In the long, often boring, and generally disappointing history
of evolution, nothing has managed to capture our imagination
quite like the dinosaurs.1 The simple fact that there were once
giant, terrifying reptiles with tiny brains who “ruled the
Earth”2 is enough to inspire awe, but that they then disappeared
prior to the invention of the camera phone really compounds it.
On the cosmic scale of things, the fact that grizzly bears
frighten us is a bit laughable, for if they stepped out of a
time machine and into the age of the dinosaurs, grizzly bears
would spend the majority of their short lives screaming like
children and running away from everything they saw – including
the plants, probably – and wondering what the hell was going on
here (and also kicking themselves for not just stopping the time
machine in 1929 and shorting the stock market, like they had
planned). ‘I’m short oil, I’m short steel, I’m short
railroads…I’m short pretty much everything. Oh, I’m from the
future.’ Of all the dinosaurs, none is