Are you sitting down?
Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by the folks who make Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs Assorted Real Fruit Snacks, the monstrous reptiles that roamed the planet for 170 million years or so of the Mesozoic Era were not half-inch-high gelatinous blobs of red, purple, and green. They contained neither corn syrup nor partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Nothing in the fossil record suggests that they traveled primeval Earth in groups of six individual pouches.
Yes, I exaggerate. You and I are obviously aware that dinosaurs, wildly popular as a motif in toys, games, books, clothing, interior design, and foodstuffs, are often inaccurately represented. We sense somehow that despite the maiasaurs’ reputation for attentive parenting, the good mother lizards didn’t iron their kids’ clothes like Mrs. Sinclair of TV’s Dinosaurs. We’ve guessed that Chef Boyardee doesn’t bake his T. rex ravioli to scale, and we know that regardless of the way milk-chocolate Dinosuckers are configured, the flesh-and-blood originals didn’t have sticks through their middles.
Still, the Dinosaur Society is worried. A nonprofit organization barely a year old, the Dinosaur Society is dedicated to revealing and correcting inaccuracies in popular dinosaurabilia. Its board of directors includes eminent paleontologists like John Horner, curator of Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies (1), and David Weishampel and Peter Dodson, editors of the authoritative text The Dinosauria. They’re concerned about business folk who act as if there’s a dinosucker born every minute.
