History and fiction - and dinosaurs

When I was pre-teen, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I would have been content curating a museum, because long excavations without access to proper showers wearing clothes chosen because they showed the dirt the least and brushing dirt away from a metatarsal would have tested my love even for custard croissants. Then a teacher - as they do - crushed my hopes by pointing out I wasn't very good at, like, school. Jokes on her because I then vaulted the scholarly alphabet, but sans my dreams.

What they fail to tell you in school - among many things - is that a job title hides many variations of task. Even though I lacked fundamental logical skills, as it turns out, I could have risen through the corporate landscape, perhaps in funding, by bemoaning the inadequacies of the previous job-holder and then revising everything because Steve Jobs did it (in a competitive and innovative technological environment that is completely different to most companies).

I especially love dinosaurs. Now, I understand that this discipline is a bit of a joke because it requires ignoring the amazing range of animals we have now. But, they are giant reptile-like creatures, people. And this is also a treasure hunt. We don't even really know what they look like or sound like, just where they died, really. We don't have complete skeletons, people. We're throwing a party if we find an intact femur. And like with Pluto, we're notching creatures off roll call all the time.

When I was still living in the clouds like scarecrow looking for my brain, I had collections of magazines, trading cards and posters of my favorite dinos. I drew a cartoon of a dinosaur family that I realise now was improbable because different species can't breed, and I'm pretty sure a T-Rex and brontosaurus do not a stegosaurus make. Most kids grow out of this and into, I dunno, cars and making dinner like adults.

Did you know there is actually an internet discussion about who would win: T-Rex or Allosaurus? Your answer? It's a trick question. They lived in different eras. But should time and space collapse, my money's on the Allosaurus. The T-Rex is bulky and wins mostly by rushing at its prey, and Allosauris is lithe and fights like a boxer. Another anticipated show-down is Allosaurus versus Stegosaurus. I leave that to your imagination.

A stegosaurus staring down an Allosaurus.

There is a type of dinosaur that would beat them both. A saurupod (four-legged herbivore) so big nothing could kill an adult, except maybe worms, gangrene and flu. Oh, and humans. First they were known as gigantosaurs (yes, I know, I would have called it Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus) and then titanosaurs (I call it Fiveminutesoffame-saurus). A single femur is about one and a half times the height of a person.

A herbivore at the centre of the food chain.

According to reputable sources, a velociraptor was captured last year alive in Congo. There are some people who take this seriously because some fossils of extinct dinosaurs that were not wiped out in the mass extinction have been found in the area. Unfortunately space and time has not collapsed, and a few million years is a long time for anything to hibernate. Also, if they were real, I would be there reenacting the scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are hiding in the kitchen.

Some of my favourites have always been (until they check it off roll call) a species of duck-billed dinosaurs, which is a description not a nickname. They grazed in the same way as cattle, with their lips. Do I need to state the obvious? That their lips looked like bills. Well now I have. They ate on four legs but ran away on two, smart buggers.

Bird beak rather than bill, maybe.

This was not where My Point was meant to be (this never happens. Never). I was actually going to write about a popular science book I am reading that I am sceptical about. (The author claims he wrote a paper that founded string theory. Which is interesting given that the theory predates his birth.) But, you know, then dinosaurs. Perhaps I like history because if it were going to affect us, it already has. Like a  novel, you can close the book or skip the chapter on mass sacrifice or how that fossil came to be dead in the first place. You squint at your mortality, shift your head so that it looks like immortality and leave to get lunch.

I would be good at curating a museum. Far away from other people. With only the past and fiction for company. (I meant or: past or fiction. Definitely.) Can someone translate Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus into Latin?

PS. I realise a person who hunts dinosaurs is a paleontologist. But I was 12.