Rawr That 39;s I Love You In Dinosaur

[Cristhian Cinq-Mars]

Iwas so excited I baked some plaque and dinosaur cookies so I could create something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I saw a picture at Hobby Lobby that had the RAWR and Chevron background for the dinosaurs and I fell in love. So I cookiefied them and made these super fun airbrushed dinosaur cookies. What do you think? I love the backgrounds with the vibrant colors of the Dinkydoodles.

I know the supply list looks long but you probably already have most of the stuff you need to make these. I just wanted to list everything I use while making these bad boys. There are some things that are optional like the Stencil Genie and Dinkydoodle Airbrush Colors but I wanted to show you where I got them in case you want to find them.

The reason the cookie and table are covered with the red airbrush color is because I over filled the cup and then tipped it to the front and spilled the colors all over the place. oops. Check out this Chevron and RAWR pattern.

I am The Bearfoot Baker and I want to show you how to create fun and exciting things in the comfort of your own kitchen. I hope you find things that inspire your love of baking and inspire your creativity!

A has decided that the T. Rex toy we bought him from the Natural History Museum in London ("That'd be 15") is his son. I tell him I'm confused because until now I thought he was a lion, interested in raising lion cubs. A, who turned five this year, ignores me and declares that from now on, he will only go to bed after putting his son to sleep first. He squeezes my battery-operated grandchild's famously small arms, and it (or should I say he?) lets out an approving screech.

This nonpareil popularity of dinos fuels a thriving global dino industry, churning out everything from T-shirts to theme parks. Enter China. In the southwestern Chinese city of Zigong, oil explorers discovered one of the world's largest deposits of Jurassic era dino fossils in the 1970s. (The Jurassic era extended between 200 million years and 145 million years ago.) Zigong now makes a fortune manufacturing and exporting 80% of the world's animatronic dinos. A five-metre-long Tyrannosaurus sells for up to 50,000 yuan, or about US$7,000.

Over in the UK, the dinosaur toy sector grew 23% in the year to May 2022 and was worth 51.6 million. A Diplodocus skeleton from 150 million years ago belonging to the National History Museum toured the country and raked in an additional 36 million for the British economy. (For comparison, Nessie, as the Scots call their beloved Loch Ness monster, is estimated to bring in 41 million annually.)

The appeal of dinos is transgenerational. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in a lower-middle-class family in a small town in India, I didn't have access to slickly packaged dino ware. But it didn't matter, because my generation had the Big Daddy of all dino cult starters. His name was Steven Spielberg.

It was the summer of '94. My cousin sister and I rented a video cassette player and a tape of Jurassic Park from the neighbourhood video store. We watched it on her black & white TV, shrieking in horrified delight when a venom-spitting dino ate the bad guy, and rewinding the final escape scene over and over, half in relief and half wishing there'd be one final hair-raising chase.

My curiosity was further fanned by a story I read in a popular Bengali children's magazine that came out around the same time. A Bengali boy in the US had discovered the fossil of a new kind of dino, and in his honour the entire genus was named after him! To the pre-teen me, this was a giddying, fantastical achievement.

Last week, while researching this article, I made the rather more prosaic discovery that Shuvosaurus inexpectatus ("the unexpected lizard of Shuvo") has since been declared not a dino but a 'crocodilian'. I quickly brushed aside this minor technicality, not wanting it to interfere with nostalgia. More importantly, I noted that Shuvo Chatterjee's father, Sankar Chatterjee, is one of the world's foremost dino experts. Makes sense.

Chatterjee Sr. taught in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and was the curator of paleontology and director of the Antarctic Research Center in the Museum of Texas Tech until his retirement last year. I found an email ID after some digging and decided to send him a mail sharing my childhood fanboy moment, and asking him if he has any theories on why kids are crazy about dinos.

Considering the notoriously gendered ways of the toy industry, it's possible that dino marketers specifically target young boys with their hulking, masculine presentation. When Lisa Wade, a sociology professor, called out a dino toy seller for creating a separate section dedicated to 'dinosaurs for girls', it led to a lively debate and a thoughtful reply from the company, pointing out the difficult balancing act of running a gender-free site with the gendered expectations of parents themselves.

