I’m Free! Also, My Thoughts on Dinosaurs

Today I woke up, and inhaled air through both of my miraculously clear nostrils. I stood up, and I was not dizzy. I am no longer sick!!

Between doing sessions of homework, I’ve been thinking about dinosaurs. Well. I think about dinosaurs all the time. Looking up from my creaky dorm desk as I write this, I can see my sketchbook open to a drawing of a brachiosaur. My shelf has a triceratops skull sculpture (skullpture?) on it. There is my “prehistoric life” book, bookmarked with a plastic pliosaur bookmark. My dinosaur class textbook is to the left of it. I’m wearing a sweater with dinosaurs on it, and beneath the triceratops skullpture are my t-rex earrings. When I go home this weekend, I intend to rescue my stuffed apatosaurus and bring him here with me.

Anyway, this is mostly the fault of my Dinosaurs! (yes, with an exclamation point. I didn’t add that.) class. I took it partially because it’s taught by my neighbor, and mostly because–if you can’t tell already–I LOVE dinosaurs! Before I knew that making art for a living was an option (we will see how that goes) I wanted to be a paleontologist. I gave up when I learned how much geology, math, and chemistry it involved. But I took the class for fun, and now my early mornings are spent listening to hilarious lectures and getting to hold incredible fossils. So far, I’ve touched…

• An oviraptor skull
• A million-year-old shark tooth
• A camarasaurus tooth
• An allosaurus vertebrae
• A spinosaurus tooth (real bone, not a cast)
• A theropod (forgot which) wishbone
• The absolutely massive claw of a barosaurus
• A t-rex tooth
• The footprint of an ancient reptile of some kind
• And more!

So, naturally, I’ve had dinosaurs on the brain lately. That was when I stumbled upon a youtube channel that has dedicated their time to using the latest research and science to reconstruct what dinosaurs might have sounded like. T-Rex didn’t roar like it does in Jurassic Park, but instead made near-silent rumbles that would physically stop you in your tracks and burst your eardrums subsonically. There would be no doom trumpet to announce its presence: instead, you’d figure it out when your ribs started vibrating like tuning forks and your ears started bleeding. Which, if you ask me, is way worse. However, by far the scariest one for me was Dilophosaurus. Forget fake neck frills and spitting goop, their sounds alone would have me peeing my pants.

The Jurassic Park franchise lost everything when they decided to make the sequels into generic action movies. (Starring Chris Pratt, no less. Disgusting!) They could make a thousand sequels of haunting proto-birds singing in the shadows with forward-facing eyes and I would be first in line to every single one.

I’ve heard this is more or less the premise of 65, starring Adam Driver, but I haven’t seen it yet. It’s on my list!

Anyway, all this to say that dinosaurs truly are one of the best things to think about all day long. Also, I practiced a lot of restraint with how much dinosaur info I was putting into this post, because I need to do homework still.

October 24, 2023