Not Quite Barney, but Showing a Softer Side

The New York Times ^ | June 27, 2005 | By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

[MRMEAN]

>A Tyrannosaurus rex greets shoppers on the second floor of the Toys "R" Us store at Times Square.

I do not know if we get the dinosaurs we deserve, but we certainly get the dinosaurs we desire. Once, they were known by their gigantism and monstrous power, by their claws and armored plates, their incisors and grotesque skulls. They earned their names: thunder lizard (Brontosaurus ), carnivorous bull (Carnotaurus), three-horned face (Triceratops). They were primal forces erupting from the planet's crust, relics of a brutal past.

Now, we have something else in mind. The extraordinary exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries," for example, opens with a recently discovered skeleton of a birdlike dinosaur named after a gentle Disneyesque deer: Bambiraptor.

[calex59]

Bambiraptor.

This has got to be a joke. Bambiraptor?

[Paul Atreides]

Once, they were known by their gigantism and monstrous power, by their claws and armored plates, their incisors and grotesque skulls. They earned their names: thunder lizard (Brontosaurus ), carnivorous bull (Carnotaurus), three-horned face (Triceratops).

[RichInOC]

The extraordinary exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries," for example, opens with a recently discovered skeleton of a birdlike dinosaur named after a gentle Disneyesque deer: Bambiraptor.

So what they're saying is that Bambi and Godzilla didn't just meet, but they may have mated as well?

[infocats]

How perfect for our time. A kinder, gentler Tyrannosaurus rex.

That reminds me of the original and now famous Milt Glaser poster showing a fearsome mountain lion with a Catskill Mountain backdrop.

With each new yearly printing, the mountain lion became more subdued, with the last printing looking like a tamed pussy cat, probably reflective of the second home building craze starting in the early eighties.

I call it the "tabification" of the Catskills because the original poster (and in fact, the Catskill Region itself) had lost all of its punch that had made it so attractive to the early settlers and to writers like John Burroughs.