Say what?!?

I've mentioned before that Mark's quite opinionated, and that once he makes up his mind, there's no changing it. So I'm not sure what to do about this one...

Mark has decided that dinosaurs never existed. "Dinosaurs aren't real," he told me matter-of-factly. "They never were."

I shook my head and wondered where this came from. I spent every childhood vacation looking at dinosaur bones and other fossils. What the heck was this kid talking about??

"What do you mean they're not real?" I asked. "Who told you that?"

"No one. I just know they're fake." He smiled at me like I was a dumb little child he was enlightening.

I was stumped. "What about all the books about dinosaurs? And the museums?"

"Fake."

"What about Sue? You stood in front of the biggest, most complete T. Rex skeleton in existence -- how can you say she's fake?" I asked.

"Because she is," was his reply. "Those bones are so fake -- they're not even white."

I explained that if his bones were lying in the ground for 65 million years, they'd be brown too. He still shook his head.

I tried another tact. "Why would museums show dinosaur bones if they weren't real? Wouldn't that discredit the museums?"

He put his foot down. "They AREN'T real," he told me. "I've never seen them, so they never existed."

Aha -- a loophole! We've been studying the Presidents a lot lately, so I seized on that. "Well, then George Washington's not real either," I said.

"Yes, he was!" Mark didn't like that at all.

"But you said it didn't matter if something's in books or museums." I said. "So if you never met him, he can't be real."

I thought the logic worked, but I forgot I was dealing with a stubborn almost-9-year-old. He cast my theory aside, reiterated one last time that dinosaurs never existed, and asked me to turn up the car radio.

Well. There's nothing I like more than a challenge, especially one that reeks of Creationism casting aside Darwinism. Which turned out to be particularly relevant, as my marine biologist friend Vicki was currently vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, birthplace to Darwin's theory of evolution.

"Fine," I told Mark. "You can tell that story to your friend Vic, the scientist. And you can tell it to the ticket counter at the Natural History Museum, because you just won yourself a free field trip with me and my scientist friend to learn ALL about when dinosaurs roamed the Earth!"

I still think I'm gonna have trouble getting through to this thick skull, though -- and I'm not talking about Sue's!