Dinosaurs Birthday Quotes

My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness.… One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month.… These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.

In 1991, Disney forced a group of New Zealand parents in a remote country town to remove their amateur renditions of Pluto and Donald Duck from a playground mural; and Barney has been breaking up children's birthday parties across the U.S., claiming that any parent caught dressed in a purple dinosaur suit is violating its trademark. The Lyons Group, which owns the Barney character, "has sent 1,000 letters to shop owners" renting or selling the offending costumes. "They can have a dinosaur costume. It's when it's a purple dinosaur that it's illegal, and it doesn't matter what shade of purple, either," says Susan Elsner Furman, Lyons' spokesperson.

Push up some mountains. Cut them down. Drown the land under the sea. Push up some more mountains. Cut them down. Push up a third set of mountains, and let the river cut through them. “Unconformity” is the geologic term for an old, eroded land surface buried under younger rock layers. Put your outspread hand over the Carlin Canyon, Nevada unconformity and your fingers span roughly forty million years- the time that it took to bevel down the first set of mountains and deposit the younger layers on top. What is forty million years? Enough time for a small predatory dinosaur to evolve into a bird. Enough time for a four-legged, deer-like mammal to evolve into a whale. And far more than enough time to turn an ape-like creature in eastern Africa into a big-brained biped who can marvel at such things. The Grand Canyon’s Great Unconformity divides 1.7 billion-year-old rock from 550 million-year-old rock, a gap of more than one billion years. One billion years. I earn my salary studying the Earth and teaching its history, but I admit utter helplessness in comprehending such a span. A billion pages like those of this book would stack up more than forty miles. I had lived one bullion seconds a few days before my thirty-second birthday. A tape measure one billion inches long would stretch two-thirds of the way around the Earth. Such analogies hint at what deep time means- but they don’t get us there. “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time," John McPhee once observed, “it may only be able to measure it.

You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too!” Nine-year-old Frank Hardy looked at his brother, Joe, and laughed as their friend Paul McMahon blew out the candles on his huge birthday cake, which was decorated to look like a dinosaur. Everyone cheered as Paul blew out all ten candles on the first try.

On the porch Juan monologued about the age of dinosaurs. I thought of my last birthday present for Guy: an ancient cricket—a katydid—preserved in amber. Scientists say its wings produced an E natural, the planet’s first musical note, over 150 million years ago. He was very impressed, though he suggested we donate it to the Museum of Natural History. As if he was ashamed to own it. I told him shame blunts ambition.

one day, someone will look at me and watch their whole life ignite behind their eyes. their breath will stall in their throat, swallowing ache like a fallen star; like lungs forgetting what to do with air. their heart will stop for a fraction of a second, and that fraction will stretch into a silence so vast it feels prehistoric; wide and unbearable as an eternity. and then it will race, faster than thunder finding ground, faster than light trying to outrun itself. their palms will turn cold, fingers trembling without permission as if they’ve touched voltage, their limbs will forget gravity, and time will hesitate, pausing to witness it - the exact moment they fall in love with me and in that fracture of a second, they will fall. they will look at me and know, not hope or guess but know in the marrow of their bones and in their soul that ages ago, that before the first atom split open, before the sky learned how to hold blue, before dinosaurs burned into fossils, before language found a tongue, before earth gathered dust into gravity, and humanity mistook itself for something permanent, we had already happened. they will know that us, colliding with all our atoms and cosmos is no coincidence; that we were inevitable, in all of the universes and in all our lifetimes; not because fate whispered, but in the quiet, cellular way that recognition works- like something long separated clicking back into place. like it's a promise, set across timelines, before the galaxy even knew it would come to exist and when the universe tore itself apart in the big bang, it was not chaos but a rehearsal and they will feel it: the red string pulled taut across galaxies, threaded through our ribcages and wrists, through lifetimes we do not remember but ache for anyway. and when they touch me, the collision will be like magnets snapping together, hungry for just one touch metal against metal, body against body, lips against lips. sparks spelling something older than god. in that very moment, they will understand that this is not just love or mere affection; that this isn't luck or coincidence but gravity recognizing its own law. this is two particles separated by eternity snapping back into alignment. it is something that would have occurred in any version of existence. in every universe. in every lifetime. in every possible arrangement of matter. a curse and a blessing braided together. a life sentence that feels heavenly even when it burns. and even if none of it had happened— if there had been no explosion, no earth, no evolution; we still would have found a form, like planets and their moons; like a tree and its branches, like the pulse and vein. and when everything ends, when stars cool and light forgets its purpose, when the universe folds in on itself like a dying lung; when galaxies extinguish like Birthday candles, when time collapses and all of it ceases to exist, we will remain. not as bodies or memories; not as names engraved on tombstones; all of it except us. we will remain as inevitability as the sentence written before time, and still being served long after time is gone. just us, still finding each other, in whatever is left.