I’ve had a few close encounters with dinosaurs over recent months. While in the Kimberley region, I saw footprints near Broome. I walked Fossil Beach minus dinosaur evidence near home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. I’ve watched a few episodes of Netflix’ Life on our Planet narrated by Morgan Freeman.

I’m in awe of the people who can extrapolate from a few remains what dinosaurs looked like before extinction around 60 million years ago. However, while on Fossil Beach and recalling the rounded recesses in the headland near Broome, I suddenly had the thought: What if dinosaurs wore shoes?

This mental interjection quickly evolved into something deeper - how much are our perceptions shaped by the smallest scraps of evidence? Like the palaentologists who can imagineer what dinosaurs looked like based on scant skeletal remains, our ideas and beliefs often have little foundation.

If dinosaurs wore shoes, how misguided would our view of what they looked like be? The round depressions on the headland near Broome would be created by foot cladding, encasing something about which we could only surmise. Let’s face it, the fact that a dinosaur manufactured a shoe would throw all preconceived notions of life in that epoch out the window.

Consider that they managed to hang around an awful long time - 200 million years, give or take, meaning humans have some way to go in proving their endurance and longevity. Maybe dinosaurs were brighter, more adaptable and more ingenious than we give them credit for.

Fast forward to our time and we find ourselves inundated with hypotheses and disinformation based on much less evidence than footprints. The integrity and validity of science is being challenged by conspiracists, unbelievers, fakes, false prophets and sometimes just malintentioned bots.

What is truly scary is that some could read this and start a new stream of nonsense about a flat Earth populated by dinosaurs in shoes and decry the experienced and informed people who tell us differently.

It’s an environment in which religion, cults, dictatorships and oligarchs flourish - in which people are nurtured on a diet of dogma, false hope, ideology and populism. It’s the easiest path to follow when the alternatives are hard or detrimental to personal interest.

How much easier is it to deny climate science and maintain lifestyle as usual - denuding the Earth of finite resources, while pumping all manner of exhaled waste and poison into the atmosphere and other places? Feel assured, because there’s undoubtedly a climate denialist to dial up in your favourite social media channel, with all the ‘evidence’ you need to back your choices.

The ease with the idea that dinosaurs may have worn shoes evolved into a broader question about what shapes our understanding illustrates just how many directions an experience, a thought, a belief can take us.

I have surely missed an opportunity to establish a new cult of dinosaur worship. Fortunately, I listened to the mellowing tones of Morgan Freeman’s narrative and returned to mental terra firma. On the balance of evidence, I accept the expert opinion that dinosaurs roamed in bare feet.