Do you ever spend your free time daydreaming about how awesome dinosaurs are? Or how you sometimes wish that if you could have anything in the world, it would be a baby dino to love and play with? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I think you and I just became best friends. If you answered ‘no,’ then congratulations, you're a normal human being. Whether passionately excited about the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous reptiles, or just mildly interested in them, here are six reasons we can all agree that dinosaurs are a pretty rad species:
1. Dinosaurs are super-hecka-for-realz terrifying.
This one goes without saying. Have you ever seen a dinosaur? Well, no, I guess you haven't, but we have pretty good ideas of what they looked like, and we know that many of them were massive, gnarly, beastly, unfriendly and vicious creatures. Yes, there is a reason the “Jurassic Park” franchise is so successful, and that is because being trapped on an island with man-eating dinosaurs roaming freely and hunting you for dinner is excellent nightmare material.
2. But they're also super-hecka-for-realz adorable.
I'm not talking about dinosaurs like Littefoot from “Land Before Time,” or Baby Bop from “Barney & Friends,” I'm not even talking about Yoshi from Super Mario World or Rex from “Toy Story,” all of whom are pretty dang cute. Let me bring the Brachiosaurus and Triceratops to our attention for a minute. Remember that scene in “Jurassic Park” when Alan and the kids feed the Brachiosaurus a tree branch the morning after the traumatic T-Rex incident? That was pretty cute, let’s be real. Who wouldn't want to feed leaves to a good ol’ Brachi? And have you ever heard someone say, “Wow, Triceratops are really scary?” I mean, if they were trying to eat you, that'd be scary, but has a Triceratops ever tried to eat you? I didn't think so.
3. Dinosaurs have the illest names.
Can you say Archaeopteryx or Beipiasaurus? I can't either. But there's no denying that in spite of being complete toung-twisters, these names are pretty rad. Sometimes I wonder if paleontologists name dinosaurs through the method of picking random letters and throwing them together to make the greatest names ever. Zigongosaurus—how fun is that to say? And the Dreadnoughtus? You know you're hardcore when your nickname is Dread. That's heavy metal.
4.They're fun to impersonate.
Who doesn't love a good dinosaur strut? There's something about pretending to be a giant reptile that is satisfying to the human heart. I don't know about you, but after many years of practice, I have nearly perfected the dinosaur screech (still working on my dino roar, though). What was that? You don't practice being a dinosaur in your free time? Well this is awkward…
5. There are so many different kinds of dinosaurs!
From the classic Tyrannosaurus to the more obscure Ankylosaurus, from the pterosaurs of the sky to the marine reptiles of the sea, the list of dinosaurs that we have discovered is long and overwhelming. We’ve found herbivores and carnivores, dinosaurs that can fly, ones that can swim, and others that stay on land. We’ve uncovered the bones of giant predators and the bones of small plant-eaters, just as we have found giant plant-eaters and small predators. Some dinosaurs had feathers, others had spikes. The variety of dinosaurs that walked this earth is astounding, and that's pretty dang cool.
6. The reality that dinosaurs were actually real is kind of mind-blowing.
Just think about it for a minute. It’s crazy that these scary (and sometimes cute) looking monsters once roamed the very planet we’re living on! The T-Rex—that giant beast that helps saves the day at the end of “Jurassic World” in the awesomest way ever—actually existed! Sure, it probably never attacked a mutant hybrid dinosaur that went rogue, but the T-Rex was still a real reptile monster (no offense, Rexy). Pterodactyls really did fly among our skies and Triceratops really did eat Earth’s plants. Is that crazy to think about, or what? If that's not rad, I don't know what is.
