Will there be fish that wrap themselves in cocoons to feed the T-Rexes on the Ark?

(This continues our series of “Will there be dinosaurs/dragons/unicorns/talking donkeys on the Ark?”.)

Ken Ham fired back yesterday at the Courier Journal’s story featuring theme park experts explaining why the numbers in Ark Encounter’s feasibility study are a work of absurdist fiction. His rambling, paranoid response to the Christian-hating secular media is a beautiful piece of performance art, and I highly suggest reading it (if you’re in the right frame of mind for such a thing).

But speaking of numbers that are a work of absurdist fiction, let’s take a dip into asking how Noah fed the sauropods and T-Rexes on the Ark. I discovered the Twitter account of Ark Encounter yesterday and decided to ask them this question:

“what did the T-Rexes eat during their year on the boat? Were they still vegetarian coconut eaters at that point?”

I ask the coconut question because, as everyone should know by now, T-Rexes and all other carnivores used to be vegetarian before there was dirty sin throughout the world. God gave the T-Rex giant teeth so that they could crack open coconuts and feast on the delicious goodness inside. It wasn’t until gay people started engaging in their filth that they began to crack open human skulls to feast on delicious brain goodness (humans were plentiful at this time for T-Rexes to feed on, of course).

Anyway, the AiG flak handling the Twitter account promptly replied, sending me back this link that explains how the animals were fed and cared for on the Ark. The whole post is an amazing read, but let’s just go ahead and dip into the relevant section:

Dinosaurs could have eaten basically the same foods as the other animals. The large sauropods could have eaten compressed hay, other dried plant material, seeds and grains, and the like. Carnivorous dinosaurs—if any were meat-eaters before the Flood—could have eaten dried meat, reconstituted dried meat, or slaughtered animals. Giant tortoises would have been ideal to use as food in this regard. They were large and needed little food to be maintained themselves. There are also exotic sources of meat, such as fish that wrap themselves in dry cocoons.

OK, there’s a lot of knowledge dropped on us in this paragraph, but let’s start with their “if any were meat-eaters before the Flood” caveat. Obviously, AiG is open to the possibility that T-Rexes were still feasting on coconuts 4,000 years ago, which is just unspeakably awesome. Their logic is that since gays weren’t marrying and Planned Parenthoods weren’t around in olden days, dineysores didn’t eat meat. Just as incest didn’t cause genetic defects because of the low volume of sin back in those days, the mighty T-Rex did not resort to using their teeth for sinister means like eating other animals, for God did not intend them to. In fact, the Bible explains that the first humans eaten by a T-Rex were a couple of anal copulators who were startled by the mighty beast in a palm tree grove, and promptly smited by it. (T-Rexes, like Behemoth, were “Chief in the ways of God”)

But what if T-Rexes had already abandoned their coconut diet before the flood? As AiG points out, they could have eaten dried meat, reconstituted dried meat, slaughtered animals, giant tortoises, or “exotic” fish wrapped in cocoons. All of these of course seem quite plausible, but let’s make an attempt to crunch the numbers here.

While the eating habits of the T-Rex obviously have to be estimated (“were you there?”), some say that they ate around 7 tons of meat per week. Since the two T-Rexes were on the Ark for a year, this means that they would have to consume about 1,450,000 million pounds of meat between them, or 720 tons. To put this in perspective, this would be the equivalent of about 1,250 cows.

But they didn’t have 1,250 cows on the Ark, as AiG obviously said there weren’t (they did have two on board, but God instructed the T-Rex that these were for procreation only and off-limits for chow time). But they could have had dried beef, meaning that Noah would have had to manufacture the equivalent of around 3 million bags beef jerky that you see in your typical gas station. (By the way, if you’re thinking about the Jack’s Link Beef Jerky sasquatch, AiG would like you to know that if Big Foot is discovered, young earth creationists’ theories are validated. No, really. More on that at a future date…)

As for the giant tortoises, Noah would have had to bring 1,300 of them on board to feed the two T-Rexes. Of course, I have no idea how much the weight of the shell factors in, so they very well could have needed twice this amount.

And what of these “exotic” fish that “wrapped themselves in dry cocoons”? I’m assuming that AiG is referring to parrot fish, which wrap themselves into a mucus cocoon. I don’t know why this fish is a suggested menu item, but perhaps they are figuring that Noah liked to spice things up for the T-Rexes to keep them happy. All that beef jerky and sea turtle was bound to get monotonous for them over a year’s time. Anyways, Noah would have needed 32,000 parrot fish on board to feed them. I’ll assume that gathering this amount of fish out of the coral reefs of the Red Sea was no sweat.

OK, so I know what you’re going to say now: “your numbers are totally off! These weren’t fully grown T-Rexes, they were juveniles!”. Yes indeed, they were juveniles, so I suppose you should cut those figures in half. And I also realize that these numbers are estimates, and may be horrible estimates, at that. And it seems like it would be a shame publish faulty information.

But once I remember what these are estimates for a grifter’s giant boat that will receive $40 million in tax breaks to build, and also tell children that a 600 year old man herded T-Rexes onto this boat 4,000 years ago along with millions of bags worth of beef jerky or tens of thousands of fish wrapped in mucus, I kind of don’t give a shit anymore.

Anyways, Steve Beshear wasn’t elected to debate religion or coconut eating T-Rexes. He was elected to create jobs.