In memoriam of the dinosaurs

Monday was Memorial Day, and I was delighted to wake up to snow. My hope for 2011 is to see snow in nine of twelve months. I was worried because May was almost over, and it hadn't snowed yet. But then it did! Now it just has to snow in September, because I don't think it's going to snow in June.

I was at home for the weekend, and we decided to go to the zoo. I hadn't been since 2006. The special "exhibit" this time was "Zoorassic Park." (I get a little annoyed that Jurassic Park is the quintessential association with dinosaurs--it's a strange and significantly inaccurate movie.) While a lot of kids have a fascination with dinosaurs but later grow out of it, I am the opposite. After taking a Dinosaurs! class last summer, I've been really intrigued by them.

I remember coming to the zoo when I was five and eight when they had dinosaur figures. In both of those cases, the dinosaurs were all together in one structure. This time, they just had them all over the park--which was a little disappointing to me. Another thing that disappointed me is that many of the dinosaur figures (which moved their eyes and made noises, and sometimes spat water) were not proportional. The biggest dinosaur in the zoo was the Tyrannosaurus rex (which was proportional), even though they had a brachiosaurus (which obviously was not proportional).

This is my dad standing next to the life-sized T-rex. It amazes me how big dinosaurs were! The sauropods (long-necked dinosaurs) included the largest land animals in the history of the world. They were so big that paleontologists for a long time thought that there was no way their legs could support so much weight, so they thought they stayed in the water to buoy them up. They now don't believe this, because they have found that their legs could indeed support them, and that water pressure probably would have prevented them from expanding their lungs properly.

Birds actually evolved from saurischians, not ornithischians like this baby dinosaur. But I liked this turkey looking at an animal that shared a common ancestor.

There are a few things that bothered me with this exhibit. First was the connection with Jurassic Park previously mentioned. Remember that dinosaur that spit the poison on the computer geek in the movie? Well, they had it at the zoo (actually two, a juvenile and an adult), and had it spit water. The sign accompanying these dinosaurs said that there is absolutely zero evidence for that, but it still didn't help the issue.

They also had an indoor exhibit with actual fossil replicas. There was a station that compared "dinosaur" bones compared to other fossils (e.g., a leg bone vs. petrified wood). One of the bones was of a woolly mammoth. That is not even close to being a dinosaur! The only thing that has in common with a dinosaur is upright posture. They estimate that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous. In April I went to La Brea tar pits in California, where they find fossils of mammoths and other ice-age animals. There they said that dinosaurs lived 65 million years before the mammoths. This goes to show just how long 65 million years is, since the mammoths of 10,000 years or so ago were still so relatively recent that the same estimate to the time of the dinosaurs is used. La Brea tar pits sold dinosaur toys in their gift shop. La Brea and Hogle Zoo sure aren't being very helpful in making clear that dinosaurs and mammoths did not coexist! (Maybe it's creationist "scientists" who are stocking the gift shop.)

I did the math, and if I did it correctly, if you drew a line of which one inch equaled 1,000 years, from today to the time the dinosaurs died out would be over a mile long! Science fiction stories feature dinosaurs being found in hidden jungles--but I don't think we're going to find any after so many millennia.

An exhibit the zoo had last year was "Nature's Nightmares," and since I have a bit of a fascination with the macabre, I was sad I missed it. But they did kind of have it--they just adapted it to be "living links," explaining how the living animals were related to the past. They didn't have the free-flying bats (but I did get to see bats elsewhere in the zoo), but they still had the vultures and the Goliath bird-eating spider, which was not as impressive as I expected it would be.

After Monday's zoo experience, I had to do a lot of reading for my E Lang class. It was a biography on James Murray, the main guy behind the Oxford English Dictionary. I am truly appreciative of him, because the OED is one of the greatest things ever. I have online access as a BYU student (and I imagine most registered college students would too), and I absolutely love it.

Murray was more than just a linguist and a philologist; he loved science too, particularly geology and archeology. My experience with the dinosaurs and his story has made me consider adding geology as a second minor. It's just an idea at the moment, and I might not do it, but it's definitely a possibility.