, determined it was a reptile and gave it a name. Art became a species.
The Stegosaurus was identified by bone fragments that look like random stones when displayed next to the reconstructions in the museum. The reconstructions resemble creatures from children’s imaginations.
The Velociraptor skulls, when displayed next to alligator skulls, raise uncomfortable questions about the distinction between the two species.
Discovery patterns and controlled locations
Ordinary people don’t find dinosaur skeletons. A search for documentation of amateur discoveries at Kimmeridge Bay, a famous fossil-hunting location in England, found no evidence that non-professionals had found dinosaur bones. A review of 240 images posted by visitors on TripAdvisor, 38 reviews on AllTrails, and YouTube videos revealed zero dinosaur bones. Visitors found shell impressions, leaf impressions—the kind of fossils anyone can find on beaches and lakes worldwide.
Agent131711 compares this to his own fossil hunt in the Great Lakes region of Michigan. He constantly finds fossils: brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans. These are real fossils of real ancient creatures. He’s never found anything that looks like a dinosaur bone. Apparently, no one else not affiliated with museums, universities, or government agencies has either.
Dinosaur discovery sites are self-monitored. Kimmeridge Bay is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Access is restricted. Digging is prohibited. Hammers are not allowed. Visitors may only collect fossils that wash up on the beach.
Yet, Steve Etches, a museum director with seven dinosaurs named after him and nearly a dozen new species discoveries, claims to have recovered nearly 3,000 fossils from the site, including one of the most complete pliosaur skulls ever found. According to news reports, he spotted the snout protruding from a cliff, flew a drone to assess it, installed a rope system, climbed down the cliff, and retrieved the skull from the United Nations-protected heritage site.
No arrest. No investigation. No mention of his museum holdings or previous discoveries in the news.
The Footprints in Texas
The famous dinosaur footprints in Texas, presented for decades in documentaries as proof of the presence of dinosaurs, were admitted by the man who created them to be forgeries. He continued to use them anyway to make money. There is video footage of this confession.
The documentaries that presented these footprints as authentic aired on The History Channel, BBC, and National Geographic. The footage was not labeled as reconstruction. Viewers were expected to believe they were seeing evidence.
NASA and the dinosaur industry
The institutional connections extend beyond museums. NASA is involved in the hunt for dinosaurs—a connection that might seem confusing until one examines the overlapping interests.
NASA uses satellite imagery to locate fossil deposits and claims to be able to identify dinosaur bones from space based on rock formations and variations in soil color. Apparently, paleontologists are also experts at analyzing aerial photographs. They examine satellite images of deserts—images that look like all other satellite images of deserts—and determine where dinosaur bones are buried.
The logic is remarkable: dinosaur bones would have become fossils because they were buried so deeply, under so much ground pressure for so long, that they turned to stone. Yet, these deeply buried stone bones can be detected from space by variations in the soil color.
Ray Stanford, presented in the media as a “self-taught fossil hunter,” made remarkable discoveries at NASA facilities. In 2012, he found more than 70 dinosaur prints in a single slab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center—the building where his wife worked. The story goes that he was dropping her off, somehow ended up on the grass, and stumbled upon a paleontological treasure. A massive footprint. More than seventy additional prints. All in one small area. At a government space facility.
He found the very first baby ankylosaur in Maryland, where NASA is located. He discovered a treasure trove of dinosaur prints in Washington, D.C. Many treasures at government sites have been discovered by the same self-taught enthusiast.
His employer is listed as Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI), a defense contractor. SSAI’s clients include NASA, the World Bank, the NIH, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Agriculture, NOAA, the Naval Research Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stanford’s NASA profile lists his mailing address at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the exact location of his dinosaur discoveries.
The implications of the FOIA are worth noting: you can subject a government agency to the FOIA, but not a private contractor. The fact that Stanford is employed by SSAI and not directly by NASA creates an information barrier.
Stanford also founded Project Starlight International in the 1960s, a UFO research organization funded by anonymous, wealthy donors. The organization’s post office box was less than seven miles from the NASA facilities where Stanford made his dinosaur discoveries. The proximity of government space facilities is consistent across Stanford’s various activities.
The plate containing more than 70 prints cannot be viewed publicly. Instead, a replica is available. The pattern repeats: discoveries at controlled locations, by people with connections, where the originals are unavailable, and replicas are offered as replacements.
