Name a Dinosaur

Name a dinosaur. Any dinosaur.

Why does nearly everyone say Tyrannosaurus Rex? Why does he get all the attention? What’s he ever done for us apart from stomping around very, very heavily and roaring at jeeps in movies?

“What’s your favourite dinosaur?” I ask my husband.
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Well, he does mention T Rex, but follows up with quite a discourse on different dinosaur species (he is, after all, a preacher). In the end he decides he prefers Stegosaurus.
Stegosaurus is nice. You don’t know what the stegs were for, but mystery leaves room for speculation, and there’s always the remote delectable chance that your guesses will turn out as good as the palaeontologists’ best theories, and that one day when they finally discover the answer to the question of steggishness, you’ll be able to shrug and point to the date when you shared just that opinion on social media three years previously… I’m saying they were defensive, an imitation of an enormous poisonous plant, securing Stegosaurus his solitude and tranquillity. 

“Tell me a dinosaur,” I say to my 19-year-old.

“Thesaurus,” he says with a sarcastic look, and I feel unreasonably proud of him. He gave me the wrong answer. He didn’t say T Rex. I must have brought him up well.

He used to have a stuftie dinosaur, named Bronte because we decided it was a brontosaurus. One of the long-necked types, with four legs, and usually depicted munching on tree-ferns. It’s fun doing dinosaur voices. One of the perks of parenthood, so to speak. No-one can say for sure how a dinosaur would have sounded, but with a neck like that, Bronte ought to moo like a didgeridoo.
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I seem to remember, too, an odd selection of hard plastic dinosaurs that got bundled away into the Farm Set every time someone trod on them barefoot. The toothy types always looked hyper-alert and grinning, as though they’d spotted easy prey among the plastic sheep and pigs. I liked Triceratops better. Ruminative like a rhinoceros, old-looking like a knotted tree, steady of gaze as though he thinks he knows the secret to survival. Except that nothing knows the secret to survival when the world ends. A meteor strikes the planet or a new species turns rogue, destroys all habitats except its own. They have too much in common, Triceratops and Rhinoceros. So long, and thanks for all the fossils, or the traditional medicines, and the slow cryptic look that was in your eyes while you lived. We’re in the Anthropocene Age now, and please don’t try to tell us what comes after. 

Think of a dinosaur: think of a thing that has died. But also a thing that has lived—has run, stomped, swum or flown across a younger, stranger Earth, and left its mark in rocks and mud and genes, in crocodiles and stories and dragons.
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“Give me a dinosaur,” I say to my younger son, and he generously gives it a moment of thought, then offers me Pterodactyl. Technically not the Cretaceousest of dinosaurs to a serious palaeontologist, but a soaring monster of prehistory, and good enough for me. Better than good enough. He’s amazing: an alien, birdlike, batlike, manta-style and sharkish reptile of a sky that’s all his own. 

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​And a name that’s just enough of a mouthful to make you pause and say it twice. That elegant silent P, hanging off the not-so-silent echo of “terror”. Dactyl sounds appealingly rhythmic, almost ducklike, until you recall the toothiness of Pterodactyl’s jaws and the talons of his feet. He wouldn’t win in single combat with the Tyrant Rex, but he would rise above and taunt him, drop stones on his head, shriek like a murder of the crows that hadn’t arrived yet, and Tyrannosaur would slink away defeated.