While surfing the web for ideas on what to write about for this week's ever-anticipated Odyssey article, every student's greatest fear came to pass: my WiFi went out. Cursing my fate and feeling too lazy to go downstairs and unplug the internet modem, I decided to do the next best thing, which was to play the little dinosaur jumping game that pops up whenever Google Chrome loses WiFi connection. You know the game, right? A tiny T-Rex, adorable in all his 8-bit glory, appears on the grey loading screen, ready to be controlled by the arrow keys in a race to avoid all the cartoon cacti and low-flying birds that this Google-run game is ready to throw at you. The game is fun, its fast, and…its history is a total mystery to me. So, my interest finally piqued, I decided to dig in and do a little research on the history of one of our most famous internet moguls, the tiny Google dinosaur himself.

While the Google dinosaur originally was found only on the Google Campus (apparently the company has a deep and undying interest in the prehistoric, who knew?), web designers working for Google decided to add in this little dino to help distract people from their WiFi wait time. Why a T-Rex, though? Google cites two reasons: first, because the King of Dinosaurs has small arms and thus can't reach the Internet; clever, no? The other reason is a simple play on words: if you're seeing a dinosaur, it means you're stuck in the land before time--aka the land before WiFi.

So, next time you're tapping your foot and waiting for the WiFi to finally connect to your laptop, take heart in knowing that the little dinosaur that pops up was chosen for the express purpose of keeping you entertained and happy...and that those bird obstacles can show up really quick.