Rawr! Dinosaur!

Dinosaurs are back.  That’s the headline.  Not that stupid sitcom on ABC, actual dinosaurs.  Martialla, being the buzzkill that she is, says that they’re “not really” dinosaurs.  She says that they’re likely birds that have evolved into something like what we think a dinosaur looked like.  Like she’s a friggin’ archeologist.  When I looked to Lucien for support he just shrugged like a cowardly Canadian.  I knew there was no point in asking Paul since he only cares about murder and stacks of girly magazines. 

I don’t care what Martialla says (I mean ever) if it looks like a dinosaur and walks like a dinosaur and, well we didn’t hear what sound they made, but you get it.  Remember a few (and a hundred) years ago when scientist were all like “hey, dinosaurs have feathers” and everyone went “What, that’s dumb, dinosaurs are dumb now” and then they tried to walk it back by having some artists draw T-Rexes with rainbow feathers to try and make them look “cool”?  Being an archeologist must have been a great job because you could be wrong about everything and no one would ever know.

Now that you have the important information let’s backtrack a little.  Since there’s barely any room in Martialla’s little plane we had considered taking all the supplies we could stuff in there and heading out just the two of us, but somehow ended up doing the opposite – jamming both Paul and Lucien in the back and taking very few supplies.   Maybe if (when?) Paul goes nuts Lucien will stop him.  Or at least get killed first.  So that’s something.

I happen to know that in the olden days a flight from Sacramento to Boise was barely more than an hour (don’t ask).  I don’t know how much slower this little plane is from a commercial number but we were three hours in when we saw the dinos and I have no idea how much longer we have to fly. 

I spotted them first because I guess Martialla was busy looking at clouds or whatever you look at when you fly a plane and there are no windows in the back where Lucien and Paul are squashed together.  They don’t have feathers (I think) but I did think at first that they were ostriches based on their shape and the way they were running around.  Aside from humans you don’t see too many two-legged animals running and they have a particular stride about them.  Not that I’m an ostrich expert, but that’s the impression that I got. 

A flock of ostriches in America is interested enough on its own that I took a closer look and saw that instead of dumb tiny bird-heads they had more muzzle-y noggins on them with what looked like big scary dino-teeth but I realized later were just some kind of markings on their faces.  Those would have had to have been huge teeth to see them from a plane.  They were smooth and lizardy but they did have some kind of spiney-things on the backs of their “arms” and around the rump that were kind of feathery.  I give the scientists partial credit there. 

I said something along the lines of “Hey, are those dinosaurs down there?”  I didn’t notice for a while that they were running around because some other beast was chowing down on one of them.  It looked like a giant sloth-bear-wild boar.  Martialla, being a pill again, said that he thought that it looked like some kind of predatory wombat.  Because she has to ruin everything.  A wombat?  Get a life. 

I don’t know if it had killed the one it was eating.  It looked lumbery and too slow to catch one of them so maybe it was scavenging, but whatever had happened it was enjoying a nice meal of dino-ribs Fred Flintstone style while the rest of the flock ran around it in circles.  What were they doing?  Trying to scare it off?  Just freaking out because of what was happening?  I feel like normally when a member of herd goes down in the clutches of a predator the herd just keeps going.  Isn’t that the whole idea of grouping together – maybe the lion will get someone else and you can forget about it? 

Even with all the crazy stuff I’ve seen lately this was pretty crazy.  Martialla circled the plane around several times so we could watch, mostly me since as I said Paul and Lucien couldn’t see much.  Martialla was annoyingly nonplussed by god damn dinosaurs.  Although she must have been at least somewhat interested because she was distracted enough that she didn’t notice the other plane until it started shooting us.