I still think dinosaurs are awesome

When I was little, just about every grade in elementary school "science" included a unit on dinosaurs, probably because (a) kids think dinosaurs are nifty and (b) there are excellent museums in the tri-state area that feature dinosaurs, and possibly (c) they had a special government grant to produce a crop of paleontologists? if so it didn't work. Anyway, lotsa dinosaurs growing up (unlike Reuben's district, I've been told, which didn't include dinosaurs because the fundies didn't like them? something like that).

So as a youngster I was pretty enthusiastic about dinosaurs, and read Jurassic Park in the fifth grade, and always turned in my permission slips for trips to the natural history museum on time or even early (!!). Actually I'm really interested in almost all really big and really small animals (the big ones because they're cool, the small ones because they're generally cute), and while dinosaurs happen to fit both those categories, the really interesting ones were the ones that were inconceivably big--the ones so big I couldn't even imagine how they would compare to, say, my house or car or--well, the tallest building in Hightstown was like four stories, so maybe I was particularly disadvantaged as far as envisioning very tall things.

So today I was reading something or other, I can't even remember what, and found out that, since my childhood, they have been discovering more and bigger dinosaurs--in my day they topped out at the Diplodocus, which was pretty frickin big, but nowadays kids--well, the ones who are fortunate enough to live in non-fundy districts--learn about even more inconceivably large dinosaurs, like the Seismosaurus and Supersaurus and the other dinosaurs found here. Or, they do if the curricula have kept up with the science, actually rather doubtful. But kids today have google! We didn't have google in my day, so even if kids aren't learning it in school they conceivably could. And that's nifty--even bigger dinosaurs. So cool.