A Dinosaur Named Sue at The Field Museum

You might hear people say that certain types of dinosaurs are well suited to play piano, but I learned that is not true. Not true at all. Not even in the tiniest little bit. While it is indeed amusing to think about dinosaurs pecking away at the ivories, the truth is those Tyrannosaurus Rex guys couldn’t really play anything more complicated than Chopsicks. That’s because they have only two fingers on those tiny little hands. A T-Rex can only take selfies of her neck.

It’s kind of depressing to visit The Field Museum in Chicago because you learn these kinds of things. Right up front, when you walk in the door, there is Sue, the real Sue T-Rex, right there in front of your nose. I knew she was somewhere but I had no idea she was living at The Field Museum. I think they found almost all of her bones, too, unlike some of those other dinosaurs, including the guys from Spielberg’s movie — but those are up on the top floor, way in the back. And you have to wade through all of those depressing Mass Extinctions that happened when everybody was wiped off the face of the Earth, not once or twice, like you’d imagine but a whole bunch of times. So many that they pretty much lost count and started including some of the smaller mass extinctions in which only like 50% of the population of alive things died off.

That photo of Sue’s head is not her real head. Oh, her real head is at The Field Museum all right. It’s encased in glass in its own special exhibit. You might think it’s to stop you from poking at her enormous teeth and trying to feel the tips, but she’s in the glass case because her real head is too heavy to sit on top of her enormous body. Yup, that’s right, your head still stays fat and heavy even after millions of years of sitting in the sand and getting rained and snowed on now and then. There were all of those glaciers, too, and chunks of land splitting off, India slamming into Asia, although South Dakota stayed pretty much intact.

I hate to admit this but it was only recently that I learned about the Super Continent. All of my life I had suspected that South America had once been part of Africa, and a few years ago I discovered it was true. That was an amazing discovery for me because this was not something I had learned in school. It’s not that I was sleeping through my classes; I received a lot of A’s and stars and learned how to play nicely with others. But I did not realize that new things were being discovered about the earth each and every single day to the point that the entire way our planet was formed had changed overnight, and every person on earth knew about the Super Continent and Pangaea, except me.

This is what happens when you’re busy selling Sacramento real estate.