Thursday, September 29, 2011

The Kings of the Dinosaurs

There are tons of parenting blogs.  I know this because I've read a few and they often are parents of small children and they run akin to akin to 'kids say the darndest things.'  I don't ever plan to do that to you...but that said...

My son, like most five year old boys loves dinosaurs.  When I was his age I loved dinosaurs.  He memorizes little facts about each of them and reminds me which ones are fast, which ones are intelligent and which ones are meat eaters.

His dinosaur of choice?  You probably already guessed that it's the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  After all, he's the King of the Dinosaurs right?  The tyrant lizard?  The biggest, baddest of them all?  Not so fast.

I always had admiration for the large meat eaters myself but Tyrannosaurus Rex seemed to get a little too much press for my liking.  Sure he looked good in all the pictures chasing down some poor little Velociraptor but he seemed to be all image and no substance.

My favorite was the Allosaurus.  Allosaurus was the forgotten badass meat eater.  Allosaurus is the disrespected ass kicker of dinosaurs.  Even in the Land of the Lost the Allosaurus was off in this lost city and known as "Alice".  The show treated him like the weird old lady that lives in the creepy old house at the end of the street.  Hardly the image that is deserving for a first class bone crunching, meat chewing lizard like Allosaurus.

My son dismisses my claim that Allosaurus deserves respect and goes on talking about his beloved T-Rex.  We go back and forth on this subject and have up until recently refused to agree to disagree.

While reading a book on dinosaurs I pretended to read something about the Allosaurus.  Our dialogue went like this:

Me:  Oh look here.  It says that scientists have analyzed Allosaurus scat and were able to discover some of the things he ate.

Son:  What does it say he ate?

Me:  It says that there some small rodents, some plants, and lots of T-Rex bones.

Son:  THE ALLOSAURUS DID NOT EAT T-REXES!  YOU ARE JOKING!

Me:  (Laughter)

With a piece of paper and a dozen colored markers I began drawing two dinosaurs.  Allosaurus on the left was wearing a bow-tie (the nose ring of Republicans) and on the right was the stunning T-Rex wearing a pink skirt.  Above the picture it read:  Senior Prom.  My son saw what I was drawing and he grabbed it and began tearing it up while running out of the room.

I'm glad we have recently reached a compromise.  My five year old son proposed the notion that they both be Kings of the dinosaurs and they could work together to fight crime.  I agreed to his proposal.  We shook hands and I also made the concession to stop disparaging the reputation of the T-Rex by characterizing him as an effeminate cross-dressing lizard in sloppily scrawled drawings.

On a side note we may be starting a new comic book about our new dinosaur crime fighting duo.  Stay tuned.


4 comments:

Dave Johnson said...

I took a T-Rex to the prom, and she was all hands. Of course they were little tiny hands attached to little tiny arms, but still... so wish I would have just gone stegosaurus instead.

philnjill said...

I was a big fan of Allosaurus as well. But Spinosaurus is the king now. Up to 60 feet long, razor sharp straight teeth, 9.5 tons.

Liggie said...

I vaguely remember a cartoon involving dinosaur superheroes. A human family goes back in time, meets up with a caveman family and their dinosaurs, who protect them from bad guys. The triceratops could shoot stones from his horn, etc.

Gino said...

i prefered tricerotops.
he just minded his own business til you messed with him... then look out.