Dinosaur Toys
When reading through a rerun of a Calvin and Hobbes comic the other day, I thought to myself about a lost icon of my youth: the dinosaur toy. Like Calvin, I loved dinosaurs as a child. When I was six years old the Tyrannosaurus Rex was one of the most amazing thing that ever existed. Actually, the Tyrannosaurus Rex is probably still one of the most amazing things that have ever existed, at least to me. I was fascinated by dinosaurs, and I had all sorts of dinosaur toys, from tiny little brontosauruses to a two-foot tall T-Rex.
Maybe one of the most interesting things to me about dinosaurs was the fact that they lived in a world that was completely different from mine. I knew my world wasn’t all that glamorous; in central Minnesota it got down to forty degrees below zero in the winter, but their world was one full of danger and intrigue. Huge lizards soared overhead on bat-like wings while predators the size of my mom’s car stomped through the thick jungles. Monstrous battles took place in the blazing sun while humans weren’t even a blip on the radar yet. With my dinosaur toys I reenacted these battles, screeching and screaming while the Triceratops tried to defend her nest against the gigantic aggressors (though I only had one at the time).
The world of dinosaurs has changed quite a bit since the days of my six year-old self and his dinosaur toys. Some of them have become warm blooded (depending on who you ask), and it turns out that my beloved T-Rex was much more of a scavenger than a predator. Thanks to Jurassic Park the Raptor has become a bit of a celebrity in the dinosaur world with his big talons, sharp teeth, and huge brain. My beloved Brontosaurus is no more; it turns out that his gigantic fossil was actually a mislabeled Apatosaurus fossil. The world that they live in within my mind is still the same though, filled with foreign screeches and howls, and rife with struggles between massive creatures. The dinosaur toys don’t interest me quite so much anymore; they’ve been replaced by the mystery of their namesakes’ disappearances. Why did so many giant creatures, creatures which literally ruled the earth, get wiped off the planet? The question seems especially pressing since we pretty much rule the earth now (or at least we’d like to think so) so what’s going to happen with us? Maybe Calvin has the answer.
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