The Smithsonian Network
The Smithsonian Institution serves as the central hub for American dinosaur conservation. It receives taxpayer funding and donations from entities such as the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Fox News, Bank of America, and the Smithsonian itself (which donates to itself).
An examination of the donation records of just one Smithsonian entity—the National Museum of African American History and Culture—reveals contributions of $10 million to $20 million from major corporations and foundations, a pattern repeated throughout the institution’s many branches.
The same network funds, discovers, authenticates, exhibits, and reports on dinosaur history. At no point is there any independent verification involved.
The auction market
The financial incentives became clear when dinosaur fossils were sold at auction.
Stan the T. Rex sold for $31.8 million in October 2020. The fossil was discovered by paleontologist Stan Sacrison in the Hell Creek Formation, the same location where almost everything is found. Sacrison spotted bone fragments in a cliff while “looking for plants” in an area with minimal vegetation.
It was later revealed that Stan’s skeleton contained replicas copied from other T. Rex skeletons, including one named Sue. The forged parts were copies of forged parts from other forged reconstructions. The Black Hills Institute, where Sacrison was employed, subsequently sold and leased additional copies of Stan: skeleton, skull, teeth, and claws.
Stan is now in a natural history museum in the United Arab Emirates.
Shen the T-Rex, with a price tag of $25 million, was pulled from the auction after it was discovered that the forged parts were copied from Stan’s forged parts, which in turn were copied from other reconstructions. Copies of copies of guesses.
Trinity the T. Rex, sold for $6.1 million, was made up of 293 bones from three different locations. Of those bones, 147 were “real bone material” (chicken bones, horse bones). The toes were reproduced from plastic because “dinosaur toes are rarely found.”
Big John the Triceratops sold for $7.7 million. The bones were discovered by paleontologist Walter W. Stein after just “10-15 minutes of searching” and were scattered across 1,000 square feet. Stein found “over 30 significant dinosaur skeletons,” including new species.
The auction market deals in forgeries. The forgeries are copies of other forgeries. The copies fetch millions of dollars. The copies then become the authentic pieces, exhibited as history.
Part Two: The First Pillar — Fossil Fuels
The linguistic construct “fossil fuel” serves a specific ideological function. It ties petroleum to a biological origin, specifically to the breakdown of old organic material under geological pressure over millions of years. Dinosaurs are the imaginative anchor of this narrative. They died, they decomposed, and they became the oil we extract.
A Sinclair Oil ad from the 1960s made the connection explicit by showing dinosaurs being transformed into the oil that powers cars. The company’s logo to this day is a green brontosaurus. Children absorb this image before they can even judge its accuracy.
This framing portrays petroleum as finite—a resource that can be exhausted because it took millions of years of organic accumulation to form. We burn old dead. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Scarcity justifies the price. Scarcity justifies geopolitical agreements. Scarcity justifies wars.
The narrative also positions extraction as harvesting the past rather than tapping into an ongoing planetary process. Oil companies become miners of prehistory rather than drillers of a constantly replenished resource.
The abiogenic alternative
The alternative theory—abiogenic origin of petroleum—proposes that hydrocarbons are continuously produced deep within the Earth by geological processes completely independent of biological breakdown. No dinosaurs needed. No ancient biomass needed. No scarcity needed.
This theory is strongly supported by Russian and Ukrainian geologists, who developed it extensively after World War II as part of Stalin’s drive for Soviet oil self-sufficiency. Their research led to the Russian-Ukrainian theory of the deep, abiotic origin of petroleum—the conclusion that oil is a natural product of planetary processes, not degraded biological substances.
Thomas Gold, an astronomer at Cornell, brought the theory to Western attention in his 1998 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels . Freeman Dyson wrote the foreword. Gold’s argument: hydrocarbons are fundamental building blocks of the Earth as it formed and continues to evolve. Dig deep enough into the mantle, and you’ll find abundant oil everywhere. The reason we find oil in sedimentary rocks isn’t that sedimentary rocks contain decomposed organisms, but that sedimentary rocks are porous enough to trap upward-migrating oil.
Gold also explained that the biological material found in petroleum deposits—the supposed evidence of organic origin—is microbes carried by the oil as it moves through the rock layers. Life doesn’t create oil; oil sustains life in the deep biosphere.
The proof
The evidence for abiogenic oil includes several anomalous observations:
Eugene Island in the Gulf of Mexico: Depleted oil wells were refilled from below, suggesting a deep well is continuously replenishing surface deposits. The oil reservoir was “rapidly refilled from a continuous source kilometers below the Earth’s surface.”
