Main Page

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 2990 xkcd comics, and only 9 (0%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!

Latest comic

Go to this comic explanation

|< < Prev Comic #2990 (September 25, 2024)

Late Cenozoic

Title text: Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a ONCE-DOMINANT BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

Many science museums contain fossils,^{[citation needed]} which are often reconstructed into full skeletons. In the comic, aliens (in Randall’s classic alien style) in the future have discovered the reconstructed fossils from our museums and misidentified them as coming from actual dinosaurs living now, and have thus concluded that these dinosaurs survived the asteroid impact that in fact made them extinct. The Cenozoic, which began after that impact around 66 million years ago, is Earth's current geologic era, while the Cretaceous was the final geologic period of the previous era, the Mesozoic.

The title text says that a high amount of resin and human DNA has led to them theorizing that dinosaurs ate humans. Much more likely, the resin and human DNA have mixed as a result of the molding and casting process used to recreate missing or damaged bones—usually so complete skeletons can be displayed.

A similar museum, misunderstood by people instead of alien beings, is depicted in 2760: Paleontology Museum.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Three squid-like aliens in a classroom; one alien stands in front of a board covered with minute text and a drawing of a T-Rex skeleton. Two aliens sit on stools watching the teacher alien. The teacher alien on the left is on a raised platform and points at the board with one tentacle.]

Left alien: Species such as triceratops and tyrannosaurus became more rare after the Cretaceous, but they survived to flourish in the late Cenozoic, 66 million years later.

Left alien: Many complete skeletons have been discovered from this era.

[Caption below the panel:]

It's going to be really funny when our museums get buried in sediment.

Trivia

The title text has a typo: "techinques" should be "techniques".

Is this out of date? .

New here?

Last 7 days (Top 10)

Rank Score Pages Changes Username 1 161 148 193 Charlie Spring 2 21 17 21 TheusafBOT 3 16 13 15 Asdf 4 11 8 11 Kynde 5 10 6 10 DKMell 6 8 4 8 Barry Margolin 7 6 3 6 Apollo11 8 6 3 5 RadiantRainwing 9 5 5 5 ConscriptGlossary 10 3 3 3 Firestar233

Lots of people contribute to make this wiki a success. Many of the recent contributors, listed above, have just joined. You can do it too! Create your account here.

You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.

• If you're new to wiki editing, see the explain xkcd:Editor FAQ for a specific guidance to this Wiki and the more general help on how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.

• Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.

• You can browse the comics from List of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.

• There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!

Rules

Don't be a jerk!

There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.

If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.

Please only submit material directly related to (and helping everyone better understand) xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.

If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.