Getting face to face with dinosaurs

I TOOK my grandchildren to the Dinosaur Encounter, an exhibition attracting hordes of youngsters in Dublin.

Robotic models of the giant reptiles gyrate and roar against a Jurassic backdrop.

The originals became extinct 65m years ago, yet dinosaurs capture the imaginations of children today; my grandson, Tommy, not yet three, can identify and name the commoner ones. What masters of spin the grotesque giants were. Scared but safe, like roller-coaster riders or adults watching horror movies, children wallow in delicious terror of the freakish beasts. Could there be a dinosaur living, secretly, at the bottom of the garden? Ironically, the extinct monsters also resonate at the other end of life’s journey; fuddy-duddies, like myself, are often dismissed as “dinosaurs”. Giant reptiles were the most conspicuous creatures on the planet for 150m years, an inconceivably long period. The group to which we belong, the hominids, is a mere two million years old and our species has been around for only 200,000 years. Although many dinosaurs were small, some the size of farmyard chickens, the tribe included the largest land animals ever to have lived. Brachiosaurus, the “arm lizard”, weighed up to 100 tonnes. Diplodocus, the “double beam”, resembled a suspension bridge; a ridiculously long neck was balanced by an equally long tail, the serpentine body held aloft on four pillar-like legs. Some specimens were 35m long, although they weighed a mere 10 to 16 tonnes.