The Middle East has doubled its proven reserves in recent decades, despite continued extraction and relatively few new discoveries. Where does the new oil come from?
Oil and gas occur in locations where there are no obvious fossil deposits. At many oil sites, there is no evidence of dinosaurs or massive biological accumulation.
Hydrocarbons are found throughout the solar system on bodies where biological processes have never occurred. Saturn’s moon Titan has hydrocarbon lakes. If hydrocarbons require biology, these observations must be explained.
The Fischer-Tropsch process demonstrates that hydrogen and carbon can be combined to form synthetic oil. Nazi Germany used this process to meet up to 75% of its wartime fuel needs by producing synthetic oil from coal. If oil can be manufactured, its origins are not necessarily biological.
Testimony of L. Fletcher Prouty
L. Fletcher Prouty was Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. He worked at the Pentagon for nine years: two years with the Secretary of Defense, two years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and five years at Air Force Headquarters. He was the primary focal point officer between the CIA and the Air Force for covert operations.
Prouty stated bluntly that labeling oil as a “fossil fuel” was a conscious decision by the industry and the government, who knew better. In his words: “These are not coincidences. There’s a dollar sign behind almost everything.”
They knew oil didn’t come from dinosaurs. They knew it was a naturally occurring and renewable resource. But labeling it as organic would make it finite, create scarcity, and drive up the price. They also influenced what geologists came to accept as truth.
According to Prouty’s testimony, geologists were the first academic group to be hijacked by industry. The medical world followed suit with the Flexner report. The pattern repeats itself across disciplines: funding determines conclusions, conclusions become curricula, curricula become consensus, consensus becomes unchallengeable.
The Geneva Convention of 1892
In the Geneva Convention of 1892, international representatives agreed to establish a nomenclature and classification for petroleum products. The participating countries jointly accepted the term “fossil fuel.” The story became known worldwide through an institutional agreement, not through a scientific discovery.
As agent131711 puts it, all the countries were “like, ‘Yeah, okay, fossil fuels sounds good, let’s go with that.
Jerome Corsi’s review
In The Great Oil Conspiracy, Jerome Corsi describes the intellectual desperation of the camp that believes in an organic origin: “First it was dinosaurs, then plankton, and now it’s bacteria and microbes. They’re simply desperate for a biological link, because if oil is a natural process of the Earth and can be produced naturally, it can also be produced synthetically, and we won’t run out of it.”
The link between dinosaurs and gasoline was established through advertising and education. Sinclair’s green brontosaurus taught children the connection. Schoolbooks reinforced this. Museums displayed the dead creatures whose bodies became our means of transportation. The story is vivid, memorable, and fundamental to how we understand energy economics.
If that story is false—if oil is abiogenic—then the dinosaurs-to-oil narrative becomes not only inaccurate but a deliberate mechanism to control the resource economy through artificial scarcity.
Part Three: The Second Pillar – Evolution
Agent131711 opens his series with a direct statement: the discovery of dinosaurs came at precisely the moment when the theory of evolution needed physical evidence.
At the end of the 18th century, religious groups—which constituted the vast majority—did not accept purely theoretical arguments for evolution. The Bible described creation. Science offered speculation. Something material was needed to tip the balance.
Then bones appeared. A member of the Royal Society examined them and declared them evidence of extinct species. The biblical creation story suddenly faced a material contradiction.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Cope and Marsh made their discoveries around the same time. The theory needed proof; proof appeared. The theory needed a long time; the bones were dated to a long time. The theory required extinction as a mechanism; the bones came from creatures that no longer existed. The theory required common descent; paleontologists arranged their bone fragments into ancestral sequences.
Darwin’s own doubts
Darwin himself recognized the fossil record as “the most obvious and gravest objection” to his theory. His mechanism—gradual modification by natural selection based on random variation—predicted countless transitional forms. Each major group would have to be connected to every other by countless intermediate forms, each slightly different from its neighbors.
These intermediate forms were not found in the rocks. Darwin hoped that future discoveries would fill in the gaps.
After 150 years of intensive research, this problem has only gotten worse, not better. The fossil record shows that species appear suddenly, fully formed, remain unchanged throughout their existence (stasis), and then abruptly disappear. There are no gradual transitions between major groups.
As paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record remains the trade secret of paleontology.”
The Cambrian Problem
The Cambrian explosion presents Darwin’s doubts in their most acute form. Nearly all animal phyla appear simultaneously in the geological record—fully formed, without precursors, in the blink of an eye. This is not a gradual change. It is the sudden appearance of fundamentally different body plans.
