Dinosaurs

2  Dinosaurs

For the last few years, I have been having trouble with the fact and idea of dinosaurs.  I have not always doubted these reptilian creatures.  When I was young, I was convinced of their  authenticity.   I had, after all, during my family’s numerous visits to the Agassiz museum at Harvard University,  beheld many a skeleton of vertebrae, bones, and plaster wired together to create massive models that dominated the museum’s grand, musty rooms.  These colossuses were indeed thrilling.  I have no doubt, too, that they would have been even if they had not been viewed in contrast to the museum’s outer galleries’ dimly lit glass cases of delicate, finely wrought glass flowers which my mother insisted my brothers and I admire, or at least look at, before we were permitted to enter the hall of the creatures of the Cretaceous.   I really believed that these skeletons, despite the plaster prosthetics, were genuine.  Who wouldn’t?  I was a child with my parents.  It was science and it was Harvard.  

Notwithstanding the weight and authority of lessons learned in childhood and the cultural cache of all things museum and Ivy, over time my doubts about dinosaurs have grown.  What brought my simmering disbelief to a crisis, besides the Saturday afternoon staple of Godzilla movies and dinosaur toys in my fifties’ childhood, was the breathless announcement sometime in the 1990s of fossil evidence that these not so fleet footed creatures had feathers.  Feathers!  I mean, really.   Even with their small heads and rumors of mini bird like brains, the avian appendages of feathers fails to fly for me, seriously violating my beliefs about the behemoths.  Even though evidently some suspected such accoutrement earlier, certainly no one had suggested plumage when I was a child.  And if there were previous hints of such fluff, why had we followers of the fate of the species not been alerted to the possibility?   Why was this image altering information just thrust upon us with no warning?  Was there some kind of conspiracy here? 

Whatever it was, this feather dust up only brought into focus doubts that had been simmering in me repressed and left unspoken for many years.  We are supposed to believe that after “roaming the earth” for many a year, these extraordinary behemoths just disappeared.  Like that.  Was it the small brains and vegetarian diet, a logical possibility some may say?  Perhaps even some Icarus-like issue with those feathers, the dinos daring too much.  No!   The master narrative of my pre global warming warning youth ascribed the destruction to a historically histrionic meteor or comet or the like.  (My Google search on this matter, by the way, revealed a lack of consensus on which type of celestial body deserves the brunt of the blame.  The destruction of the dinos is ascribed variously to a comet, meteor, and asteroid.  And just so you know that I am thorough, I did investigate the distinctions between these various types of denizens of the heavens.  Alas, my source, the website, “Science Kids:   Fun Science and Technology for Kids,” which I chose for what I suspect are obvious reasons ( I often fail to know more than a fourth grader),  did not provide much clarity—all were described variously as heavenly bodies with tails.)  More recent theories propounded for the mass extinction sixty-six million years ago of the creatures large and small read like climate change prequels, with an obviously non human aided and therefore somewhat inexplicable earlier ice age, or a particularly ferocious  volcano a la 1991 Mt. Pinatubo, wreaking dinosaur havoc by throwing up debris that blocked the life giving sun. 

Whichever it is, this destruction of the dinos scenario creates what I call the evolution problem.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am a big fan of evolution.  But I just can’t keep in my head that these dinosaurs and humans are part of the same evolutionary strain.  Is it because these reptiles, notwithstanding the bones I have seen, are in truth more imaginary to me than real?   Has cinema and popular culture trumped science?   The ridiculous feathers, with their implications of dinosaurs as birds, certainly didn’t aid in verisimilitude.   Besides, if the once decisively dominant dinosaurs were subjected to some force deadly enough to devastate their habitat and thus lead to their demise, why didn’t all the plants and verdant glens and dales, from whose slime we humanoids allegedly rose, go with them?   Was there, if that were the case, a two step evolution (much like the two step creation of the bible with Lilith, Adam’s first wife, (woven from the same cloth, incidentally) conveniently replaced by the rib-sourced Eve) in which the planet of the apes and humans was preceded by a whole other, discrete, dinosaur and the like evolutionary animal strain?  Could that be?  Does that make sense?

 And here is the thing, really:  if something so dominating and enduring—having existed for 136 million years—can perish in the cold or dust,  what chance do we sixty-five million year old featherless mammals, who require so many goods and services, have?     What chance do I, a sixty-five year old product of evolution, have?