Dinosaurus Preposterosus

In the matter of career choices, the young person who otherwise has no evident qualities the world is crying out for can be forgiven for thinking that unearthing dinosaurs is just the type of thing he ought be able to get into.

He has liked the creatures since he first saw them, rearing up near the entrance of local and regional natural history museums.

If he is on the outs with the principal and the rest of the governing regime in grade school, or if there is a clutch of romantic rivals vying for the attention of Mary Jane Wilson, she of the red hair and green eyes, then he could dwell in his imagination on the image of the creature coming to life and eating the principal and the romantic rivals in one swift action, a kind of volume discount that resolves all his problems between one minute and the next.

The name itself, dinosaur, is attractive, and translates as Terrible Lizard, one of the better monikers in the last 20 million years. Not all Latinate taxonomic names translate so well.

There are fossil creatures out there described in the same books as the dinosaurs appear in whose names in English come out as Nocturnal Slime, or Shame of the Sea Slugs, this when by all appearances sea slugs are not easily shamed.

Better in these cases to politely refer to them by their Latin names when making introductions.

By contrast, you cannot see one of these dinosaur characters actually objecting to the name; much more likely they will readily own up to it: “Terrible Lizard, yes, yes, that’s me,” and answer to it promptly when called upon in class.

It also doesn’t seem to require an inordinate amount of equipment, this dinosaur hunting business.

You could get by, at least if we are to judge by the movies, with no more to your name than a pith helmet, a shovel or two, some twine and flags to stake out your various digs, and one of those brushes that you use to dust off the various bone or horn or tusk fragments that you come across and stare at in wonder when you realize the implications of the find.

They could be enormous, these implications, and they make you reel with the thought of them, so maybe a canteen for water or perhaps something stronger is also called for to unreel you.

Most of these things can be bought, reasonably priced, in the Boy Scouts section of your local Sears Roebuck.

These matters aren’t the problem.

The problem is that as it turns out it is a field hard to make a distinction in.

You are not the only one, my friend, who would happily play in the world’s sandbox as you did as a toddler, digging things up and looking around for praise every time you unearthed something.

You like traveling to remote places with names pulled from antiquity and moving from village to village and considering what an adventurer you are?

You’re not the only one. It ranks up there right behind other romantic careers such as becoming a movie actor, or a prospector for gold, or a writer of humorous essays.

It’s worth mentioning too that many men who do not look good in any other type of hat, who in fact look like a failed embezzler whose image you’d expect to find on the Post Office wall, look pretty danged good in a pith helmet. Women notice these things even when they say they don’t. You find a solution to the perennial problem of getting something on that head of yours that modifies its melon-like qualities for the viewer and you do not lightly give it up. This draws and keeps many participants in the field.

The challenges do not stop there.

One of the peculiarities of this field of study is the downright poverty-stricken nature of the finds.

Nature doles out its treasures in this field frugally, like an unwilling giver at Christmastime walking briskly past the Salvation Army bell ringer.

Contrary to the impression we get from our serious study of the movies, complete dinosaur skeletons are essentially never found. It is all a matter of fragmentary clues, clever postulations, and ramshackle hypotheses. A segment of a femur bone counts as sound evidence of the entire beast, as good as it gets really, and a complete earlobe or toenail causes celebrations to break out in natural history museums worldwide.

You do not get this, by the way, in other fields of study. The musical historian does not happen upon a scrap of manuscript paper with three notes scribbled on it and say, “Whoaa! Some symphony!”

The ardent student of medieval manuscripts does not find a scrawl on a crumbling page of a book in a monastery and conclude, “Netflix! They had Netflix!”

These types of inferences are viewed as premature.

Not so in dinosaurology. You’ve got an old bone that passes muster and the world is at your feet.

It is this passing muster business that ranks at the top of the challenges that stymies the enterprising newcomer.

You may have your pith helmet, your staked digging site, your canteen, and even your very own bone fragment, but you are not yet complete.

You need to have a story in place and stick to if you want entry into these august gatherings.

Best in these circumstances to make your claim as ridiculous as possible. This may be in contrast to your first impulse, which is to stitch together a plausible falsehood and push it for all you’re worth.

Don’t do it!

Entirely fictional but seemingly realistic assertions firmly fixed in a non-fantasy world are just too easy to undermine. It is the nature of small minds to deny new conjectures just because they are made up from whole cloth, so don’t give them anything to hang their hats on.

I am not saying that you don’t make things up! Good God, don’t be ridiculous.

What I am saying is that you need to make it good and so astounding that it is unassailable. It is hard to argue with a man when your mouth is agape at just what a ridiculous thing he is saying. A gift for brisk narrative and the placement of the lively detail are your friends in this matter.

Say you have found some small fragment of some stone-like material that may or not have at one time or perhaps in another dimension been a piece off a dinosaur or something that resembled one. You never know.

Now what are you going to say about it?

You must avoid the obvious. What is the use of describing your dinosaur in its original state as ‘big’?

This is pathetic.

They’re all big.

They’re all also all these other things that you can think of on the spot, such as spike-tailed, duck-billed, armor-sheathed, crested, horned, long-necked, tyrannic, ill-tempered.

It’s been done. This is yesterday’s news.

But has anyone ever brought forward a dinosaur that sings?

How about one that plays cards?

Or smokes cigars?

Or shaves?

A case can be made for all of these potentialities, careers have been built on less. Simply hold up your fragment at the lecture you give at this posh lecturey type hall and gesture with your pointer at the enlarged version shown on the screen. “See?” you say patiently for those who have trouble keeping up with the pace and richness of your thinking. “He sings.” And then you move on to the next slide.

If you are challenged from the crowd, simply tug at your white lab coat as if you can’t believe what you have to put up with these days and say “and your proof that this dinosaur does not sing is exactly what, Dr. Jordon?” This puts him in his place and the crowd is soon on your side.

I do not say that you have to write a book about this creature and his singing voice. This is not the best use of your time. You do not have to determine his favorite category of song, his favored key and tempo, whether he was known as a ham or celebrated for his understated elegance of delivery.

It is enough to convey that by your investigations into the matter the creature had a pleasant baritone and didn’t mind being asked to sing at parties.

To hint that there were barbershop quartet competitions across the ancient marshes seems a bit much; this takes your narrative gift a little too far.

No, in these matters the light touch is called for, and after all, who is going to be willing to demolish such a pleasant image?

Soon you too will take your place in the pantheon of the great dinosaur unearthers and can look proudly at your finds in famous museums around the world, now fully reconstructed to their monstrous size, and now accurately placed in their natural habitats, lighting a stogie, dealing out a round of five card stud with their short arms, and urged on by friends pushing across the latest from Tin Pan Alley with enough vigor that they can be heard a full geologic age away.