Even as a child growing up in Indianapolis, I knew that my hometown was not the magnificent megalopolis of New York City nor even the metropolis of much-closer Chicago. Though we who lived there often nicknamed our city “Indy”, those visiting from bigger places were known to call us “Naptown” or, my personal favorite, “Indian-Noplace.”
But what a lucky child I was to live in the city with the largest children’s museum in the country. And the showpiece of this incredible museum was dead ahead of me the minute I walked inside. Very dead ahead — 65 million years dead. There, looming above me, was the most amazing skeletal dinosaur I had ever seen. It was a Megalosaurus, once eleven feet tall, thirty feet long and weighing two tons. OK, so I didn’t live in a megalopolis but, by golly, my Indiana-polis had a Megalosaurus. Take THAT, you snooty Manhattanites.
As bizarre as this mammoth was to my young imagination, I was somehow soothed that this dinosaur was discovered in England, because living next door to us was a family from London. When I imagined this monster roaming near Big Ben (my sense of historical time periods was quite hilarious) I was able to give its ferocious roar a hint of the same poshness that I heard in our neighbors’ accents.
My childhood was forty years earlier than the premiere of Barney the purple dinosaur on television in 1992. I could have used that friendly, huggable, ever-optimistic singing and dancing Tyrannosaurus Rex to quell a few childhood nightmares I remember having after visiting the museum. Of course, being the nerdy kid I was, my biggest fear was not of being devoured by a dinosaur, but of being eliminated by one if I misspelled it “dinahsore” during our fiercely competitive class spelling bee.
It wasn’t until I was a few years older that a new dinosaur terror arose in me, when I was able to fully grasp the concept of extinction. If something as enormous and powerful as that behemoth could vanish from Earth forever, leaving only its bones behind, what were the odds that mankind’s ultimate fate would be any different? I remember feeling a bleakness within me.
But what I have always loved about education is the fact that for every bit of learning we acquire that might momentarily depress us, there is bound to be a future bit that inspires us. And so it was with the dinosaurs.
At first the concept of extinction was a real downer for me in seventh-grade science class. But one year later came the real upper. It occurred when our eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Grabbe, was trying to get our attention for a unit on “vertebrates”, a coma-inducing unit for preteens if ever there was one. He mentioned how wrong we were if we thought that dinosaurs no longer existed today, and that there were still dinosaur examples all around us: 85 billion, in fact.
What?? And then his big reveal: all birds are living dinosaurs! They belong to a specific group of two-legged bird dinosaurs called theropods, the exact same lineage that included the Tyrannosaurus Rex. When non-flying dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, the airborne ones survived, kept shrinking and shrinking, and evolved into the warbling darlings we adore today. Ain’t evolution GRAND!
Even better, dinosaurs shared with our current birdies the same breathing systems, feathers, and even the same hollow bones to support fast, active movement. I’ll never forget that we heard this lecture right before our Thanksgiving vacation because Mr. Grabbe announced that only dinosaurs and birds share a fused collarbone, what anatomists call the furcula. “But we call it something different,” he announced and then held up a visual aid that we all recognized. “We call it the wishbone.”
Of course, my imagination zoomed to an imagined Thanksgiving 100 million years ago when a little brother and sister from the Flintstones got to make a wish on that same bone from the Procrastinosaurus that they’d just devoured. Yeah, I made that dinosaur up (he obviously was caught because he kept postponing a hasty escape from his spear-wielding hunters).
That wishbone would have been so enormous that in order to crack it and determine the winner, all the other Flintstones would have had to help their kids out in a family tug of war.
My silly caveman fantasy pales before the one created by the brilliant cartoonist Gary Larson in his “The Far Side” series, which ran in newspapers in the 1980s and 90s. I can think of no better way to end my essay than by sharing this “prehistoric” gem from 1982:
Elliot writes: “I couldn’t resist having a title that parodies The Dinah Shore Show from the 1950s.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here