My Cousin, the Diplododicasaur

So, for New Year's the wife and I decided to get out of town and avoid the dilemma of where to be in Dallas when the inevitably underwhelming midnight hour arrived. Wooo-hoooo, I'm drunk as shit in my shiny shirt! Woooooooo! I took out a second mortgage to be at some pretentious Dallas club full of equally unimaginative tools!

Anyway, this is how lame we are, and that's okay Our New Year's plan - bed and breakfast in a small town. Destination: Granbury, Texas. Population close to 2,000. Shiny shirts? Not likely. Wildlife refuge in close proximity? Definite plus. Dinosaur Valley State Park also nearby? We are so in. We will ignore the hypocrisy inherent in the price of a bed and breakfast vs. a pretentious Dallas club.

We left on Monday and headed directly to the Fossil Rim wildlife refuge, where many animals swarmed our car hoping to be fed the delicious pellets we were given the option to purchase at the entrance. However, we didn't purchase any of the delicious pellets after getting burned at the State Fair on a $8 bag o' feed the animals weren't the slightest bit interested in.

The Zebras were interested, though. One of them looked kind of on edge so I gave him a French fry. I hope he's still alive. It was an old French fry.

The second day we made our way out to Dinosaur Valley State Park. On our way into the park, strategically placed about a mile outside the entrance, we passed a curious building, similar to a barn, with large block letters plastered across the front that read: "Creation Evidence Museum." There was a logo of sorts depicting a man's footprint super-imposed over a dinosaur's footprint. My country-crazy-Jesus-hick radar began to go all haywire. These are the parts of Texas where "evidence" is loosely defined and science goes to die. We drove past it quickly and decided to check it out after the dinosaur footprint park, if there was time.

There were many a footprint to marvel at inside the park, not to mention some amazingly cool models of a T-rex and Brontosaurus from the '68 World's Fair in NYC. Can't believe NYC let these get away.

Seeing the park didn't take very long - and it was pretty much what we expected. Some limestone with some large footprints, as advertised. We decided to stop by the "museum" on the way out of town. The dirt road leading up to what is more accurately described as a "shed" was charming. There did not appear to be anyone on the grounds. I started to get an eerie feeling about what might be inside. The wife agreed. It was just too creepy. I put the risk of being kidnapped at 3%, the risk of being hypnotized and/or poisoned at about 4%. There was also the possibility of laughing out loud at the museum's desperate attempt at 'splaining dem dino-tracks, which in turn created a 3% of a nutjob assault. It turns out I would make a horrible journalist, and we left, content with googling the place when we got home. And google it we did.

From the CEM website:

Among museums this entity makes a unique contribution, demonstrating that man and dinosaur lived contemporaneously. Educators, professors, children, and adherents to various religions are finding answers to the great questions of life: Who am I?, Where did I come from?, What is my purpose here?, and Where am I going? In its ongoing research to find answers to
Who is God?, Was the Universe designed and created by a Creator?, and What do the Bible and Science teach about the heavens, man, animals, plants, etc?, the Museum researches and houses artifacts from archaeology, geology, and paleontology (such as the London artifact, the Meister Print, the cup in coal, the fossilized foot in a boot, the fossilized human finger, and others).

Turns out the "evidence" at the museum to support a history where man and dinosaurs lived together, harmoniously, perhaps just as Hannah Barbara envisioned, is basically just a bunch of craptacular rocks that look like human fossils and have been given mystical names. Anyway, to sum up, the place was frightening and I didn't even go inside. I am not one to tell someone what to believe, or to act like I know anything more than anyone else about the mysteries of the universe, but come on? Really? Carl Baugh, the museum's director, received his Doctorate of Theology from the unaccredited Louisiana Baptist University, where he was a memeber of the flat-earth society.