Walking With Dinosaurs

Sunday (mere hours before we all got sick, but I'm pretty sure it was unrelated) we went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to introduce Jack to dinosaurs. Oh sure, they have other things there....non-prehistoric animals and insects, space-related stuff, I believe some cultural whatnot involving ancient people the like, and that's all well and good too. But when I go to the museum, and moreover when I take my son there for the first time, you can bet my main objective is to bring him up close and personal to some massive creature whose fossilized pinky toe is bigger than his entire body. And so I did.

As kids, my brother and I were ridiculous dinosaur geeks, devouring books on them, dragging my parents to laughably bad movies like "The Last Dinosaur" and so forth (not to mention good ones like showings of the original "King Kong"), and drawing endless pictures of dinosaurs chomping screaming cavemen into tiny pieces, even though we know now the two didn't exist within 65 million years of each other. Well, unless you throw in time travel or The Lost World, but that's another story.

As an adult, of course, I'm still a dinosaur geek, somehow finding a woman, my wife Emily, more than happy to go on vacation with me to nowheresville Wyoming, Thermopolis to be precise, where we actually spent $100 apiece to crouch on our knees in the blazing July sun using tiny brushes to clean dirt off massive rocks that were probably fossilized dinosaur bones, although we couldn't always be certain.

So at the museum, there's a big ol' dinosaur skeleton right in the main lobby, a T-Rex I believe, unless the sickness has muddled my memory. I held Jack up to it and looked on as he gazed blankly at its ominous presence, his face devoid of any real emotion beyond, perhaps, simple uncertainty about where on earth we were.

We bought our tickets and headed straight for the elevator, since the prehistoric area was on the third floor. At the exhibit, we zipped past a lot of the preliminary stuff: insects, plants, the kinds of things dinosaurs crushed underfoot. After going up yet another level in an elevator about the size of the stroller - no joke, I thought the opening door would suck me into the wall with it - we reached the dinosaurs, and here I got the reaction I was hoping for. A friendly old guide had a tray of fossils, or re-creations anyway, including a T-Rex tooth the size of Jack's head, and Jack grabbed it and smiled and I made some joke about how much sleep we'd get if he were teething with something like that, and then it was time to move on. He touched other fossils, and we gazed up at huge skeletons and put our hands into fossilized footprints....it was all pretty cool.

Later I admit I got somewhat distracted by this video discussing the end of the dinosaurs, and the fact that the giant meteor striking the earth theory had only been conceived around 1980 or so. Since I was a kid then, it seemed to me it had always been the prevailing theory. Which got me thinking: what if they WERE wiped out by that meteor - and what if they hadn't been? What if the thing had missed the earth and simply passed on by? Would the dinosaurs still be here? Was humanity inevitable? I mean, we've been here for just thousands of years. Dinosaurs? My science is probably a bit off but I believe they walked the earth for somewhere around 180 million years. Could we really never have been, if that one meteor had gone somewhere else? Or would the cavemen my brother and I drew getting gutted by dinosaurs actually been us?

Our museum trip ended with a visit to the "Discovery Zone," which seemed to basically be a place for exhausted parents to catch their breath while their children climbed all over and ran around various toys, interactive exhibits, and play areas. We brought Jack to what seemed to be the proper age appropriate one, coincidentally dinosaur themed: you could build small, tricycle-sized dinosaurs by assembling wooden bones together. Jack and I sat there between the two sample dinosaur skeletons, handing each other bones back and forth to attach, and somewhere along the line while doing that I decided that everything in the world was as it should be.