Stephen Meyer explores this problem in detail in his book Darwin’s Doubt . The explosion represents not only new forms but also an “information revolution”: the sudden appearance of the genetic instructions needed to build fundamentally different body architectures. Body plans require coordinated genetic information that specifies their structure, development, and integration. There is no known mechanism that explains how unguided processes generate specified, complex information of this magnitude.
The probability calculations are impossible. Hubert Yockey calculated that the chance of a single protein of 100 amino acids spontaneously arising is 1 in 10^65—comparable to winning the lottery with the same numbers every week for a thousand years. Robert Sauer’s team at MIT experimentally confirmed that proteins are not a random collection of chemicals, but extraordinarily rare and precise combinations where most positions are completely intolerant of substitution.
The simplest self-replicating cell requires not one but hundreds of different proteins, plus DNA, RNA, and complex metabolic systems all working together. The chance of all these components arising simultaneously by chance is essentially zero, regardless of the time available.
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, acknowledged that the origin of life “seems almost miraculous, because so many conditions had to be met to get it going.”
Circular dating
Richard Milton’s research, summarized in “Shattering the Myths of Darwinism ,” reveals the circular reasoning underlying paleontological dating. Rocks are dated by the fossils they contain. Fossils are dated by the rocks in which they are found. Neither discipline has independent methods of verification.
The Institute of Geological Sciences admits that isotopic ages “probably cannot compete with or replace fossils as the primary means of correlation.” The dates assigned to the geologic column are based on assumptions about evolutionary and sedimentation rates, not on empirical measurements.
Carbon dating has yielded unexpected results. Coal and oil deposits believed to be millions of years old consistently yield carbon dates of only thousands of years. Volcanic rocks known to be of recent origin yield potassium-argon dates of millions or billions of years due to excessive argon contamination. Multiple dating methods applied to the same samples routinely yield widely varying ages.
The KBS tuff in Kenya, crucial for dating human ancestors, yielded ages ranging from 0.52 to 220 million years from the same rock formation.
The ideological function
Why does Darwinism remain orthodox despite its problems?
Liam Scheff’s assessment, which I quoted in “Intelligence”: “Darwinism was never really a scientific theory—it was an anti-religion, born of the desperate need of Victorian intellectuals to escape the suffocating grip of ecclesiastical authority.” The project aimed to “destroy the Christian ‘Yahweh-driven’ model and replace one god with another, which they called ‘nature,’ which somehow ‘selects’ the ‘fit’ to ‘survive’ through processes that no one can actually define or measure.”
The theory served cultural and political purposes beyond explaining biological origins. It provided scientific authority for eugenics programs and forced sterilizations. It positioned people as accidents of chemistry rather than products of a purpose. It transferred ultimate explanatory authority from religious institutions to scientific institutions.
When science becomes dogma, when questioning is forbidden, when careers are destroyed for publishing contradictory evidence, then we are no longer doing science. We are maintaining a state religion in a lab coat.
Dinosaurs as anchors
Dinosaurs anchor the evolutionary transmission of authority. They populate museums where children learn about human origins. They star in documentaries explaining deep time. They appear in textbooks demonstrating extinction and adaptation. They fill children’s imaginations with creatures that lived millions of years ago and died in catastrophes beyond human memory.
The drama of dinosaurs—their size, their strangeness, their violent end—brings evolution to life. Abstract concepts like “natural selection” and “millions of years” are made concrete by T-Rex skeletons and extinction asteroids. Children accept the timeline before they can assess the evidence.
Without dinosaurs—or the specific narrative constructed around them—public acceptance of evolution would require different support. The actual content of the fossil record—sudden appearance, stagnation, disappearance—doesn’t clearly suggest gradual change. The dinosaur story provides the imaginative framework that makes Darwinism feel intuitively true, despite the evidential problems.
Part Four: Synthesis
Two narratives. Two pillars. One imaginative anchor.
The fossil fuel narrative states: oil is finite because it comes from dead organisms compressed over millions of years. This scarcity justifies the economics of extraction, pricing structures, and geopolitical agreements. The narrative positions certain regions as blessed with ancient death and others as dependent on their wealth. Entire economies are structured around this distribution of resources. Wars have been fought. Alliances have been formed. Carbon taxes have been proposed. The climate change narrative builds on the foundation of fossil fuels: we are burning irreplaceable old biomass and must switch to alternatives.
