Kids love dinosaurs and that is a good thing
The popularity of dinosaurs is an entirely modern phenomenon. Fossils were discovered in the past but it only led to stray conjectures rather than an understanding of the past inhabitants of this planet. It is only in the 1800s that we created a good understanding of the dinosaurs and modern dating tools tell us that they were the dominant species on earth from around 220 million years ago to 66 million years ago. Since the last few decades, dinosaurs have captured the imagination of children and it is a good thing.
Dinosaurs become an excellent tool through which children can relate to the vast time spans involved in this universe and earth. The distant past can all blur into one fuzzy era if we are not careful. Once we correlate that human beings invented agriculture only 10,000 years ago with the fact that dinosaurs existed for 160 million years before being wiped out by an asteroid impact, it puts our current existence in perspective.
Especially in India, where our mythology has a very long view of time this can give an excellent way for even a 10 year old to distinguish facts from fiction. Mythology is a window into the minds of the ancients rather than into the facts of history.
Granny: There were four yugas: Satya, Treta, Dwapar and Kali. All of them put together are a Mahayug nearly 4 million years long. And a 1000 of them is only one of Brahma’s day!
10 year old: Ah, so Brahma would have seen dinosaurs! They were somewhere in the middle of a billion years and now. Is there a Brahma and Dinosaur story?
Granny: Err … you know, these beliefs are not about what really happened. They are what our ancestors believed in. They tell us more about how our ancient one’s thought and what they knew.
10 year old: Many thousands of years from now, I will be an ancient one and they will say — I knew about dinosaurs.