"I'm not sure, but my psychotherapy instinct says it's all about feeling big, scary, and powerful in a Gulliver world?" speculated psychotherapist Karolin Susan. "Making noises, rawr-ing, shouting, screaming, talking fast are all great stimulation mechanisms as well. It fulfills their sensory needs, it calms them."

Then there's a more macabre possibility: To a child, the huge mythical monster is the embodiment of the 'other', of a primal terror arising from the depths of the psyche, said Lawrence Barrett, who's a Jungian coach. "They are the lived symbol of the child's experience of the world, surrounded as they are by huge and unfathomable creatures," Barrett said. "By demonstrating that we can master our fears in proxy or symbolic form, we build agency. This is why people enjoy horror films."

Films are of course key to dinos' pop-culture clout. Jurassic Park went on a worldwide box-office rampage upon its release in 1993 and became the highest-grossing film in history, replacing Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster E.T. Globally, the Jurassic Park franchise, with six movies and a clutch of short films and animated series, boosted interest in the arcane science of palaeontology and created a brand-new market for dino tourism.

Chatterjee Sr. would have you believe that their mountainous build doesn't mean dinos are brutish creatures without the possibility of tenderness. "Place your head in the jaws of Tyrannosaurus; you create a bond with this fearsome predator. You tenderly touch a Brachiosaurus's giant femur or thigh bone, as if adoring a child," he wrote to me, adding that there might be a subtler and simpler reason for children's love of dinos: All their names end with -saurus. "Kids love to remember the names because of the mnemonic quality."

A few creators have tried to address this imbalance. Notable among them is Vaishali Shroff, whose 2018 book The Adventures of Padma and a Blue Dinosaur aimed to make children 'fall in love with our country's dinosaur fossil heritage and to make them aware of the fact that dinosaur fossils could very well be in their backyards'. Take my money already.

As I researched and wrote this story over the past few weeks, I made peace with the fact that there's no single neat answer to the question I began with. I also decided that such an answer is unnecessary, because why should fun have to explain itself in a world where it can be so scarce?

One day, during a break from work, I invite A to look at dino pictures with me. I am writing about how much you like dinosaurs, I tell him. Is there anything you want me to tell the people who will read this? About how you have so much fun with your dinos, but then you are also a lion with a big mane?

No matter how good or bad a game is, when I pick up thick, chunky, strange but cool-looking dice with some real heft to them, I always go back to the line from the Leonardo DiCaprio character in Django Unchained:

Working with not one, but two sheets of paper for your park, actions are breezy but planning is quite thinky. Draft 2 dice, showing something simple: a coin, or maybe 2 of the 6 different dino DNA types you need to craft dinosaurs which will live in paddocks in your park by species. You might even roll roads which let you connect various exhibits in your park, or attractions such as rides, food stands or merchandise shops, which provide bonuses when you run tours at the end of each round.

No matter the player count, players will be left with one die showing a resource that all players will receive, but which will also generate Threat for your park. Just like the base game, Threat has to be managed with Security; if Threat ever tips the scale in its favor, that could lead to trouble when end-of-round calculations are made.

Next, dice are used to take 2 actions from a board showing 5 choices, like adding roads, gaining Security or cash, and making dinosaurs. You might also take an action to duplicate the resources produced by one of your 2 dice, as long as it is just resources and not attractions. If a space is blocked, that could mean more Threat for your park (this is bad).

Complicating matters: when your Threat outpaces your Security, people start dying in your park, tracked by a simple series of circles and dots on one of your sheets. Every few deaths mean losing something else of value: surplus DNA, roads, dinosaur paddocks, maybe even having a Specialist quit on you.

Scoring is a potpourri of triggers which will be added up to determine the winner: points for dinosaurs, points for specialists, points for Buildings, points for park exits, points for almost everything. The scoring summary area is excellent and allows for making swift end game scoring calculations.

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