If you’re part of the crowd that believes Valentine’s Day is dying out, you’re actually correct. Now I’m not one of the salty, angst-filled people who despise the holiday due to being single. Whenever I feel in doubt of the importance of Valentine’s Day, I remember all the quotes Dumbledore told us about love and it makes me feel a bit better inside. Yet at the end of the day, something still feels disconnected. Love is such a broad and open concept that we can pretty much turn the holiday into anything we want. I love that tree, I love that carpet pattern, I love the fact that Christmas time with my extended family was cancelled because Grandpa started being racist again. Love is strange.
Some days I find myself aimlessly staring into the wall. A void of nothingness is on my face. In my head is that scene in Jurassic Park when Alan Grant sees the living dinosaurs for the first time. You know what I’m talking about.
So with the recent success of Jurassic World and the influx of dinosaur culture coming back to us, I started wondering to myself why we didn’t have more of a time appreciating these massive AMAZING INCREDIBLE INSANE creatures. Yeah sure, dinosaurs appear in a lot of things but it’s just not…enough? I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like seeing your best friend in the world leave for another country, and you’ll never see them again. It’s like losing a pet. You can get on, but there’s a sadness that lingers one cannot escape from.
I decided that Valentine’s Day is no longer acceptable culture-wise. It’s over. Dead. Done. It’s time to move on and appreciate (worship) the beasts that once stood on the ground before there was a thought we could exist. Here are my reasons as to why:
1. Look at these claws.
It’s no secret that Velociraptors haunted the thoughts and dreams of many children and adults. If you haven’t had a thought of turning round a corner and there’s a raptor right there, waiting to devour you, you’re lying to yourself.
Scientists looked at the claws of a raptor and assumed they were for killing, slicing, maiming, all that great stuff. But as it turns out, they were for so much more. In fact, the claws of a raptor were to lock onto prey and prevent them from escaping. Then they’d start the killing, slicing and maiming. See? It all works out in the end.
Sure, raptors were horrifying devices nature put together for the sake of filling up Target toy shelves but LOOK:
If we gotta bring Valentine’s Day back into this, who’s to say that those massive claws couldn’t be put to good use for raptors to hold hands? Who’s to say little raptor babies didn’t draw pictures of little animals in the dirt (that they later brutally killed)? Scientists can’t say for sure, so I say dinosaurs loved and raptors could only show love with their claws. When they killed people in Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, it was just a hug and kiss. That’s all. With a bit of blood.
2. Dinosaurs are already a part of our culture – but not enough.
It’s a little disappointing that the government has totally ignored our needs for more dinosaurs. Only a handful of states have adopted a state dinosaur, and no state or country has a dinosaur on a flag. What a lost opportunity.
For some unknown reason, children form their childhood around dinosaurs . At some point a lot of us had a dinosaur phase, or a dinosaur fantasy (some authors even make a pretty penny over their dinosaur fantasies). Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time brought many children to tears for the first time in any movie. Watch this and imagine your childhood again:
While it’s apparent, dinosaurs are still shoved to the side for dragons or monster movies. We’ve got real life monsters right before us, but alas, they are not used. We need congressional legislation to expand dinosaurs into many facets of our lives. Why isn’t the National Endowment of the Arts giving grants to dinosaur artists? It remains to be seen.
3. Dinosaurs have a better history.
A big difference between Valentine’s Day and Dinotines Day is that Valentine’s Day has the longer history. I'll give it that. Same old history, really: some Romans had a holiday to celebrate fertility (good old Romans) and Christians decided that was “too pagan” for their tastes and dedicated it to St. Valentine instead, who (maybe) had a fight with a Roman Emperor over marriage rights and was jailed there. After falling in love with the daughter of a prison guard, upon his execution he sent her a letter that ended with “from your Valentine."
Maybe. After nearly two thousand years it’s a little hard to find historical records from people who solved disputes by murdering a lot of people in the name of a bunch of different Gods.
Yeah, that’s cool and all. But have you heard of the Bone Wars?
Professor Othniel Marsh and paleontologist Edward Cope had dreams of being of the greatest fossil hunters in American history. Naturally, that led to unbelievable amounts of shade between the two. What started as a simple rivalry got pretty out of hand. The two men already were from different sides of the tracks: Cope was from a wealthy and privileged family, and Marsh not so much. After being funded by his rich uncle to study Science at Yale. When the two men came together, personalities were already clashing.
In a friendly greeting, Cope invited Marsh to check out his excavation site. Marsh took the next natural step and bribed all of Cope’s workers to send fossils directly to him and bypass their boss. Cope was understandably pissed.
Marsh decided to call out Cope on a fossil where the head was placed on the wrong end. Cope did the same in return (both were weirdly right). When Marsh went west he decided to claim a bunch of land and dinosaur boneyards, while also using his connections to publish all his works in the eastern presses.
Cope ended up getting extremely poor and was forced to sell his home and personal fossils he’d found around the time Marsh was named head of the US Geological Survey. Are you noticing a pattern here?
Deciding he wasn’t going to be smacked around anymore, Cope went to Como Bluff, where Marsh had claimed the boneyard. He dug anyways. The two became so competitive that spies were placed in opposite camps and when they couldn’t carry the bones back, they destroyed them.
Yes. They destroyed them.
After they took their anger to their press, everyone hated them for not shutting up and doing their science. Cope lost everything after bad financial choices to fund his digs and Marsh was fired from his job.
They found over one hundred and thirty different skeletons and talked crap about each other until death. Cope had the last laugh, when artist Charles R. Knight contacted him and made some pretty incredible paintings based on his findings.
I always figured this story would make an amazing musical but Lin-Manuel Miranda won’t seem to reply to my tweets.
The myths of dragons, ogres and griffins? Dinosaurs. In 1679 a dinosaur bone was found by Reverend Plot in England, who claimed he had the thigh bone of a human giant. We’ve always had an idea about dinosaurs but never really understood them until fairly recently. Quite a bit of our mythology stems from confused people finding giant bones.
Am I the only one who thinks the Bone Wars are 10 times cooler than anything else in life?
4. Dinosaurs had big hearts.
I only say that because they found the biggest dinosaur of all time fairly recently and I wanted you to see how wild it is. There’s a deep, secret fantasy in the back of all our minds that has us owning a piece of land and finding ancient, mysterious bones in the backyard. How wonderful would that be?
Once again, if you don’t have that fantasy you are lying to yourself.
5. King Kong vs. T-Rex
That's all that needs to be said.
I, for one, will be putting Dinotines Day over Valentine’s Day, because what choice to we have? We’re at a brick wall we must get over. I’m talking dinosaur cookies, dinosaur shaped food, dinosaur themed gifts, walking down an outdoor mall for your Dinotines Day gifts and the Jurassic Park score plays over the crowd.
My words may not convince you. Perhaps this music will.