If petroleum is abiogenic – continuously replenished by deep planetary processes – the entire economic and political architecture built on scarcity assumptions must be rethought.
The evolutionary narrative holds that life is accidental because it arose through purposeless mechanisms operating over a long period of time. This strips humanity of its special status and transfers explanatory authority from religious institutions to scientific institutions. It positions the Bible as mythology and laboratories as temples. Funding structures, academic careers, and cultural prestige flow from this transfer. Questions about the purpose, meaning, and origins of humanity are delegated to those accredited by secular institutions.
If the mechanism of evolution cannot explain what information is needed to create life, the entire ideological architecture based on materialist assumptions must be rethought.
Dinosaurs support both pillars at the same time.
They form the imaginative anchor for “fossil” in fossil fuels. They died, their bodies were compressed, and we burn the result. Sinclair’s green brontosaurus teaches children this connection. The image is vivid, memorable, and fundamental.
They provide dramatic evidence for the deep time of evolution. They ruled the earth for 160 million years and then disappeared catastrophically, demonstrating that existence is precarious and that nature discards even the powerful. The story of extinction demonstrates that evolution works through death: species die out, new species emerge, the unfit disappear. The image is vivid, memorable, and fundamental.
The institutional convergence
The institutional network described here—the Smithsonian, the Rockefeller foundations, NASA, defense contractors, the media—benefits from both narratives. These same funding networks support dinosaur research, petroleum geology education, and evolutionary biology departments. The same museum infrastructure displays dinosaur bones, explains the formation of fossil fuels, and teaches about human origins.
Finite resources justify extraction monopolies. Rockefeller’s fortune was built on oil. The foundation bearing his name funds the museums that display the dinosaurs that support the fossil fuel narrative. The Standard Oil empire wanted the public to believe that petroleum was scarce—a limited resource requiring controlled extraction by responsible parties. If oil bubbles up endlessly from planetary processes, the entire monopoly construct loses its justification.
Materialist frameworks justify secular authority structures. Scientific institutions derive their legitimacy from their explanatory power. The theory that science explains everything—including the origin of life and the ultimate questions of existence—positions these institutions as the proper authorities for all fundamental questions. Religious institutions once held this authority. This transmission occurred through scientific triumphs: demonstrating that material processes, not divine intentions, explain the world. Evolution is the cornerstone of this transmission in the biological realm.
Both narratives together create a world in which the past is very long, there is no purpose, resources are scarce, and the institutions that interpret these truths deserve respect and funding. Citizens in this world rightly defer to experts when it comes to questions about origins. They rightly accept that resource scarcity is natural. They rightly fund the institutions that maintain the explanatory frameworks.
The resistance to questioning dinosaurs isn’t primarily scientific. It’s structural. These questions threaten not only museum exhibitions but also the architectural pillars of modern consciousness: the legitimacy structures that determine who speaks with authority on fundamental questions.
The psychology of acceptance
Agent131711 points out the psychological dimension: “I know people really want to believe in dinosaurs, and I did too. When I was little, I had all the Dinobot Transformers!”
Dinosaurs are introduced in early childhood through toys, cartoons, museum visits, and picture books. They become part of the imaginative life before children can evaluate evidence. By adulthood, dinosaurs naturally feel real—as real as elephants or tigers—despite the fact that no living person has ever seen one.
Because of the emotional investment in dinosaurs, questioning them feels less like intellectual inquiry and more like a threat to something cherished. This emotional defense mechanism protects the story more effectively than any scientific argument.
Television documentaries enhance the narrative through visual suggestion. They show artists’ reconstructions as if they were observations. They show fictional footprints as if they were discoveries. They display museum pieces as if they were excavated specimens. The gap between what is shown and what exists is obscured by confident narration and dramatic music.
Disney is listed as a partner of a military PSYOP unit in authentic U.S. Army documents. Disney operates dinosaur attractions in theme parks. The same psychological operations infrastructure that shapes public opinion on other matters also shapes the dinosaur story.
The mechanics of stability
Why does this story persist? The anomalies documented here are not hidden. The gap between excavated fragments and museum pieces is recognized in paleontological literature. If you look closely, the plaques indicate that the exhibits are replicas. The concentration of discoveries among interested parties is a historical fact. Yet the story persists, unchallenged in mainstream discourse, and taught to children as an established fact.
