Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other organs.

There are also close-ups of sectioned material: it quickly becomes obvious that anything that has a vaguely circular profile is called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint is called blood, and anything with that elongate anteater look is a penis (they apparently did not practice circumcision in the Carboniferous). It’s all crude and wrong and very, very silly.

I’ve seen it all before, too: Lin Liangtai is a Chinese Ed Conrad! Conrad (whose site seems to have vanished, unfortunately) also spent his time puttering around among old mine tailings in coal country, collecting Carboniferous rocks that resembled, to his untutored eye, fragments of body parts, and then spammed various internet sites with claims that he had evidence of “man as old as coal”, and that his “fossil” organs clearly reflected fragments of a catastrophic disaster that splattered people everywhere, and somehow preserved their bones and kidneys and penises and lungs for later discovery.

I think those two ought to get together and share their findings. They are clearly kindred spirits.