Are you kidding me? dinosaurs are way cool.
Every child knows this, and not every child forgets it like a fickle, heartless cad. For some of us, forever 8 years old, dinosaurs and space will always be the best things in existence. Lego ain’t that bad, either.
Dinosaurs are like an amazing real-life treasure hunt and jigsaw puzzle all in one. And sometimes it can all go terribly wrong. Not in a Jurassic Park way, though that is an ever-present danger, not least since they started making dinosaur chickens.
You heard me. Well, maybe not, since you are reading this. Maybe you heard a little voice in your head (not the bad kind, the one that means you can read) that you can pretend is me. Maybe give it a funny voice, I like funny voices.
Anyway, dinosaur chickens. Hells yeah, I say. Hans Larsson is a god amongst men. He may well turn out to be hell-bent on taking over the world, but if he can figure out the right genetic switches to hatch a dinosaur from a chicken’s egg,* then he probably deserves to make us all his abject slaves, cowering in fear as his dinochicken army rampages through our once bustling cities. It’s a lot more than most elected officials accomplish, so I say hats off to him.
Back to getting it wrong (but yet so right) – Crystal Palace Park boasts some of the best anatomically incorrect dinosaurs around, and I think this might have been where I first discovered my love for them, as did the people of Victorian England before me. At the same time, across the pond, the notorious “Bone Wars” were raging between two warring paleontologists. This is where it gets awesome, or more awesome, seeing as dinosaurs were already awesome. But check out the names of these two warring paleontologists. These guys are essentially Indiana Jones but with extra dinosaurs. Are you still with me, or you have you collapsed from overexposure to pure cool? If you need a break, now would be a good time to take a couple of deep breaths and have a glass of water…
Ready? OK. From the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale we have the distinguished-sounding Othniel Charles Marsh, and from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia we have the downright outlandishly named Edward Drinker Cope. I hope there used to be quotation marks around the “Drinker” (just like that in fact) that were removed after his death to sanitise the story.
Basically, the pair had once been friends, even naming discovered species after each other. But then they fell out personally, and also professionally over Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. They subsequently spent the rest of their days trying to outdo their opponent, and ruin their reputation completely. Bone Wars!
Enough, I hear you cry (I have a voice in my head, too, and thought it only polite to assume it to be you) you haven’t mentioned a single dinosaur yet, in all your ramblings. They were pretty numerous, and you can’t name a single one? They existed for over 160 million years, for goodness sake, show a little respect – can’t you shut up for a second and-
Now hang on a minute. I just thought it was interesting, and maybe I got a bit carried away. If you just want a list of dinosaurs I’m pretty sure Wikipedia has one already.
Oh, look. I was right. And look what I found. The Aachenosaurus shoves its way to the front of the queue, but what an embarrassment! Turns out what they thought was a duck-billed dinosaur was actually a piece of fossilised wood. Imagine announcing that one. On the plus side, that is the most epically-named log in the history of epics, and also of wood.
Yes, the dinosaurs have seen it all. From the days of the single landmass Pangea right up to the present day-
Just stop right there, I hear you butt in once more. Dinosaurs became extinct in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. Well, prepare your mind – it’s about to be blown.
Dinosaurs are among us. As chickens. Yes, I know we’ve done this already, but also toucans, and yellowhammers and the naughty ones like great tits and boobies. Birds are classed as a type of dinosaur, and all the scary but extinct ones are technically non-avian dinosaurs. Ooh err missus.
I don’t know how I feel about this, but I think it’s a mixture of excitement and a newfound respect/fear of turkeys and magpies.
Oh my, dinosaurs are awesome. Overwhelmingly so. and I think the most overwhelming ones might just be my favourite. The gigantic herbivores, the plant-eating monstrosities that could crush you (and your house) under one foot. I remember wishing they were still around (and secretly sometimes still do) when I was actually 8 years old, rather than just appearing so. I was the only vegetarian in my whole school, I think, and I just wanted another one to hang out with. One that was huge enough to be used as transportation and would also trample people who made fun of me for not eating meat. Every kid needs a giant herbivore – they’re awesome.
*There’s probably a joke about what comes first that could be dug out of this section – and in keeping with the paleontological mood we’ve created, I’ll let you dig around until you find it. You’ll appreciate it more that way.
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