In “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood,” I explored how complete reversals find their own equilibrium. A partial lie—a pole tilted twenty degrees from vertical—requires constant energy to maintain. Support, support, constant adjustment against the pull of reality. But a complete reversal—the pole rotated 180 degrees—balances itself. It doesn’t challenge reality, but replaces it. Its internal coherence becomes its own stability.
The dinosaur story functions as a complete inversion. It doesn’t claim that some prehistoric creatures existed and others didn’t. It doesn’t concern itself with timelines or dating methods. It presents a vast alternative history: 160 million years of reptilian dominance, catastrophic extinction, fossilization into the oil we burn, evolution through deep time to the present. Each element supports every other. The internal logic is consistent, even if it’s detached from verifiable reality.
Once trillions of dollars of infrastructure are built around an inverted pole—careers, institutions, industries, identities—the structure can endure for generations.
The components interlock:
A fundamental lie: Cuvier’s assertion that random bones belonged to extinct species. The discoveries of Cope and Marsh that populated the prehistoric world. Brown’s T. Rex that gave the story its icon. These fundamental moments were not inevitable interpretations of evidence. They were choices—choices made by individuals with institutional positions and financial interests. The fundamental lie need not be elaborate. It need only anchor a heuristic and present a coherent alternative.
Epistemic capture : the Smithsonian, the natural history museums, the paleontology departments, the journals that publish findings, the funding agencies that support research. When these institutions are captured, the reversal gains legitimacy. It becomes “science” instead of a story being told. Modern societies have outsourced judgment to institutions. Individuals cannot examine dinosaur bones themselves—they are not allowed to. They rely on the system that accredits experts and validates findings. If you capture this system, you capture the epistemology of the entire society.
The Limitation of Herd Mentality : Collective cognition cannot think slowly. It contains only simple heuristics—two-variable formulas that compress reality into useful shortcuts. “Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.” “Oil comes from fossils.” “Evolution is settled science.” These formulas cannot be controlled by the collective mind. They can only be accepted or rejected as a whole. Whoever controls the anchor points controls collective understanding.
Convergent opportunism : The original architects—Cuvier, Cope, Marsh—are long dead. The narrative no longer needs their maintenance. Oil companies profit from the fossil fuel framework. Museums profit from ticket sales and donations. Academics profit from grants and career advancement. Textbook publishers profit from curriculum requirements. Disney profits from theme park attractions. Documentary producers profit from dramatic content. None of these actors need coordination. Each independently discovers that the structure serves them. Their interests converge like iron filings around a magnet. The structure maintains itself through dispersed self-interest.
The streetlight effect : Research funding concentrates in the illuminated zone defined by capitulated institutions. Questions that would destabilize the narrative remain in the dark—not forbidden, but simply unrewarded. The paleontologist who questions dating methods receives no funding. The geologist who studies abiogenic oil is not published in major journals. The biologist who questions Darwinian mechanisms is not given tenure. Scientists go where the light is. Ignorance is architecturally created.
The complicity of comfort : The story succeeds not only because institutions enforce it, but also because the public prefers it. Dinosaurs are beloved. Children love them. Adults remember that childlike wonder. The story connects us to deep time, makes us part of an epic history, and gives meaning through scientific mythology. The comfortable lie offers connection—shared knowledge, family museum visits, documentaries watched together. The uncomfortable truth offers exile—separation from the herd, the loss of innocent wonder at T-Rex skeletons, the solitary position of the questioner. Given the choice, most people choose comfort.
The Corruption of Feedback : Markets are supposed to correct errors—bad products fail because consumers learn they are bad. But when capital gains control of the means to acquire knowledge, the feedback loop is broken. Museums that exhibit fabrications don’t lose visitors, but gain them. Textbooks that teach questionable history aren’t rejected, but accepted. Documentaries that present artists’ reconstructions as discoveries aren’t criticized, but win prizes. The invisible hand optimizes for the wrong thing. It becomes an engine of reversal.
The Model Clearing House : In “The Architecture of Control,” I explored, based on research by esc , how the 19th-century London clearing house became a model for control: local banks maintained their apparent independence while relying on clearing banks, which in turn relied on the Bank of England. Knowledge flows through the system without anyone touching the raw material. Total control through voluntary participation.
The same architecture applies to temporary inaccessibility. The distant future cannot be directly experienced. Climate models process raw data that laypeople cannot examine and produce conclusions that laypeople must accept. The models function as clearinghouses—intermediaries that stand between reality and public understanding, translating inputs into narratives. The individual can no more control the model than the 19th-century depositor could control the clearinghouse.
