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Saturday, February 24, 2007

Feminist Reading of Boneheads, Stegosaurs

As we flipped through Usborne's "First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life," Merry took in the pictures of fast-running, sharp-clawed, dagger-toothed dinosaurs. Meat eaters, made to rip and shred and ingest one another. Merry's mouth gaped. Suddenly she asked,

"Are WE meat?"


I have to admit, I am not a dino-fan. But Merry was rivited as we turned page after page of endless saurases. And then the text began to tickle my funny-bone.

Read the following exerpts with a feminist lens and see if they're not funny:

"Stegosaurs were big and heavy, and could only move slowly. . .Their bodies were almost as big as a bus, but their brains were the size of table-tennis ball." Here you can see the size of a stegosaur's brain compared with its body. (insert picture here of huge animal with teenytiny brain).

And my all-time favorite. Boneheads: "Pachycephalosaurs [had] bony domes on top of their heads. These dinosaurs are sometimes known as boneheads."

(And my favorite line:) "Male boneheads sometimes fought each other."

So the world evolved. But some things never changed.

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