I guess I thought they were cool because they were big and kinda scary and many had big flesh-eating teeth. As I grew older, I came to understand that they were just like everybody else, just trying to make a living.
Dinosaurs seem to be all the rage lately.
From Burger King's Lost World wristwatches to cereal boxes to athletic shoes, all the product manufacturers are marketing the dino image. I even saw dinosaurs at a recent Rush concert at Great Woods Center for Performing Arts. When I was a graduate student working on an MS in chemistry I took a geology course called Dinosauria in which we discussed the phylogeny, taxonomical classification, anatomy, physiology, sociology, and, of course, extinction of dinosaurs. We went on a number of paleontological digs. Central North America was covered by a shallow sea during much of the Mesozoic Era, so usually we found fossils from marine vertebrates such as the Mosasaurs, the Pleisiosaurus, and the Ichthyosaurids.