Can’t Teach A Dinosaur New Tricks?

I sometimes forget that I can learn something new.
Let me rephrase…

I always look forward to learning new things, but I’m sometimes surprised when I learn something new about something I thought I knew and had already learned!

The other day I was opening my eyes to the birds chirping in the early hours of the morning. I was stretching, and still waking up, when my daughter came up to me and said something like,

“Dinosaurs have feathers. I want to see a dinosaur feather.”

I can tell you that out of all the things I would have predicted my daughter to say at dawn, this would not be it!

Soon afterward, I had my phone in my hands, the purveyor of all knowledge (according to my 5 year old), and we were looking up stories about dinosaur tails caught in amber and pictures of beautiful tail feathers. The beauty is the cover photo for this post.

Learning New Old Stuff

When I was a kid I was taught that dinosaurs were cool, but they were extinct and the past is passed. The message I received was something like, paleontologists were still arguing about what happened to them, but aside from that great mystery, everything that we needed to know about dinosaurs was basically figured out. In fact, I recall visiting a museum and looking at a mural of huge dinosaurs in water–more lizard and amphibian like than anything else. Never could I imagine one of these dinosaurs with a feathery tail.

The mural I’m referring to lives at Peabody Museum at Yale and was a popular destination for school field trips. I specifically recall learning about the Apatosaurus and behind it was its ‘school picture’ with its other friends. The mural  “The Age of Reptiles,” was painted by Yale alumnus Rudolph F. Zallinger in the 1940s.

Cue the movie that launched an industry and made yesterday’s kids into today’s paleontologists and researchers.

Of course, we know that dinosaurs aren’t reptiles. The tail feathers caught in amber help us envision how these giants are more closely related to birds than reptiles.
These days the once famous Apatosaurus is properly known as Brontosaurus, and the museum I visited so many years ago received an update that was able to place the dinosaurs in more appropriate stances. (No dragging tails here!)

Oh…and I just found this article about a newly discovered Titanosaur with a heart-shaped tail bone! Fun!

I wonder what the next thing will be that I thought I knew and didn’t know I had something new to learn.