What Do Brontosauruses Know about Uncoordinated Conspiracies?

Brontosaurus skeleton at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (allegedly)

Let’s pretend for a moment that brontosauruses are made up, despite them being accepted by the public and scientific community, having ample evidence for their existence, and appearing in museums all over the world.

Let me show you how this could come to be:

1. Smart, but young, naive, and generally conformist people enter academia to study paleontology (the study of fossils)

2. They learn about brontosauruses:

   • They were up to 7 stories tall

   • They weighed up to 70 tons

   • They have no back teeth and swallowed all their food whole

   • They would eat rocks to help with their digestion

   • Their long necks were to "reach marshy vegetation some distance away or to reach leaves higher up in trees" (Encyclopedia Britannica)

   • No skull has ever been found

   • The bones you see in museums are mostly not real. They're casted.

3. They get a PhD about how their poop is the size of a 737

4. Then one day they have a thought “you know…there’s a lot of stuff about brontosauruses which is pretty unbelievable” and they make a list

5. They write a paper and submit it to a paleontology journal. If the paper is right, the journal must disband and all the people who work for it will lose their life’s work, so it gets turned down.

6. The skeptical paleontologist turns to the press, but all the more senior paleontologists say that the skeptical guy is crazy, so now our skeptic’s reputation is ruined

7. The skeptic can’t attract funding because they can’t get published and they’re a kook according respected paleontologists

8. No museum will air the possibility that brontosauruses are fake because it’s one of the main reasons why people go to museums

9. If the skeptical paleontologist is smart at all, they will see all this and they won’t say anything. They want to keep their PhD, their role in the group, and their prestige.

10. It takes a unique and rare person to go against the flow and call something out like this and even if they do, their views mostly won’t be heard.

Of course, I’m just joking around. Brontosauruses are real.

But if they weren’t, the brontosaurus would be an uncoordinated conspiracy.