I am utterly fascinated by dinosaurs. I know an embarrasing amount about them, and when I was younger, I had a huge collection of memorabilia related to them. Tomorrow, I’m seeing the third Jurassic Park, and I’m already nitpicking (Velociraptors were wolf-sized crocodile-snouted beasties, and a Pteranodon couldn’t possibly lift a small boy. It’s like a 5-ounce sparrow lifting a 1-pound coconut ;-D).
I’m wondering if I’m the only dinosaur nut over the age of 12.
Hardly! See some of my rants in various JP3 threads about what they did to Spinosaurus (and I haven’t seen it yet, either) 
Dinosaurs are the best thing since sliced bread. I got to ask Jack Horner a question (in person!) about dinosaur ankles once. I draw dinosaurs. I read about dinosaurs. I think about dinosaurs. They’re neato!
Oh, and if you really want to nitpick, Velociraptor was more like the size of a large chicken (about a foot and a half tall, weighing all of about 30 lbs). Deinonychus was closer to wolf-sized.
IIRC, when they found the dinosaur now identified as Utahraptor, they wanted to name it after Steven Spielberg, since it matched so well is JP 'raptors.
Oh, by the way NAM*, you’re not alone, I’m 45 and I still love dinosaurs !
I never go to movies, so I won’t be seeing the new Jurassic Park movie, but I watch anything from the Walking With Dinosaurs people every chance I get. The recent When Dinosaurs Walked America thing was pretty good. Am looking forward to whatever they come up with next.
This topic reminds me, they aren’t really dinosaurs, but anyone interested in Old Animals should check out A Fish Caught In Time by Samantha Weinberg, a the story of the rediscovery of the coelacanth. Fascinating.
Yup. I believe it was discovered within a year of the release of Jurassic Park. There was a specimen named Utahraptor spielbergi; however this specimen turned out to be the same as the earlier-named Utahraptor ostrommaysorum, so the name was not accepted. Personally, I think Ostrom deserves the name more then Speilberg, anyway
I’m still fascinated by them.
Do yourself a favor and don’t see JP3. It is totally retarded and idiotic. And if your really into dinosaurs, im sure you will puke within the first hour. And besides that, they story line is just plain bad and boring. Not enough violence and people eating.
I’m a dinosaur nut and I’m 19. If you’re really interested in Utahraptors, there’s a great book by Dr. Robert Bakker (sp?) called Raptor Red, based on just some Utahraptor skeletons he found. It’s fascinating.
I loved the Discovery Channel computer animated dinosaur specials and have the first one on tape. I draw dinosaurs, too (but then, I don’t know how to draw very many other things, which is a shame). But I felt that Walking in America was too short. They should have shown the Utahraptor in, well, Utah and maybe some in the Midwest, where I live.
Darwin’s Finch (emphasis mine):
Ummm…I think dinosaurs preceded sliced bread by quite a few years. 
Another dinosaur nut here. On my last trip to Manhattan I headed straight for the Museum of Natural History. We take the kids to the LA Natural History Museum whenever we can. My 4-year-old loves to go to La Brea (yes, I know there are no dinosaurs there, but it’s still cool.)
Yeah, I know - I just like the phrase
I like the big lizards, i suffured through a Geology course so i could take the Dinosaur class in college, even though neither of them went toward my graduation credits. At least they helped my GPA. When i was a kid, i drew the 'dinosaurs in spaceships" pictures that Calvin later drew in Calvin and Hobbes.
I love dinosaurs. I could spend hours in the dino halls at the Natural History Museum. It’s something about their size… I know some of them were quite small, but there’s nothing quite like staring up at the full height of a tyranosaur skeleton. Also I’m just fascinated with old things-- really old things. I have to struggle to concentrate on things that happened in the last few hundred years, but give me bones & artifacts from thousands of years ago and I’m your girl. I think if there had been more science courses available to me earlier on in school, I might seriously have considered an archeology degree. Digging things up rules.
Millions of years ago is the way to go. Millions 
I’m back from the theatre, and I must say:
(pukes)
At least I got out of the house. I have a few hours worth of nitpicks on that movie, which made the other two look like Casablanca, but several other Dopers have beat me to it. Pity.
I never could draw dinosaurs. Funny, though, since I can draw a reasonably-realistic human with reasonably-realistic surroundings. Of course, the last dinosaur I drew was several years ago; my pencil hand has developed since then.
I’m merely interested in old animals, period. Coelocanthi, glyptodonts, thecodonts, I love them all. It’s a pity I was born in the Holocene epoch…
Would that be an African or a European sparrow?