Enter Aardonyx celestae! A new dinosaur announced yesterday in South Africa is being hailed as a missing link in the sauropod chain of development, much to the chagrin of Creationists. I have to admit that I never outgrew my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, and when we purchased the life-like models for my daughter as she was growing up I secretly coveted them for myself. The rate of discovery among new genera of dinosaurs is between 10 and 20 per year, meaning that the maybe 20 different dinosaur types I knew as a kid has ballooned into well over 500 different species and 1,800 genera. Late at night I still hear the call of paleontology and I slip Jurassic Park into the DVD player and weep.

With each new dinosaur discovered Noah’s ark must evolve into a larger boat for some among the Creationist camp. After all Genesis says “two of every kind” lumbered aboard. The newbie this time is a proto-sauropod, a missing link between bi-pedal herbivores and their earth-shaking descendants who required four tree-like legs to support their immense weight. It seems that Noah must have been quite the engineer to handle all this displacement. And it is a good thing too — scientists predict that the new genera to be discovered represent only about 30 percent of the total, and the number will likely continue to climb for a century and a half yet.

Wikipedia proto-sauropods race for the top deck

So it seems that the God-of-the-gaps grows smaller while the ark grows larger. Of course, the dinosaurs might have evolved into all these different genera over time, but then, Creationists can’t allow for that, since it would admit room for evolution. And that seems about as likely as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints backing anti-discrimination laws against homosexuals!