The distant past works the same way. No one can visit the Jurassic period. The bones—if they exist—are inaccessible. What reaches the public comes through institutional modelers: paleontologists who reconstruct creatures from fragments, artists who add flesh to fictional skeletons, documentary filmmakers who animate the renderings into moving images, museum designers who arrange the exhibitions. Each layer is a clearinghouse, processing input from the previous layer and producing conclusions for the next.
The symmetry is precise. Climate science says: trust our models of the future you can’t visit. Paleontology says: trust our models of the past you can’t visit. Both directions of time are behind a wall. The only access is through accredited intermediaries who translate raw data into stories. The public participates voluntarily—we want to understand the future climate, we want to know more about dinosaurs—and by that voluntary participation, we surrender our epistemic independence to the clearinghouse.
Just as the financial clearinghouse created the appearance of decentralized banking while concentrating control at the top, the modeling clearinghouse creates the appearance of objective science while concentrating narrative authority in hijacked institutions. The depositor thought they were dealing with their local bank. The museum visitor thought they were encountering prehistoric reality. Both encounter the output of a system designed to convert their trust into someone else’s control.
These components don’t just coexist. They are intertwined. Epistemic conquest enables heuristic installation—the anchor points are certified as “established knowledge.” The constraint of herd mentality makes conquest effective—the collective cannot control the institutions it trusts. The complicity of comfort ensures that the collective doesn’t want to control them. Convergent opportunism maintains the streetlight. The streetlight produces the ignorance that shields the foundational lie from scrutiny. The corruption of feedback ensures that market forces reinforce the reversal rather than correct it.
The machine is self-sufficient, not because it is centrally controlled, but because each part creates the conditions for the functioning of the other parts.
The convergence
Agent131711 immediately identifies the convergence: “The information is being pushed because it is a pillar of the theory of evolution, which refutes the Bible (they hate God because they believe in scientism), and yes, it creates fossil fuel hysteria, which drives up the price of a natural resource.”
The two pillars reinforce each other. Deep time makes dinosaur oil plausible. Dinosaur oil makes deep time relevant to everyday life. Evolution makes extinction meaningful. Extinction makes evolution dramatic. The stories connect.
Children learn the two stories together: life evolved over millions of years, dinosaurs came and went, their bodies became the oil we burn. The timeline of Earth’s history and the energy economy merge into a single, cohesive worldview. Questioning one element raises questions about the other.
What would be left?
Consider what happens to each pillar as dinosaurs—particularly the narrative as constructed—fall apart.
The fossil fuel narrative would need a new anchor. Crude oil could still be positioned as finite, but the imaginative link with prehistoric creatures would be severed. Children wouldn’t be able to imagine decomposing dinosaurs when they see gas pumps. The Sinclair Brontosaurus would become nonsensical instead of explanatory.
The story of evolution would lose its most dramatic evidence. The transitional fossil problem would become more acute without dinosaur family trees to refer to (however problematic those trees may be upon closer examination). The framework of deep time would lose its most memorable inhabitants. Museums would need other eye-catchers.
Neither pillar would necessarily collapse. But both would be weakened. And the questions this research raises would extend to other elements of both narratives.
Closure
Agent131711’s work makes no claims about what dinosaurs were or weren’t. It documents anomalies: the concentration of discoveries among interested parties, the inaccessibility of original specimens, the disparity between excavated fragments and museum reconstructions, the institutional interconnections, the financial incentives, the controlled access to sites, and the fabricated evidence presented as authentic.
The five-part series represents substantial research: examining specimen codes, tracing institutional connections, documenting the gap between what is shown and what is claimed, identifying funding streams and professional networks. This is the kind of work professional journalists used to do, before the profession was hijacked by the very institutional interests that were supposed to control it.
The question the research raises is not “Were dinosaurs around?” but “Why does this particular story exist in this particular form, and who benefits from its perpetuation?”
The connection to fossil fuels and the connection to evolution suggest answers. Both narratives serve interests beyond historical accuracy. Both narratives demand public acceptance of claims that cannot be independently verified by ordinary people. Both narratives channel enormous economic and ideological resources through institutions that control the narrative. Both narratives position their defenders as authorities on fundamental questions: the future of energy and the origins of humanity.
This doesn’t make the story untrue. It does, however, make it worth examining with the same skepticism we would apply to any stakeholder claim about matters that are impossible to independently verify.
