Dino-Mania
My 3 year old daughter loves dinosaurs. All of them. The “good” ones like Barney and the “bad” ones from Jurassic Park and Godzilla . On that topic, she’s in the exalted company of Calvin and other, regular kids world-over who too are “caught up in the raging, teeth-baring grip of full-on dinomania”, as this article by Richard Conniff calls it. Soon after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, in 1861, the paleontologist, Hermann von Meyer, discovered a dinner plate-size fossil: “It seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone.” Von Meyer’s description of the fossil was that of a type of flying reptile. In 1964, John H. Ostrom, a Yale paleontologist discovered Deinonychus, a primitive bird that he said “must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile, and very active animal”. A couple of years later, when Ostrom was looking at the limestone slabs of von Meyer closely, he c...