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"We all have a dinosaur deep within us just trying to get out."

-Colin Mochrie

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

-G.K. Chesterton

            I think the first multi-syllabic word I ever learn was Triceratops. Or Jesus. The jury is still out.

            In any case, dinosaurs ruled my four -and-a-half-year-old world and, for about a year, were the sole priority of my every day life. Of course, this translated into sneaking downstairs to watch Jurassic Park on VHS and bi-weekly visits to The Science Place in the far-off kingdom of Fair Park, my hands running up the fossil-encrusted staircase outside, stone-encased crustaceans basking in the Texas summer heat. I was an archeologist. I was an astronaut who found dinosaurs on Venus. I was Sam Neill with a bandana around my neck and a velociraptor claw dangling from my belt-loop.

As I said in the angsty, pen-soaked months of 2008:

Jurassic

This stale air is drastically different than your steam-drenched Eden,

isn’t it?

What once were billowing trees have been replaced by marbled pillars and

the comfortable, damp soil has changed into smooth, tiled linoleum.

And, after all these years, I don’t think you’ve adjusted.

Just look at you!

Your jowl is still clenched, captured in a final act of defiance and

you, scaled angel of Death, still have that

flaming sword, gripped between those gnarled, petrified fingers,

your empty eyes still

daring anyone to come nearer. But the

gummy-gaping four-and-a-half year old just can’t seem to hear your

roaring warning, still crawling its way through stony lungs and

his grimy hands will snatch your Apple of Knowledge.

            Today I went back to The Science Place, for the first time in over ten years, on a field trip with my anxious campers.  The wonder that I experienced over a decade prior was completely absent from their ten-year-old eyes, replaced with boredom and twitching joystuck thumbs.

The Powers That Be, in their white lab coats and spectacles, have changed the name to the much-more-official-sounding “The Museum of Nature and Science,” evoking Smithsonians and long hallways of wax prairie dioramas. TPTB have removed the prehistoric shells from the front-steps, polished and empty, now only crevices and grooves. TPTB have taken down the giant mural of brush-stroke illusions at the entrance, leaving only peeling egg-shell-white paint on the silent wall.

They’ve changed everything.

But the IMAX screen is still there, now falling apart in individual tiles, and still curving upwards to strained infinity. But the marble floor is still there, planets and constellations formed out of lines and circles, trampled on by Velcro, light-up feet. And the exhibits are still there, the old ones of the T-Rex, bubbles, and nose-blowing, hidden behind the new interactive shit that the “experts”, TPTB, have set out for this new generation, featuring Timmy Turner and Nokia sponsorships, hidden behind the new truths and virtual realities that are alien to me.

And so my childhood is all-but-forgotten. Extinct.