The Dinosaur Plaything

By Author: Gregory Hepburn
Total Articles: 38
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When reading through a copy of a Calvin and Hobbes comic the other day, I comtemplated about a lost icon of my youth: the dinosaur game. Like Calvin, I loved dinosaurs as a child. When I was six years old the Tyrannosaurus Rex was one of the most amazing creatures that ever lived. In fact, the Tyrannosaurus Rex is probably still one of the most amazing creatures that have ever lived, 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 fascinating things to me about dinosaurs was the fact that they existed in a world that was totally different from mine. I realized my world wasn't all that exciting; in central Minnesota it went down to forty degrees below zero in the winter, but their world was one full of risks and intrigue. Large lizards circled overhead on bat-like wings while marauders the size of my mom's car stomped through the thick jungles. Monstrous battles took place in the hot 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 colossal aggressors (though I only had one at the time).

The age of dinosaurs has altered 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 turned out to be a bit of a superstar in the dinosaur world with his big talons, sharp teeth, and huge brain. My beloved Brontosaurus is no more; it turns out that his huge fossil was actually a wrongly classified Apatosaurus fossil. The world that they live in inside my mind is still the same though, filled with outlandish screeches and howls, and full of struggles between massive creatures. The dinosaur toys don't interest me as much anymore; they've been replaced by the mystery of their namesakes' vanishing. Why did so many gigantic creatures, creatures which literally ruled the earth, get swept 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 to us? Maybe Calvin has the answer.