Flintstone facts? 41 percent of Americans say people and dinosaurs co-existed
Riding a Brontosaurus bareback might not be a fantasy. It could be history, depending on who you ask.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
" Jurassic World" may have been a documentary as far as millions of Americans are concerned.
A recent survey by YouGov -- a for-profit research firm that conducts all sorts of online polls -- found that 41 percent of those queried think dinosaurs and humans "probably" or "definitely" once co-existed on Earth at the same time.
The online poll (PDF) of 1,000 adults was conducted between June 15 and 17 and has a 4.4 percent plus-or-minus margin of error. Here's the full breakdown of the results on the question of whether or not dudes and dinosaurs ever had a historical chance to bro down, Chris Pratt-style.
Note that with 16 percent "not sure," it's entirely possible that I'm actually living in a country where most people disregard the scientific consensus that dinosaurs lived tens of millions of years ago and tens of millions of years before the first humans emerged.
Perhaps these results shouldn't be so shocking when we consider that there are entire museums, like Kentucky's Creation Museum, devoted to showing how dinosaurs fit into the biblical timeline of history, complete with this animatronic display of a dinosaur hanging out with an Old Testament kid tending a fire.
YouGov also notes a clear religious split in the survey results. Most Americans who identified themselves as "born again" (56 percent) for the survey said that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, as opposed to just 22 percent who did not identify that way.
(This is all a little confusing, though, when you consider that there are also groups out there, such as Christians Against Dinosaurs, that consider the very existence of dinos to be a Jurassic-size hoax.)
Interestingly, in the same survey, 54 percent of respondents correctly answered that it is not currently possible to create dinosaur clones from DNA inside fossils. It turns out that we might not be too far off for other extinct animals like the woolly mammoth, however.
Perhaps the next flick in the animated " Ice Age" franchise will be a live-action sequel.