In which I revisit dinosaur nostalgia, realise I missed a lot of LEGO® Dinosaurs, before finally getting on the band wagon with the Jurassic Park Fallen Kingdom sets.  We breakout the Stygimoloch, and take her out into the wild.  Then, we look at the latest ‘Iconically Jurassic’ contest over at LEGO Rebrick.

I was once, it will come as no surprise, a 6 year old boy. Like many such creatures, at one point I developed a fascination with dinosaurs. They consumed my waking hours, my conversations and dominated my visits to the local library.  I could draw and spell them all by heart.  If I wanted to watch dinosaurs on television, I was limited to watching Valley of the Dinosaurs (a 1974 Hanna Barbera cartoon where a whirlpool in the Amazon transported a teacher and his family into a land that time forgot)  or Land of the Lost – from the crazy team that brought us HR Puf’n’stuf and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. For me, The Flintstones didn’t really cut it for me: it was really just a sitcom wearing animal pelts.

My favourite book of this era, the Ladybird Book of Prehistoric Animals and Fossils, was a favourite. Portable and sturdy with its yellow hard cover, there was always room for it in my school bag, or clenched between my knees when we went for a drive to the shops. It was a long night when I accidentally left it at school.

I read this book time and again, able to recite portions off by heart.  The final pages offered sage advice: If you have enjoyed this book, why not look further afield to continue expressing your interest – why not go searching for fossils or build a model kit; perhaps try making a paper mache diorama of a prehistoric landscape.  Put a small lizard in it, and pretend it is a massive dinosaur.  (to be fair, some of these ideas may have come from other books of this era).

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