Triceratops

When I was really little, I had a poster on the wall in front of my bed with different species of dinosaurs on it. It labeled each dinosaur, whether if they are herbivores, canivores or ominvores. It compared and constrasted the human-to-dinosaur height and weight ratio, among other things that I don’t remember about it. I also had a few dinosaur toys that I would play with taking baths in the apartment my mom and I stayed in when my parents first split up. They helped me cope with the change in environment and fed the little bit of curiousity I had, at the time, for science. The poster was trashed when I turned seven or eight. For a while after that, I stopped thinking about dinosaurs.

I remember that the triceratops was my favorite dinosaur (and it still is). For some reason, I found it’s horns and shape cute. They reminded me of my old bulldog, Bruiser, who passed away the summer before my freshman year of high school. Plus, I was thoroughly convinced that they couldn’t eat me if they were to magically come back to life because they eat plants, not meat.

Growing up, I was super religious and I have no clue why. My family (and Catholic school when I was six) encouraged Catholic-Baptist faith and, for a long time, I didn’t know anything outside of God and the Garden of Eden. When it came to things like dinosaur fossils and evolution, I didn’t understand how they fit into the bigger picture. I didn’t deny the existence of dinosaurs, because there was sufficient evidence that, at one point, they did walk the Earth. I was naive when I was little; I thought that the dinosaur-human situation was something like The Flinstones, not knowing any better.

When I turned nine, I started to really question my faith. I was still a devout believer, and no one could tell me otherwise that there was never a man named Jesus who was born from a virgin and Jehovah Himself (not even my Dad, who is a strict Atheist), but the world started to change for me in ways I had never seen before. I attended a private school in the Capital and had a science teacher who was gay. I had never met a gay man before and couldn’t wrap my head around the idea thtat two men could kiss each other and have kids. I wasn’t disgusted by homosexuality - my family just never talked to me about these things. I wish that they did today because I probably looked like an idiot from how confused I was, but I get why they didn’t. I was way too young to understand those things.

The dinosaur issue came back when I was ten and the country was very different. I went back to public school because my parents couldn't commute me back and forth every morning. I knew that “faggots burn in Hell” because my classmate told me so when I came out to her as lesbian (I was a very confused kid) and I knew what the Big Bang Theory was (first the show, then the actual theory). I’ve read the Bible and I interpreted it the way I saw fit; I watched a documentary that stated that, if the Universe kept a record of its history from the very start, then it could see the history of life on Earth only lasting seven days in comparison to the rest. In the Bible, God made the Earth and all life on it in seven days. That had to mean that the dinosaurs lasted for a day, however long God’s days first were before the Mayans and the Romans created calenders.

In middle school, things changed again and my problem with dinosaurs came back full swing. By that time, I gave up praying and I hated going to church (still do, not gonna lie. Mass is boring af.) My life was just too much of a mess (or, at least I thought it was a mess) to believe in a God that didn’t want to listen to me. My spat with sexuality ended and I decided that “I don’t care” when it comes to who I want to be with. There were bigger fish to fry than if I was going to be condemned to Hell because I like what I like and because I don’t appreciate “being neglected” by a benevolent God. Because of very persuasive and alt-Left classmates that I made in the eighth grade, who were really just disturbed fucks that I regret ever befriending, I threw up the middle finger to Jesus and decided right then and there that dinosuars existed before people, no God involved.

I’m seventeen now and a senior in high school. The dino-dilema that I have has faded out over time, because who cares what I or others believe? I think that the dinosaurs were creatures that evolved into birds, reptiles, anphibians and mammals. I think whales evolved from wolves. I think that I was probably a paleontologist in a past life and that’s why I thought dinosaurs were so cool as a kid. I think that Jesus is Middle Eastern and was kicking it with prostitutes of all sexualities. I think that, at the end of the day, I took the words of others too seriously and formed my own viewpoint too late.

The thing people find facisnating about dinosaurs, I think, isn’t the dinosaurs themselves, but the controversy behind their existence. I think that little bit of discorse is what drives normal, avergae people in to them. I can’t speak for the creators of Jurassic Park/World or paleontologists, but I’m pretty positive that I can say that the raging beliefs regarding evolution-versus-religion sparks the significant interest.

Either that, or it’s all because of Jurassic Park.