Like many children, neurotypical and otherwise, I spent a lot of my early childhood obsessed with dinosaurs.
I don’t remember how it started. It could have been the movie The Land Before Time. It could have been Dougal Dixon’s Dinosaurs or one of the other lavishly illustrated books my parents bought for me to encourage my interests. It might have been Walt Disney’s Fantasia, with its primal images of fire and transformation, hunger and disaster and death. (It definitely wasn’t Jurassic Park – I was already obsessed before that movie came out.) But I think it was probably earlier than any of those. In first and second grade, I remember trying to turn every school assignment into an opportunity to write my own story about dinosaurs, complete with illustrations, which I made by drawing the same dinosaur shapes with a stencil over and over…
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