An Ode to the Dinosaurs

An animatronic dinosaur at the Pacific Science Center.

I’m gonna be transparent here: when I found out that the dinosaur exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is being shut down, reader, I cried. 

For those of you who have not been fortunate enough to see the majesty of the PacSci dinosaurs, let me paint a picture for you. Imagine being five years old. The existence of dinosaurs is something that is still taking shape in your little child-mind, but—while you can’t quite grasp yet the scale of sixty-five million years, nor do you have a thorough understanding of the science behind fossils or the biology of this diverse group of reptiles—you can understand something much more important than all of that: dinosaurs are really, really cool. 

You go to the Pacific Science Center on a rainy afternoon. (I can’t recall for sure if it was rainy, but given the area, it seems like the most reasonable assumption). You’re enchanted by the butterfly house, all those delicate little things fluttering past your giggling face and maybe, if you’re very lucky, landing on your chubby little hand. You’re dazzled by the planetarium and the twinkling stars projected on the domed ceiling above you. You’re enthralled by the giant levers, the optical illusions, the bike you can pedal to light up a lightbulb. 

But all of these wonders pale in comparison to the jurassic journey lying just past the planetarium.

You step inside a world unlike any you’ve ever known. Plants you’ve never seen before reach up towards the sky all around you. You’re small enough that the one-story garage in your house feels comparable to the soaring warehouse ceiling of a Costco, and this room—maybe two stories high, maybe a little more—seems to stretch on and on forever above you. Simulated animal cries echo around you, somewhat like a bird and somewhat like a lizard. Someone lifts you up for a better look, and finally, you see them.

Dinosaurs stand all around you. The biggest animal you’ve ever seen up-close is the elephant at the zoo, and that elephant seems somehow small compared to some of the magnificent creatures here. Even to an adult, most dinosaurs are large. To a young child, they seem unfathomably massive, unprobably real. You’ve only just learned that dragons are, allegedly, fictional. And yet here you are, looking at something just as incredible, but somehow real—creatures that, even if long extinct, once walked around the same forests you do now. 

And that’s not even the best part.

The best part is that they move.

You walk through the valley of giants and stare at their moving forms in awe. A parasaurolophus moves its arms and raises its blue-crested head. Two deinonychi tear into the flesh of a fallen beast. An apatosaurus lowers its long neck into a patch of grass. This is the moment, undoubtedly, when you fall in love with science—but it’s also the moment you decide to believe in magic. Maybe not the magic you see in movies, where a wave of a wand can turn a prince into a frog or a pumpkin into a carriage, but something more real and thus somehow more fantastical. This feeling you have in your chest as you stand among the giants: that is magic. 

I found out that the dinosaur exhibit was shutting down through random chance. I was idly scrolling through my Facebook feed when a post from the Pacific Science Center came up. I wasn’t even following their page (a mistake that has since been rectified), but in a rare moment of lucidity, Facebook’s algorithm did correctly guess that this was a post I’d like to see.

I read that the dinosaur exhibit was to be shut down, and I was overcome with a wave of grief. I thought about the dinosaurs of my childhood—their beauty, their magnificence, their incredible grace—and I thought of losing those, and it wrecked me. I cried out to my wife, “They’re taking down the dinosaurs!” 

To some, I’m sure this must seem profoundly overdramatic. They’re just animatronic dinosaurs, after all. But to understand this, you must understand how very much Seattle has changed over the past two decades. I’ve lived in the Seattle area nearly my entire life. The Seattle I see today is, at many parts, nearly unrecognizable from the Seattle I knew as a child. I drive around my old neighborhood in Bellevue and I see ugly, boxy new-builds cropping up on the graves of friends’ houses and favorite shops and sentimental cafes. Over in Seattle, the tutoring center where I honed my love of writing and the coffeeshop my dad and I went to for geek trivia nights are gone. I try to drive my wife past my childhood home in Redmond just to find that it and the forest behind it have been torn down and replaced with condos. The landscape of the cities I once knew are gone, replaced by Amazon and data centers and that tech boom that everyone insists has been so good for us even as my wife and I were priced out of living in our hometown. 

Seattle is my home, and my heart, and my ache. It has changed. I have, too. We all do, and I know this—but there’s still an indescribable comfort in something that stays the same; something that remained constant through your childhood when so many other hallmarks of your youth are buried under wires and greed. 

But as I finally calmed down enough to read through the full post that PacSci made about the dinosaurs, something began to gnaw at the back of my mind: had they remained constant through my childhood?

The first time I saw the dinosaurs, I was a young child. The most recent time was a few months ago, when my wife and I went to PacSci for my birthday. I had reacted with such anguish to the initial news in no small part because, in my mind, the dinosaurs still exist today as they existed in my childhood. But the thing is, I do remember my wife and I remarking to each other during that recent visit that the dinosaurs were not quite what they had once been. The paint on the walls that had once transported me to a long-gone era had faded from vibrant green and gold to pale, washed-out shadows. The artificial plants surrounding the dinosaurs had grown worn and bent over the years. And the dinosaurs themselves, those majestic creatures of my childhood, were torn and broken and barely moving—if they even still had it in them to move at all. Many of them sat still on the day we visited, glassy eyes staring blankly at the faded walls before them.

The most illuminating part of PacSci’s post, the part that gently ushered me into the “acceptance” stage of grief, was the explanation that the dinosaurs were made with materials that were designed to last for about fifteen years from the time of their construction… in 1986. Over the thirty-nine years that the dinosaurs have lived in the museum, the dedicated staff just kept repairing them over and over: patching tears, sewing damaged skin, keeping the dinosaurs moving as long as they possibly could. Their retirement now is because the core materials have degraded beyond repair, and trying to sustain their lives even further is just no longer practical.

If the dinosaurs had only lived their original fifteen-year lifespan, they would have been taken down in 2001—a year or so before the first time I remember seeing them. The dinosaurs are not being killed. By the time I met them, they were already dying. 

The fact that they were able to be such a long-standing part of my childhood is, in itself, a wonder. I hesitate to call it a miracle, as miraculous as it feels, because “miracle” implies something that is wholly inexplicable, only capable of being understood as an act of divine intervention. But the reason why the dinosaurs lived so long is readily apparent: because, in a world where everything and everyone seems to be viewed as more and more disposable by the day, the dedicated staff at the Pacific Science Center looked at a bunch of old dinosaurs long past their expiration date and put countless hours of effort into preserving them as long as they possibly could. 

PacSci hasn’t announced yet what will be taking the dinosaurs’ place. The deeply sentimental part of me hopes that they’ll surprise us all and just reveal a new, even more impressive dinosaur exhibit, updated with modern understandings of paleontology and filled with animatronics of feathered dinosaurs beautiful enough to make Disneyworld quake with envy. Of course, it could be something else entirely. Right now, I can’t say. 

But when I think about those dinosaurs and how so many people have dedicated so many years to keeping them up long past their predicted extinction, I know for certain one thing that will be in that exhibit: there will be a small child who looks up at whatever those mad geniuses at PacSci have cooked up with wonder and awe in their eyes, and like so many children before them, what they see will make them believe in science and magic in equal measure.