STL Science Center

STL Science Center

13 February 2011

Nanotyrannus doesn't love children!

Typically Sunday is reserved for family time; information geared for children, coloring, cartoons. You know I love finding things that children can do or families can work on together on Sundays. In fact, while everyone's in church around here I'm usually burying my nose in a dinosaur book (The Dinosauria edited by Dodson, Weishampel, and Osmolska right now) at the laundry mat or sketching out something that I can share with the kids that love dinosaurs that I know. Dinosaur study is kind of a religion for me I suppose. Anyway, Nanotyrannus, it seems, has no love for the babies in our lives... well, they might make a nice snack on the run for a Nano, but they're not very friendly on the coloring pages and they don't even have a fact page on the site I usually grab kid's fact cards from for us. There are, of course, many reasons that this probably happens to be a cold spot in the Nano world but I blame two factors exclusively:

1. The debate about whether or not Nano is its own species makes toy makers, coloring books folks, and all other children's ware producers wary after the whole Brontosaurus episode. How many of them want to build a mold just to trash it if science changes its collective mind about the existence of something?

2. That debate has made the animal a bit obscure to the outside world. People with interests in paleo news know about the animals and the debate, but because the debate leans one way and then another, there aren't really many highly popular opinions being put out there for the animal and since it looks so much like other predatory animals to the layperson why would they distinguish it from a T. Rex or an Allosaurus? Lack of popularity itself drives the market down for demand of the Nano to be represented in popular culture.

In fact, I found only one toy, and it's not a pretty one. Check it out here and here.

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