Vandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives.

> Vandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives.

Professional what exactly?

(I pay closer attention to graffiti than I used to.)

Professional shyster making something like the Georgia guides tones or golden tablets to "discover" and then use as the basis of a religion, is the first thing that comes to mind.

Oh, you mean dinosaurs! There's basically never been a full one found. The closest one ever was found under dubious circumstances. The process for extracting them is to make tiny chips in rock and casts as you go along pretty much allowing you to shape as desired. The sites are of course highly guarded. Of course the most complete was the ever popular TRex.

Dinosaur paleontology is a religious racket. Sure there was lots of megafauna and their were some large flightless birds with various levels of feathering. Like anything though money corrupts and the money behind dinosaurs is huge. Every kid has toys, books, theres movies, TV shows, museums, etc.

They're not carving stone when digging out the fossils. And the average fossil digger is not Michaelangelo or capable of sculpting a negative dinosaur skeleton out of solid rock. Just imagine hundreds of people on a dig trying to get the symmetry and proportions right. The answer is that the material inside the impression left by the decaying bones is softer than the rock it's encased in.

Sure, dinos for kids are big money, but there's just a massive amount of proof they existed. What proof is there for the world being created in seven days besides a single book of stories invented a couple thousand years ago?

I think it's a joke, but it's the internet, so Poe's Law applies.

If you have the opportunity, Dinosaur national monument in Utah is well worth the visit.

They have an exposed fossil bearing rockface that you can get very close to, and you can see how the fossils differ from the surrounding stone.

This is obviously not intended as an informational post or as one that would be likely to be taken as fact by most people. You'll never be able to recover the time you spent typing all that.

If I were going to do something like that, I'd probably come up with an invented language so I could translate it as I needed new commandments.

Ah, you mean the Voynich Manuscript!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

No, he means the Golden Plates found by Joseph Smith in 1823 in New York, which created the Mormon religion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

Hmm, is it Poe's law or some sort of generalization thereof if I wasn't actually trying to mock any widely-followed religion?

Just give whoever a few hundred years to go from cult to religion, though, and they'll burn you at the stake for making fun of their silly tablets.

If I were Musk or Bezos, the temptation to rig a Contact-style scenario would be well beyond merely overwhelming.

Guessing the orbital mechanics needed to station-keep a signal source at a given apparent sidereal position, far enough from Earth to simulate parallax at infinity, are unworkable.

There's surely a low cost version.

Technically, the Vandals were East Germanic, but these are West Germanic-inspired runes.

The key to a great fake is to fake it NOW and leave it to be found two hundred years later.

When the profit motive is removed it becomes harder to track down.