the horned devil from the river of hell

With ten minutes to spare in class after teaching my lesson, I felt inspired to play some hangman with the class. I wanted to throw them off, so I wrote on the board, next to a silhouetted gallows: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. The hint: “This word means ‘The Horned Devil from the River of Hell.’” It took them a while to guess it, but they eventually figured it out by throwing out vowels and consonants: Stygimoloch. “This dinosaur was ten feet long,” I told the class, “and it was discovered in Hell Creek, Montana. Its name is the corrupted blending of two words: styx and moloch. Styx was the river in Greek mythology that the dead had to cross to reach the Underworld. Moloch was a horned demon in Hebrew mythology, and a corruption of ‘Molech’, a pagan god to whom infants were sacrificed. It was a pachycephalosaur, cousins to the stegosaurs. It had a thin dome of bone on its head, and its head ornamentation included nasty, protruding spikes and stubby horns.” And then I dismissed the class. Here is a colorful image of the dinosaur: 

I have two more classes to teach before I am done at Southwest. I somehow want to weave dinosaurs into the mix. I am thinking about doing one lesson on the beauty of dinosaurs and how they point us to the Creator, using texts from psalms to illustrate how creation sings of God’s glory. And perhaps with another one I will tackle the creation/evolution debate, giving several different theories regarding how dinosaurs fit into the historical narrative of planet earth.