Dinosaurs Don’t Do It For Me

I have to conclude that I don’t like dinosaurs. I want to but they just don’t do anything for me. I decided to give up on them entirely one day in Sucre.

One of the attractions in the area is an impressive find unearthed by a concrete manufacturer when they were mining for aggregate. The diggers were munching up the earth as diggers do when a massive wall revealed itself, covered in gigantic footprints. In leaped the paleontologists to explain that dinosaurs must have walked across this muddy land. Their tracks were covered over by more mud, buried and turned into rock. Then the whole lot was flipped into its present upright position by massive earth-movements.

Predictably this structure is none too stable, it is just very very old dirt after all. The bosses decided that rocks, however crumbly falling on tourists’ heads are not good. This meant the museum had to be built 70 meters away from the cliff-face, which left me squinting as I tried to visualize magnificent reptiles lumbering across the plains. We were assured that it was possible to discern different family groupings and species from the size and spacing of the marks. In the mid-morning high altitude sunshine my mind wandered back to the leafy plaza where I could watch Bolivians and tourists in their contemporary wanderings.

To bring the beasts to life, real size models have been etched in fiberglass, these replica titans stand among genuine prehistoric foliage. They emit the actual noises they would have made in life, throwing their voices into the bushes like massive ventriloquist relics. A lot of effort and scholarly research has gone in to making your experience as real as possible on a budget that is also has to preserve a large wall of fossils that wants very much to fall down. I dutifully waited my turn to take pictures in the few spots where I could get a whole animal into one shot. I read information boards and asked pertinent questions. I did try. But after 20 minutes I was bored.