Yeah, my 2-yr old Kidpony is smack into his Dinosaur Phase of Development. Dinosaur bedsheets, dinosaur eating wear, freakin’ Dinosaur movies, the whole nine yards.
My dinosaur learning curve has had to go from zero to sixty as of yesterday. The first problem I’m seeing is that the scientists and parents need to get together before blood is shed. Specifically:
Quit changing the freakin’ names!! I grew up with “brontosaurus” ok? What possessed you to change it to “apatosaurus”, Mr./Ms. Dinosaur Scientist? You guys have kids? Do you know how many more questions I have to answer because of your anal Latin classification fetishes? If “brontosaurus” was good enough for me and the Flintstones, dammit, it’s perfectly all right for my son!
Make the damn names easier to pronounce! I took three years of Latin in high school. It doesn’t give me a mandate to make life miserable for the ordinary Joes and Janes of this world. If you want to use your Latin name for the museum, go for it! Give us easier names to use when our kids bring the dinosaur book for us to read! I’m not asking much. “Anklyosaurus”? (sp?) It looks like a freakin’ armadillo, so call it an armadillosaurus! Or Spikeosaurus (so it dovetails into the “Land Before Time” movies). C’mon scientists, a little help here for the beleagured and under-educated parents! Not all of us majored in paleontology in college. Some of us slept in class, partied, and played Frisbee for those four years. Don’t get even with us because we had fun and you wanted to get your Phi Theta Kappa!
Quit changing their damn coloring!! When I was a kid, Dino on the Flintstones was purple, just purple. Nowadays, dinosaurs sport camoflauge jungle patterns similar to Air Force attack aircraft or main battle tanks. All well and good, but some of us adults are “artistically-impaired” and still trying to cope with the future shock that the Crayola Company inflicted onto our beloved colors of yesteryear. My proposed new rule— “One Dinosaur, One Color”. I don’t care how you figured out their evolution, quit putting feathers on them! Do you know how hard it is to draw feathers for a 2-year old who wants Daddy to draw biologically correct dinos?!
(I’ll stop with this last rant now that the pain in my foot has subsided with this oral injection of Michelob Lite)
Find some dinosaur species without horns, plates, fangs, or spikes! I don’t know if you are aware, Mr. Dinosaur Scientist, but these translate into toys,
yes toys! Hard, small, plastic little fuckers that soon spread all over the house. Have you ever stepped on a Triceratops (call them Three-Horns or Rhinosaurs, dammit!)walking around your house barefooted? Try it sometimes, you white-coated, Latin-spouting, fossil-humping, Pterodactyl-felchers, and see how that feels! Kinda like those jungle spike booby traps in the Vietnam War movies right? Come up with some pseudo-species like Fluffysaurus, Gumbysaurus, or Cottonballraptor. Easier on the feet.
Well, sorry about that minor rant. As soon as I get off the 'puter, I have to go navigate through Jurassic Park to get my uniform on and go to work. Happy Dino Days to all my fellow parents in pain!
You don’t appreciate the joy and wonder of dinosaurs. Kids REVEL in all the changes. My not-yet-three year old, who still can’t navigate the shoals of potty training, knows the difference between a Carnotaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. She could pronounce “Parasauralophus” before she could pronounce some people’s names. In this she is following in her father’s footsteps. There’s definitely something genetic here.
I’m a little annoyed about the name change from “Brontosaurus” to “Apatosaurus”, too. I realize that it’s not taxonomically correct, but neither is “Platypus”, for that matter (a beetle squeeked in to the name first). Yet you don’t see biologists trying to re-educate the public about the name change. “Platypus” seems to fit the ridiculious creature, in the same way that “Brontosaurus” fits the big sauropod, so why not leave well enough alone?
And if you think the names we have NOW are hard to pronounce, take a look at the new dinosaur names coming out of China. Guaranteed to mak you long for the days of Pachycephalosaurus.
The bronto underwent a name change some time ago, dear Bluepony. Cecil discussed it, too. Here’s a link for ya.
My daughter has a thing for dinos, too. She’s not well versed in the names, but she likes to pretend she’s a dinosaur. She’s good at it, too. We call her Dianasaurus Rex. She’s three. Really, really three. The name is quite fitting.
Darby: Oh yes, your time is coming soon! DINOSAURS, Know them, Live them, Breathe them…
CalMeacham: Don’t get me wrong, anything that has my kid reading, counting, and reciting ABCs can’t be all bad! They need to kick those scientists out of China until I can catch up with these damn Triassic Period 'saurs. I might make an annonymous call to the Chinese Embassy implying that some of them work for the CIA.
Persephone: Interesting link. I hear that these same bubbleheads intend to change the name of Tyrannosaurus Rex into some horrible Latin tongue-twister to reflect its unusual vertebrae (sp?). I need to meet with these assholes in a dark alley with an old-fashioned white ash Louisville Slugger.
