Palin-tology: Yabba-dabba-doo!

Dinosaurs walked the earth 4,000 years ago - according to Sarah Palin, anyway.

As bizarre as it sounds, A few Alaska residents recently discovered that Palin's anomalous ancestors fought off snarling velociraptors and protected their cave from a cantankerous T-Rex on numerous occasions.

According to Wasilla resident Philip Munger, Palin's exact words were, "Dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time." And when he showed her a look of disbelief, she went on to say, "I have seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks."

I'm sure she has. In fact, this almost convinces me that she is capable of co-leading this country. If her ancestors were strong enough to defend a brontosaurus meat cache from a pack of vicious deinonychus, then she must have the strength of Adam and the vigor of Eve flowing through her veins as well - flowing, perhaps, like an Ichthyosaurus flip-flopping through the shallow waters off the coast of mainland Pangaea.

Just take a minute and imagine it all: Early Palins ran side by side with flocks of caudipteryx, swam in deep blue oceans with pods of pleiseosaurs, and dined in jungles so dense that they would make the wilds of Vietnam look like denuded pastures. In other words, times were pretty tough back then. One of her ancestors, whom we'll call Fred, even had to power his car with his own feet, and that's after working a brontosaur in the quarry for 10 laborious hours a day.

Such ancestral tenacity is usually only found in fairy tales and cartoons. How fortunate we are to have a candidate whose history defies every fossil known to man. What's more, Sarah Palin also has the uncanny ability to speed up radioactive decay by about 64 million years. Barack Obama has never demonstrated matching radioactive superpowers, and I doubt he ever will.

So, what can I say? The choice is clear. When you walk into that election booth on Nov. 4, you can either vote for the disciple of dinosaur slayers, the mysterious lady who lives in an insular bubble outside of time and space, or you can vote for the man who only claims to be a normal, competent human being, with no special powers whatsoever.

"Yabba-dabba-doo?"



-- Damian Sowers can be reached at damian.sowers@gmail.com. This is his last column. He is starting his Ph.D. work in Boulder, Colo., and no longer has the time to write.