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H is for Hip

Trex takes a step to the ri-i-i-ight. Photo from Youtube.

We’ve got to get into the hips. Hips are what the dinos are all about, which is why I’ve spent the last half hour trying to create a picture of a dinosaur doing the Time Warp. You know, put your hands on your hips? Apparently, pelvic thrust is considered NSFW. And, when I asked several AI picture generators, they took forever, asked for a lot of info I didn’t want to give them, and then gave me a very lame picture of a dinosaur dancing, which I could have just got off Clip Art anyway. Which I did — so there’s our buddy dino doing the Time Warp.

Did you know there’s a whole wiki showing you how to do the Time Warp? Because you can learn anything on the Internet!

Along with the extra hole in the head–remember letter “A”?–dinosaurs are dinosaurs because of the way their hips were designed. It’s what helps distinguish dinosaurs from the crocodiles and other non-bipedal lizards. And it separates the two dinosaur divisions from each other. Although that’s becoming a controversy, as we shall see.

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G is for Godzilla

Godzilla was definitely a dinosaur. The question is : Which one? And that means, of course, both which kind of dinosaur and which Godzilla, since there were several. Plus, always with the science, the ultimate question is: How do we know?

One thing is known about the Big Guy. Godzilla is the only dinosaur to have both an Oscar and his own theme song.

Which Godzilla

If we’re going to define what kind of dinosaur Godzilla represents, we have to narrow the list to which one we’re talking about. In total, there have been 38 film Godzillas (33 Japanese) beginning with the one in 1954. While I’d love to spend a leisurely post (or ten) about Godzilla’s history, let’s stick with the dinosaur theme. Point being, there have been a lot of renditions of Godzilla which look different, so if we’re going to call him a dinosaur we have to narrow the field to at most three.

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F is for Fossil

Fossil of plant-eating teeth, Morrison museum, photo by kajmeister

Fossils never excited me. Skulls do, but I could never find the thrill of a 1000-year-old imprint of a leaf. Imprint of a 200-million-year-old feather? Now you’re talking. Yet we wouldn’t know anything about the world that came before, without fossils. Everything we know about dinosaurs comes from fossils. You don’t get to know what T-rex ate, how a diplodocus withstood attack, how hadrosaurs laid eggs, or where the sauropods walked — without fossils. Fossils are the artifacts, the archive as the historians say, which prove that there was life before humans.

And they’re not really even bones.

Theseus’ Paradox

There’s a famous Greek philosophy idea about Theseus’ ship. Theseus sailed out to the island of Crete and slew the minotaur in the maze, plus had many grand adventures, which is why Athens was named for him. The story goes that the ship of his odyssey (no, that’s another guy) was put on display as a monument. Over time, the wood rotted, so a plank was replaced here, then there, then the mast…. Over a long time, all of the wood in the ship was replaced.

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