A San Antonio News Site Is Called Fake News by Creationists For a Story About North Texas Fossils

In the journalism business we have one simple rule to maintain our sanity: Don’t read the comments (save for an overworked editor or two who delight in correcting uninformed readers). But we're happy to read comments belonging to other news entities. Especially when they go bonkers.

A News 4 San Antonio story posted to Facebook Tuesday prompted plenty of commenters who had a bone to pick with a story about dinosaurs.

The thread — which we think is just as fascinating as the story itself — is, quite frankly, a shining example of why Texas ranks 42nd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in education.

The story, headlined "Historic drought unveils 113 million-year-old dinosaur tracks in North Texas," describes how about 80 miles south of Dallas, very, very, very old dinosaur tracks surfaced after a drought (although some of these tracks are said to have been visible prior).

And some 5,000 people cracked their knuckles, pulled up their sleeves, got to typing and haven’t been the same since. The internet is humanity’s greatest or worst invention. Something about this specific news story’s comment thread makes it hard for us to determine which.

Comments have become the bumper stickers of the internet. Are we really changing anyone’s mind about a topic? Likely not. And do we love to lean in and see what someone’s opinion is so we can give them a mental high-five or middle finger? Sure do. Except online, we can just say it directly to them without swerving into traffic. Opinions run rampant and they make no difference to reality. But we love them and love to hate them.

We slap cartoon dinosaurs on toddler T-Shirts, bake cookies in their likeness and enjoy movies based on the extinct bastards (we even have our own dino-centric stripper). But the subject can also take a dark turn, with accusations of dinosaur fossils being government cover-ups for modern-day aliens or assumptions that you can’t be a Christian and believe the Earth is billions of years old.

Because of the amount of dino-deniers, the pro-dinos on the thread questioned whether Texas even teaches evolution in public schools (the answer is yes, although the depth at which it is taught likely varies from school to school). Along with quick-witted remarks, others offer long, philosophical thoughts on the matter, trying to bridge the divide between the religious and the secular-minded. It’s heavy stuff for a story about some long-dead animal’s footprints.

Ultimately, we don’t know what’s funnier here: the science deniers, the folks wasting time replying to the science deniers with science-y stuff or the ones posting completely unrelated or made-up material in an attempt to mock the entire situation. We’ll let you decide.