The resistance to research—the societal costs of raising questions, the professional consequences of skepticism, the reflexive dismissal of research as “conspiracy theory”—in itself suggests something worth protecting. Science invites falsification. Ideology resists it. The scientific method welcomes attempts to refute theories; the stronger a theory survives an attack, the more confidence we can place in it. What pattern does the dinosaur story follow? Are questioners welcomed and their objections addressed? Or are they marginalized and their questions dismissed?
When questions are prohibited, it’s worth finding out which answers are protected.
What if petroleum is abiogenic? What if the mechanism of evolution cannot generate specific, complex information? What if the dinosaur story serves purposes that those who perpetuate it would rather not discuss?
These questions don’t need an answer to be worth asking. They simply require the recognition that official narratives serve interests, that institutions that protect stories must be scrutinized, and that perpetuating stories is never neutral. Every story has storytellers. Every storyteller has interests. Among the storytellers of the dinosaur story are some of the most powerful institutions on Earth.
Agent131711 has done extensive work documenting the anomalies. This essay has attempted to identify the larger structures that reveal these anomalies: the twin pillars upon which dinosaurs rest in our collective imagination and our institutional arrangements. What readers do with this information—whether they investigate further, dismiss it, or simply keep the questions open while remaining appropriately uncertain—remains their own responsibility.
Dinosaurs in museums will continue to attract people. Gas pumps will continue to churn out fossil fuels. Schoolbooks will continue to teach evolution. The only question is whether we understand the purpose of these stories, who benefits from perpetuating them, and what it might mean if the foundation is less solid than we’ve been led to believe.
Acknowledgments: This essay builds on the five-part research published in April 2024 by agent131711, integrating it with previous work on the origins of fossil fuels (“Fossil Fuel”), the theory of evolution (“Intelligence”), the mechanics of narrative persistence (“The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood”), and the clearinghouse model of institutional control (“The Architecture of Control,” based on the research of esc). The synthesis—connecting dinosaurs to these metanarratives and explaining the architecture of their stability—is the contribution here. The primary research on dinosaur anomalies is by agent131711.
References
Primary source on dinosaur anomalies
agent131711, “The Dinosaur HOAX” series (parts 1-5), April 2024.
Origin of fossil fuels
L. Fletcher Prouty, interview on the origin of the term “fossil fuel” and the Geneva Convention of 1892.
Thomas Gold, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels , Springer, 1998.
Jerome R. Corsi, The Great Oil Conspiracy: How the US Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People , Skyhorse Publishing, 2012.
JF Kenney et al., ‘The evolution of multicomponent systems at high pressures: VI. The thermodynamic stability of the hydrogen–carbon system: The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2002.
F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press, 2004.
Evolution and deep time
Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design , HarperOne, 2013.
Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism , Park Street Press, 1997.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution , Free Press, 1996.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History , May 1977. (Source of the recognition of the “trade secret of paleontology.”)
Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life , Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species , 1859. (Recognition of fossils as “most obvious and gravest objection”.)
The mechanics of stable falsehood
Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense , Columbus Publishing, 2014.
Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con, John Blake Publishing, 2008.
Malcolm Kendrick, interview with Ivor Cummins (episode 102) about thinking fast and thinking slow.
Paul Collits, on convergent opportunism.
Hill & Knowlton strategy documents, 1953-1954. “Doubt is our product,” internal tobacco industry memos.
Upton Sinclair: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The architecture of control
esc, research on global governance systems, clearinghouse architecture, and institutional control mechanisms. Available at escapekey.substack.com.
Unbekoming, “The Architecture of Control: How Humanity Built Its Own Prison,” based on research by esc, July 2025.
Julius Wolf, Sozialismus und capitalist Gesellschaftsordnung , 1892. (Source of the international clearinghouse model.)
Institutional history
Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada (The Flexner Report), Carnegie Foundation, 1910.
E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America , University of California Press, 1979.
Consulted paleontological sources
Edward Drinker Cope, Scientific Papers (1400 papers identifying dinosaur species).
Othniel Charles Marsh, Discoveries and Collections of the Yale Peabody Museum.
Barnum Brown, American Museum of Natural History Reports on the Discovery of the T-Rex.
Georges Cuvier, Observations of the Royal Society on Extinct Species.
Media and documentary sources
Various documentaries broadcast on The History Channel, BBC and National Geographic, as analyzed in the research by agent131711.
Sinclair Oil Corporation promotional materials featuring the Brontosaurus logo.