Quick quiz — Which one of these is a dinosaur? A, B, or C?

If you answered A or B, you are stupid and don’t know Science!. A is a flying reptile, B is an aquatic reptile, and only C is a dinosaur (of the avian variety).

So why aren’t pterosaurs or plesiosaurs not considered dinosaurs (even though they have the “saur” in their name)? It’s for about the same reason mathematicians decided the number 1 isn’t a prime number (Math!); scientists just decided things fit together better that way. Plus, they make the Science!, so they get to define things however they want.

But why are birds now classified as dinosaurs? That’s a bit more complicated.

Kids are fascinated with dinosaurs. They love playing with toy dinosaurs and reading simplistic books on them. Kids are also stupid. They’ll have a Tyrannosaurus fight a Stegosaurus even though they lived ten millions of years apart. Or have Fred Flintstone ride them. Or Turok fight them. And then they ask dumb and inane questions about them like did the Triceratops go to school too. Basically, they get their dumb all over dinosaurs. And anytime we don’t treat a scientific subject with reverence, we risk angering Science! and having it punish us with something scientific like space radiation.

Obviously, it was up to scientists to get children disinterested in dinosaurs — which is hard because they are pretty cool. Still, we came up with the brilliant idea: What if we dilute the awesomeness of dinosaurs by including within that label the most boring animal in all of Science! — birds.

Everyone is completely bored by birds. You’d think an animal that can fly would have to be interesting, but somehow birds just make it completely boring and uninteresting. No one cares anything about birds. Anytime we want to learn something about birds, we send the Science! interns to do it because it always a snoozefest. Never once has any bird ever done anything even remotely interesting. The closest were penguins, but that was just because they we narrated by Morgan Freeman.

But look at it this way: If a child sees this on the front of a book about dinosaurs, do you think he’ll want to read it?

Boring.

Of course not. And thus children’s interest in dinosaurs is crushed and scientists can continue their research unmolested by their misdirected enthusiasm.

Science!