bbc planet dinosaur growing up with dinosaurs

Thu Sep 06, 2018

recently i just watched a brand new series on dinosaurs from bbc, which was about spinosaurs, a new dinosaur that was newly discovered called planet dinosaur







at this point i don't clearly remember my first encounter with dinosaurs. i think it might have been a tv show
the flintstones




, or maybe a coloring book. at some point though i did learn about them and became hooked. this was in the 70s and early 80s.


there was no internet in those days, at least not for most people, when the apple 2e was considered the most advance computer. and there were only like 5 tv stations, abc nbc cbs pbs and upn that's it, no cable.

so i had to rely mostly on books. books on dinosaurs

iirc it was only boys though that seemingly had any interest, nerdy boys who weren't athletic. obviously athletic boys were more interested in sports and in my time that was baseball. but i don't recall any girls having any interest in dinosaurs. mostly the girls seemingly were interested in gossip with other girls about other kids. not things of the world like the planets and dinosaurs

i did talk to other boys about dinosaurs and one debate which ray called me a retard was the color of dinosaurs. he said t-rex is green and triceratops is brown and i said we don't know what color they were. he said i was a retard. just look at the books.

i also talked about dinosaurs with girls and they seemingly showed no interest. they knew what a t-rex or a brontosaurs was but wasn't interested in saying more.

my elementary school to us to the chicago field museum and specifically dinosaurs that was awesome




we were allowed to ask question and one question i asked was about how scientists know what color they were and the guide said clearly that the color is not known. it is a fanciful guess based on real reptiles.

a lot of the dinosaur books featured a battle between t-rex and triceratops



this was more than a decade before the first movie jurassic park. there were tv shows that had dinosaurs and if they were live, they used what is called clay animation. of course now they have computer animation

one of the most confusing issues about dinosaurs for me was what the school and books said about dinosaurs and church.
in both church and catholic school we learned about adam and eve, noah and the ark and the global flood. we even were told about the leviathan as said in job.  were there dinosaurs on noah's ark? is that ark big enough for dinosaurs and all the other animals?

even in public school there were plenty of children raised in christian and mormon and even catholic and jewish families.
how does dinosaurs square with what the bible says?

were there dinosaurs when god created adam and eve as said in the bible? were there still dinosaurs when god flooded the world?

books and these people called scientists said that dinosaurs lived long before there were any people.

i was told contradictory things and i found it very confusing.

i moved on from dinosaurs to dungeons and dragons. but there were games like primal rage and movies like jurassic park that reminded me of this period of my very early childhood.

by the time i hit puberty and junior high i lost interest in dinosaurs. it seems to me a lot of girls lost interest in dolls.
a common topic of conversation was who do you like, as in romantically?

i now know that while dinosaurs are interesting to look at and amazingly  hugely big, they're not interesting in terms of behavior and personality,

what i really like now is this cutie who sadly died



a dinosaur is no more interesting to me than a hippo or a whale or a crocodile, though obviously these animals are potentially very hazardous. i prefer cats and dogs for the way they interact with people more than dinosaurs.

seeing a huge crocodile while an amazing site and potentially very dangerous,



kinda reminds me of bigfoot, and not something that happens every day, but that's it. i just look at it and gawk and then move on.

seeing cute cats like my simba that makes my heart melt.

dinosaurs were simple in my day. there was trex and allosaurus which ate meat. brontosaurs and triceratops which ate plants and "dinosaurs" pterodactyls which fly and ichystaurus and pleasiraurus which swim and dimetrodon and a handful of others like a turtle looking dinosaur

now there are hundreds if not thousands to learn about. kinda like pokemon which was popular after i reached adulthood.

the bbc documentary and jurassic park sequel featured a newly discovered dinosaur spinosaurus even bigger than t-rex

i don't now find dinosaurs interesting but i'll watch computer animated documentaries from bbc and movies like lost world for a few minutes of fun. and seeing that huge crocodile was scary.

what i want now though is something that effects my emotions and that's cats and dogs. dogs though are too high maintenance. its easier for me to keep a cat alive than a house plant.



i also have since learned that the bible is contradicted by science and between the two, i go with science over the bible.
there's no way to reconcile the scientific understanding of the origin of the universe with the bible, by having the days be billions of years, for example.

if i were to invent a new religion, i would start by saying that we accept the conclusions of science, that the universe started in a big bang 14.6 billion years ago, earth 4.5 billion years and dinosaurs died in the late Cretaceous 65 million years ago, long before humans, accept evolution and throw out the entire old testament

i would instead that as did the gnostics and neoplatonist and taoist that the tao consists of light and dark, the universe emanated from the tao like light from the sun, and that christ death on the cross brought the cosmic alignment of the universe to the light.

for kids watching this, computer animation is far superior to clay animation lol. but in my day i had to settle for clay representing dinosaurs and they were animated by having them move which looked awful. but that was state of the art of the 70s.



i would be interested in news if they actually discover a living dinosaur which like bigfoot is something i heard about in the world of the paranormal, of reports of dinosaurs like loch ness and in the african jungles of the congo.