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I like facts about dinosaurs.
Sometimes, when I tell people facts about dinosaurs,
they begin counting backwards in their heads.
But I still like them.
Fossil fuels are not dinosaurs.
Even though there were lots of dinosaurs,
they are in fact very difficult to find.
Not everything turns to stone, and lasts a billion years.
When I was a kid,
my nana gave me a large pictorial volume about dinosaurs,
because she knew that I loved them.
I took it to school.
The sixth grader Adam stole it and tore the pages.
Because he knew the same.
I never told my nana about the book. I didn’t know it then, but
I think I was ashamed.
The Brontosaurus never existed.
It was made up, an Apatosaurus body with a Camarasaurus head.
Back in the day,
mustachioed palaeontologists were locked in a rivalry
to find the most bones and give them names.
Bronto, meaning thunder, and sauro for lizard.
Apatelos, from the Greek – deceptive.
For decades, the Pittsburgh Museum of Natural History
had exhibited a cockentrice.
Posed mid-stride by wires for the peoples’ fascination.
Nana used to tell a story of how she lost her job, before she was married,
before my father even had a father of his own,
how she punched the foreman in the nose.
She told me never to do that, but always laughing as she did.
That’s not a fact about dinosaurs.
Or, then again, maybe it is.