Am I the only kid who never went through a dinosaur phase? This phase just never really went anywhere with me. I didn’t own any plastic dinosaurs, I didn’t watch the dinosaur movies, and I didn’t think they were interesting.
Ohhhh, Bluepony and DarbyV. I laughed so hard at this post, and unfortunately must tell you this: it will only get worse. I am the eldest of three daughters, and my parents thank God every day that I was the only one that took interest in dinosaurs. My dinosaur phase lasted from the age of roughly 4 all the way up until 4th or 5th grade. I went to every exhibition possible, read all the books in the library, scrounged plastic Burger King dinosaur toys, and even begged my mom to buy multiple boxes of Cap’n Crunch when they had a marker named for a different dinosaur in every box. Meanwhile, my relatives bought me books, sent newspaper comics and articles, and even sent matching stuffed dinosaurs to my sisters and me one Christmas. My sisters were less than impressed, so being the benevolent older sibling, I relieved them of their confusing new companions to add to my own collection.
Fast forward 10 years.
I am now 19. My sisters survived their infancy, toddler, and young years without my dino obsession. They get admired at family reunions, no problem. I have relatives asking if I’ve declared my major in paleontology yet, or if I’m saving that for post-grad work. I tell ya, once you get a reputation…
I remember doing the whole Dino phase it lasted for me from about age 4 when I first saw dinos in a museum to about… oh…4 or 5th grade so 10 or 11… I’m still interested just not as much as I was at one time… heck I even won First Place in the school science fair for my knowledge on Dinos! Now though I probably couldn’t tell the difference between a Brachyosaur(sp?) and a Terranadon… (Okay maybe I could I know a terranadon flies I can’t remember anything about the brachyosaur except that it was a land dino and big… wasn’t it?)
Now this is only 6 or 7 years later from that. I’ve forgotten pretty much everything I learned about them… the only one I can name for certain is a Tyrannosaurus Rex… I still have my plastic T-Rex actually and I got to look into the mouth of an animatronic one when they came to the Alberta Museum in Edmonton. I still enjoy Dinos and love to go to Drumheller (been there a couple times… I need to go again its been awhile) but definately not to the extent I did at one time.
They’ll grow out of it… eventually… but it might take awhile… a good thing to do is buy stuffed dinos or very few… I only had two dinos myself… my platic T-Rex and my purple stuffed one which faintly resembles Dino from Flintstones… I still have them both actually a little worse for wear but tucked away in my toy box…
You mean a Fraxinus Americana Louisville Slugger, Blue?
Chalk me up as another who’s stayed ahead of the game by following the dinosaur debate as I got older. My two-year-old isn’t really into dinosaurs but when she is I’m right there with her, slingin’ the latin.
Excellent excellent rant. A very funny read.
Of course, it’s hard to talk about dinosaur obsession without thinking of Calvin and Hobbes.
I was into dinosaurs when I was little, but not in any major way. I don’t think I had any plastic ones, but I did have a bunch of dinosaur books, some trillobyte (is that right) fossils, and one or two archeology kits.
I would also collect bones of dead mice that got down into our window wells and couldn’t get out. That was a blast; a little two foot by four foot garden of fossils.
I hear those cottonballraptors were right vicious bastards, especially when they were wadded up and got stuck in your ear.
My dino phase lasted from shortly before kindergarten until about 3rd grade. I still remember most of the names though. Oh, and brontosaurus will always be brontosaurus, much like Saigon will always be Siagon. Apatosaurus/ Ho-Chi-Minh City my arse!
The name that some scientists were arguing should be the ‘proper’ name for Tyrannosaurus rex…? Manospondylus giga Some fragmentary fossils that were later attributed to Tyrannosaurus rex were also listed as Dynamosaurus imperiosus, which might not have been all that bad, actually…
I would like to state that **I hate dinosaurs ** and *feared my son liking them * but have (so far) side stepped the *evil scurge of useless and unnecessary toys * by introducing my 4.5 year old to **trains ** at age of two. ( They were a gift)
Now I have three levels of Thomas the Tank engine ( basement, first and second floors) littered with trains and tracks. Dinosaurs are not allowed at either preschool he has attended because (and this was my reason) they are violent and noisy toys. It didn’t matter if was a gentle plant eating Whatamacallitsauraus or the T-Rex, they all battled, said the teacher(s).
Trains are quiet and puff along the rails. I like it alot and can interact with them easier.
I am hoping to side step the evil that is **Barbie ** with my nearly three year old daughter by introducing her to ** ponies and horses **, a lesser evil. Time will only tell.
**Bluepony ** Good to see you, where you been hiding?
I was seriously into dinosaurs as a kid and remember a lot of what I read and learned. For example, when I was seven or eight, I remember visiting the Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. and correcting one of the tour guides when she referred to a Triceratops in a diorama when anybody could clearly see it was obviously a Styracosaurus.
Anyway, the point is, if and when my kid(s) get this obsession, I’m frikkin’ ready.
