For a time, I wondered whether the interest had something to do with the fact that the dinosaurs had become extinct. But children are not clear about this. When my daughter was two years old, she asked to see dinosaurs at the zoo. She had been to the zoo several times, and apparently believed the dinosaurs were housed in some section we hadn't visited yet. Perhaps, I thought, that was a clue.
Children spend much of their lives powerless and frustrated.
I began to entertain a Freudian notion that being able to pronounce the complex names of huge creatures afforded children a sense of control. In a child's world, after all, everything is big-parents, cars, everything. And naming things is a classic human procedure to reduce anxiety. But once again, careful observation cast doubt on this idea. When my daughter was four, I took her and two friends to Stan Winston's workshop to see the dinosaurs being constructed for Jurassic Park.