I started my morning by running around in my underwear, screaming "DINOSAURS OH MY GOSH DINOSAURS!" The running included an impromptu little jig atop my mother's bed while she stood in her bathroom brushing her hair. I was so excited I just could not finish getting ready. Because today I went to the new dinosaur hall at the LA Museum of Natural History.
Walking among the remains of the dead sounds morbid. Staring at their disconnected vertebrae in a display case sounds sick. Standing beside their skulls and smiling for a picture is just plain disrespectful. All this I thought about as I walked into the exhibit, and completely disregarded as soon as the first creature was seen, raising its head over the crowd of jumbling humans.
It was like a dream. I knew I was seeing and yet it seemed unimaginable. These beasts had to survive in a world of violence and natural catastrophe. I stood entranced, enthralled, overwhelmed. I think I could almost sense the dedication gone into uncovering their skeletal remains, and it made me love them though I was terrified. I am a sucker for the complex and beautiful machinery, and nothing is so beautiful and complex as a dinosaur.
"What happened, you guys!?!?!"
To begin with, fossilization blows my mind. Minerals filling in the bone cavity as it decays away and staying preserved like that beneath the ground--I just feel like someone left it there, just knew we'd want to see it 25 million years later. It feels so unlikely, the whole process, doesn't it? When we are really left with so very few human remains from the first of us to evolve 4 million years ago. But dinosaurs, who roamed the earth long before humans made their first steps, are scattered over our continents. And I am so glad they are.
There is something so extraordinary about them. What the hell happened to them!? I kept hearing the most popular theories of their demise, but none of it really explained why so many are found in clumps, does it? Or why they are found with things inside of them, like fetuses, partially digested food, rocks even.
And we have to speculate about their bone structure because the bones aren't found all nicely connected. We get things wrong, and correct them, and a whole understanding of a certain dinosaur, previously accepted, becomes irrelevant. When I got home I watched Jurassic Park III, which has a spinosaurus in it, a dinosaur I assumed Spielberg or someone had made up. According to the Discovery Channel, however, the dinosaur is real. The problem is, the only known complete fossil of it was destroyed during WWII. Which is why you don't really hear much about the spinosaurus, as our entire understanding of it is based off of the German scientist's journal.
Knowing this does not dilute my fascination with them. Personally, I trust these paleontologists, and admire them for their years and years of dedicated study. But more than that, I can't forget these beings, these creatures of goliath, of terrifying beauty: they are true excitement. They have never faded but have stretched their existence across millions of years. They are perhaps the truly eternal, and I respect them for it.
