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Why Do Kids Love Dinosaurs?
by Odds Bodkin
They're monsters, but they're not aliens.
They're dangerous, but they're not around anymore.
They're as big as houses.
And you can see them coming.
Dinosaurs tower above our small imaginations, knocking down trees and sniffing their young with roaring nostrils. And if you're a child, you can imagine yourself in their world, cowering under bushes and praying they don't see you.
Or you can imagine what it must be like to own one. A pet dino. One who, like a trained elephant, kneels gently to let you clamber up onto his back to parade the neighborhood as other kids clamor for a ride.
Why do dinosaurs stand head and shoulders above the competition when it come to kids?
As a storyteller who tells stories about dinosaurs, I have my theories.
Because they're extinct, dinosaurs can be whatever a child wants them to be. Although paleontologists speculate about their behavior based on their fossil skeletons, we really don't know how dinos sounded, what they thought, how they smelled, how they slept, and so on. So children have greater leeway in imagining their behavior than that of living species.
In a manner of speaking, we all possess a dinosaur brain. Scientists often refer to the brainstem -- the medulla that connects the two other regions of the brain (the cerebellum and the cerebrum) to the spinal cord -- as the "reptilian brain." It heats up when we are acting acquisitive, hungry, territorial and aggressive. So when we behave in those ways, we're closer than we think to those ancient masters of the planet.
Children play with toy dinosaurs and when they do, they project their own fantasies about being small but powerful. If someone pushed me around on the playground, you would bet when I got home, even my smallest dinosaur made quick work of big T-Rex.
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