The Science Joke Book

Joke 9

I was talking to a group of primary school teachers about geology, and how to introduce it to the young, the inevitable discussion on dinosaurs....all kids are fascinated about dinosaurs.

So I asked the teachers, if so many kids were interested in dinosaurs, why wouldn't there be more geologists and palaeontologists?

The answer...most kids grow up!

But the jokes are still here for you to read. 

Wait a moment, I'll dig some up.

1. Why shouldn't you expect perfection from geologists?

They all have their faults.

2. Which dinosaur had the most extensive vocabulary of all?

A: A Thesaurus!

3. What do you call a synapsid that's great at geometry?

A: Dimetrohedron!

4. Which dinosaur was infamous for pulling practical jokes?

A: Irritator.

5. What do you call an awesome temnospondyl?

A: KOOLasuchus.

6. Why is it easy to win a hand wrestling match against a Tyrannosaurus?

A: Because it has such short hands!

7. A man is touring a natural history museum, admiring the dinosaur reconstructions. He spots a curator and asks him: "How old are these fossils?"

The curator replies: "They are one hundred million, four years and six months old."

"That's amazing!" says the visitor. "How can you know their age so precisely?"

The curator explains, "When I started working here they told me those bones were one hundred million years old, and that was four and a half years ago."

Explanations (to those for whom this was too much of a blast from the past):

3. Dimetrodon was a pelycosaur of the synapsid lineage. Contrary to popular belief, it was not a dinosaur. In fact, the synapsids gave rise to modern mammals. Dimetrodon had a large neural sail on its back formed by elongated spines extending from the vertebrae. In this joke, its name is changed so that it sounds like a solid geometric shape.

4. Yes, folks. Irritator was a genus of spinosaur. It was given the name Irritator because the paleontologists had found out that the snout had been artificially made longer by illegal fossil hunters in hopes of getting more money for it, making it harder for paleontologists to reconstruct its original features, irritating them and getting named so.

6. Tyrannosaurus rex has ridiculously short arms with two digits, not even enough to reach its mouth.

7. Mother Nature was not kind enough to timestamp each dinosaur bone when the animal died. Despite the fine detail preserved in some dinosaur fossils, finding their age still involves a lot of detective work and the answers are not always satisfyingly precise, hence the joke.