Dinosaurs

Picked up a Tapejara figurine in the toy store and couldn't even tell if it was REAL. That's how much dinosaurs have changed since I was a boy reading about them. Back then, the standard line was

• Big slow lizards
• Tiny brains
• Extinct because -- well, not certain, really. Maybe drought, maybe cold, maybe simply out-evolved by smart mammals like us.

The book I remember reading as a boy was by Roy Chapman Andrews. Not that I remember the book, really, or the author. There was a mention of finding fossilized dinosaur eggs for, no kidding, the very first time.  And there was the dinosaur that laid the eggs, named after him: Protoceratops Andrewsi. They were found in Mongolia, where the author and his team of explorers had to be wary of nomadic bandits. I probably looked up Andrews and Mongolia and the Gobi Desert in the encyclopedia we had, and recall being confused about the world he had written about compared to the one described there. Mongolia didn't even exist any more: It was part of China, now. Much of it wasn't desert. Bandits were not mentioned as being a problem.  It was like this part of the world had completely changed a mere 40 years later.

And it's now 40 years again after that. Dinosaurs are now known as incredibly varied, from dangerously smart hunters to huge sea monsters to big slow - but social and complex - herd beasts. Extinction? Meteor - everyone knows that. All changes in perspective wrought starting in the late 1960s, becoming mainstream in the 1980s, with mass dissemination due in part to Jurassic Park. Mongolia, meanwhile, is still part of China. Bandits still aren't much trouble there. Some things change more quickly than others.