When I was a kid I much preferred the company of dinosaurs to that of other human beings. Even before I could read, my father would drive the family to the American Museum of Natural History on Sundays. Like many kids I assumed people had evolved from dinosaurs. Oh, to be a T. Rex again and throttle those neighborhood bullies! A few years later I would subway to the museum on Saturdays with a sketch pad and copy the famous drawings of Charles R. Knight. It didn’t take long to find out that people had actually evolved from small mouse-like mammals that had scrambled underneath the vast hulking reptiles, a line of animals that ironically was older than the dinosaurs themselves. In nature, no matter how impressive the design, you didn’t win until the race was over. Read the rest of this entry