Dino-postia

Like many children dinosaurs were ever present in my life early on. My parents would read to me every night, so for several weeks on end we would read Dinotopia. If I’m perfectly honest with myself I don’t remember very much of those books. They seemed to be a perfectly entertaining integration of dinosaurs and an early society, but I can’t remember anything else from it.

As it so happens though my family used to go on large road trips across the United States. We were going through the southwest US on one trip when we went to a museum with a ton of fossilized dinosaurs. There was even an excavation site that the public could view. This stuck with me a lot more prominently as it was a tangible event. Dinosaurs in this context weren’t just imagination. They were a long dead organism that was to be studied and speculated upon.

Typically today most people lump dinosaurs into a group that consists of creatures that have been dead for a very long time. We don’t think of them in relation to both ourselves and each other. The T Rex lived closer to us than it did to the Stegosaurus, despite the fact that most people would seem to guess that they lived in roughly the same time period if they didn’t often look at biological timelines. Without delving too much into an existential quandary I will mention that this fact makes our own human timeline seem rather insignificant.

Back to the way that children view dinosaurs; to them they are merely creatures that exist in a fantasy. There is a reason that many depictions of dinosaurs aimed at children can talk or are incredibly humanized. Without those aspects they would just be another dull animal that has been long dead for millions of years.