It’s Fall Break here in Arizona. Our school is a charter school, so we don’t have the same days off of school as the majority of the population. This is both good and bad. It is good because we ….okay there is really no good part to it. It sucks because our family and friends are at school while we are home for a week. We do have one week that overlaps, but darn it all…we get bored.

Today I took the young one all the way to Scottsdale to a Pangaea … place. It wasn’t really an amusement park or actually any kind of a park. It was an inside room with a bunch of moving dinosaur statue thingies. Yes, it does sound lame when I describe it like that, but it was actually cool. This is an example of someone having a basic idea and pairing it with someone who has an amazing idea to take the lame idea to the next level.

We easily could have walked through the exhibit in about 15 minutes and gone home. It wasn’t a big place. The ‘gift shop’ looked like it had recently been robbed and the empty shelves weren’t apologizing for anything. There wasn’t a food court or anything that really made it take longer. Except for the scavenger hunt.

I can just imagine some guy who never grew out of his dinosaur addiction, er…passion, who decided to fill a room with all of his favorite dinosaurs. They would be grouped in herds or families, with all these big prehistoric plants surrounding them. It would be so cool! His friend humored him but prodded him towards making it better.

Make the dinos move around.

Put cool lighting in there. Maybe some huge eggs people could climb into.

Yeah, but what else…?

Make the whole thing a challenge. Make people read about the dinosaurs to get a token for each one on the map. Tell them there is a cool prize if they get all 32 tokens. People will do anything for a prize!

It’s true. We spent over an hour reading about dinosaurs, answering trivia questions, and scanning QR codes just to get a small bag of shark teeth. I’m not sure how the shark teeth tied into it all except that most dinos had teeth…but it got us to do the hunt.

We learned a few things. The biggest thing we learned was that the Jurassic Park movies are full of lies. The biggest lie was that they took these dinosaurs which were basically large turkeys and made them into the things of nightmares. Yes, I’m talking about Velociraptors. Totally not scary in the real dinosaur world. But that’s not all.

We got to listen to a dinosaur expert talk about fossils and what they’ve decided dinosaurs were really like. It’s not pretty. Instead of the massive, roaring, terrifying beasts that will rip a rest stop bathroom apart to eat you, they are basically a bunch of really big chickens that sound like peace pipes when they make noise. It comes across as very anti-climatic.

So the question is, would you rather be eaten by a mythical monster lizard who will rip you to shreds

OR

scooped up in the beak of an enormous bird thing and swallowed whole?

It’s a tough choice, but don’t think you can just stand still and think about it and be safe. The real bubble burster was the T-rex has excellent eyesight. Seriously. What else can they do to ruin the magical terror of the dinosaur world?

Just think about it. If all these dinosaurs were really just big chickens, it kind of makes sense why they have boxes of dino nuggets at the grocery store. What a cruel joke that is… Cause I said so.

Photo Credit: http://www.deheuskidzz.com