Catharsaurus Rex

Things used to be much bigger back in prehistoric times. Dragonflies had one metre wingspans, jellyfish bulked like hundred tonne gobbets of mucus and the lizards, don't get me started on the lizards. What the hell was in the water back then? Apart from jumbo sized jellyfish of course. Nowadays if I see a giraffe or an elephant I tend to think of them as pretty large. Actually what I would probably be thinking is "What the hell are giraffes and elephants doing wandering through suburban Sydney?" but after I got over the initial shock I would probably think they were pretty large. Yet either of them would be something that a short sighted apatosaurus would scrape off its foot.

I can't help thinking that evolution made a bit of a cock up with dinosaurs. After the most recent batch came out of the egg evolution inspected them said "Hmm, still no opposable thumbs what the hell, I'll just double the size and see how that works out". Notice, incidentally that I've anthropomorphised evolution. When one does that the result is usually called "God". In which case we would have to admit that God is a bit of an idiot. Although for the religious evolution must be a tremendous relief (a godsend even) because at a stroke they have an excuse for every silly, pointless, malevolent or just plain demented lifeform on the planet. "Oh that wasn't God, just nasty old evolution up to his silly tricks again".

The Cathars went one step further and simply blamed everything on the devil. They called themselves Cathars because its harder to make fun of that name than Bogomils which was their previous choice. Cathars believed that the entire material world (including us) was the creation of the devil and inherently sinful. They hung out in the south of France in the twelfth and early thirteenth century. Amazing what people can come up with really. If the Cathars could believe the world was created by the devil while living in the south of France one can only imagine who they might have thought created it if they had lived in Somalia.

The Cathars seem like a pretty gloomy bunch but by all accounts they were reasonably cheerful. Full practitioners of the religion (the Perfecti) were expected to lead lives of extreme asceticism but it was understood that most couldn't attain such an ideal and were simply expected to do the best they could while providing support to the Perfecti who were the moral example for the community. Unfortunately Catharism was definitely heretical (the world created by the devil? Didn't you read the book of Genesis?) and as such they attracted the ire of the Catholic church. Something else which attracted the ire of the church was the Cathars unfortunate habit of pointing out exactly how corrupt, greedy and depraved the church had become. This was made worse by the fact that the Cathars tended to live completely blameless lives themselves leaving the church with little by way of a return argument. So the pope declared a crusade against them and had them wiped out.

I'm pretty sure the Cathars would have been fully down with dinosaurs. After all giant, marauding reptiles crushing and savaging their way around the countryside fitted in pretty well with their world view. All in all its a pity that dinosaurs became extinct sixty odd million years ago whereas Cathars didn't become extinct until the middle of the thirteenth century.