Real Talk: Why the Good Dinosaur upsets me

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way: yes, I'm fully aware this is a kid's movie, no I wasn't expecting scientific accuracy, and yes that does upset me.

And no, to be completely fair, I haven't seen it yet.

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[ EDIT days later after trying to fix this post from looking like fucking garbage:]
I still have not seen the movie, but I listened to a review on I Know Dino (link to the right hand side to their main site), and they confirmed pretty much what I figured the movie was going to be. Cute, very base, and riddled with not giving a shit about dinosaur history or mammalian origins. Apparently there's even a part were the T-rexs are talking about dealing with the "steggos", which died out millions of years before the Cretaceous. 
Why are they even talking about them?!
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It's 2:30am and this has been swimming around in my head since I saw the trailer months ago. Now I have a medium to vent this without annoying the crap out of my friends with a long-winded, redbull induced rant at deranged -o'clock.

I'm not saying I think the movie shouldn't take a fantasy twist, shouldn't be bright and colorful and sweet and nice, and totally for kids. That's all fantastic. Grand. Great. All on board.

What I am saying, is that just because this was aimed at kids and selling toys doesn't mean they had to shove the concept of evolution out the door like an annoying inconvenience, or something that is going to go over their heads. I don't believe it for an instant.

The concept of the movie is that the meteor that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs misses earth, and dinosaurs along with everything else on the planet continues to evolve like nothing ever happened. That's a fantastic premise, but there's no way in hell mammals would have evolved into what they are today if dinosaurs had continued to thrive. There's just absolutely no way.

Let's recap.

Repenomamus the dorable

Repenomamus was around during the early Cretaceous period and was the biggest early mammal of that time, about the size of a small dog. These weird looking guys probably fed on smaller animals, including baby dinos, but were not even close to being at the top of the food chain.  Most of the other mammals during that time were...mice, basically. Small, little dudes like Cimolestes stayed underground and hunted at night for bugs. That was the mammalian norm 65+ million years ago.

Our furry, warm blooded borrowing ancestors didn't come into power until long after the dinosaurs had died out, paving the way for us to seize control of niche groups and grow. It wasn't until 10-15 million years after the dinosaur extinction that mammals rose into power in an age known as the "Golden Age of Mammals"

From livescience.com:

"The second evolutionary spike in modern mammalian history didn’t occur until about 10 to 15 million years after the dinosaurs’ demise, around the start of the Eocene era (about 55 to 34 million years ago), the researchers say. This was the mammalian Golden Age, when the preponderance of mammals, especially the ancestors of many groups alive today—such as primates, rodents and hoofed animals—really took off"

Hypothetically if the dinosaurs weren't all wiped out, there's a good chance that we would have never existed. None of the giant, badass mega fauna of the ice age would have existed, and primates would not have made that leap into bi-pedal buttholes. We'll never know for sure, but it doesn't look like we would have made it past being bottom tier to the dinosaur masses.

That's what kills me about the choices made in "The Good Dinosaur", is that the pairing of mammals with dinosaurs is so far past the scope of make-believe, that it's hard for me to really care about the movie.

Yeah, I saw the clip of the tyrannosaurs hanging out with the sauropod main character, so clearly they don't act like "normal" dinosaurs. I know, I get it. But even in "Finding Nemo" they had sharks chilling with the fish and they could explain that.

Geez, get over it, right? It's a kids movie...whooo cares?!

I guess the real sore spot is the fact that evolution is still being fought for as a fact in the USA. If there was a movie that dicked around with concepts that aren't still so heavily rejected, I'd probably be a lot less heated about it. But having a dinosaur with a human buddy just seems like a bad idea for us right now. They could have used other dinosaurs and kept it adorable, or used a tiny mammal, or even a hominid! That would have been so awesome!! It wouldn't have been human, it would have been something before that point. If "Spot" (the human kid) was LUCY....?

I'd be writing a totally different post.

I'd love to think we were all grown ups here, and that we can all just laugh and say "Oh, how funny and totally unrealistic!"

But the sad truth is....we can't. There are people out there who really, honestly, truly, 100% believe that the earth is onlyo 6,000 years old. That humans and dinosaurs lived together. That evolution is a lie.

Some even running for fucking president of the United States.

Sorry, guys. We're not ready for a fucking kid's movie with creationist ammo. Some asshole is using this adorable movie as a visual aid to teach kids that Jesus trumps science.

I can't get behind it. I just can't.

I'm going to go see the movie, and I bet it's really cute. I bet I laugh and have a great time. But it will be in the back of my head the same thing over and over..."why did it have to be a human?"

Dinosaur, Human, Bison. UGH