I took another thing away from that Newsweek dinosaur story (which apparently affected me the way the Bible is supposed to; I haven’t talked about anything so much since they started making Cheerios with the sugar already on them). Unlike a lot of kids, the thought of giant carnivorous lizards never really freaked me out or fascinated me. The idea of being powerless before gigantic, menacing forces that could gnash me between their teeth is not an abstract one to me; extinct pea brains don’t hold a candle to the living things I’m actually afraid of. For some reason, though, this newly discovered species (a Chinese raptor) gave me weebly-jeeblies I cannot even articulate:

If I saw one of these things — even if it were six inches long and in a cage– I would run and run and never stop. I got up and walked briskly away from the picture of it. It has wings on its knees. The Lord don’t make ‘em like that.