dinosaurs 2

In a final act of desperation before everything changed for the better, I’ve come full circle and find myself writing about dinosaurs yet again. I don’t know if I copied it from the same book as last time, but let’s say it is. There are two pages here, one full of writing which is going out of its way to explain how we know about dinosaurs, in a way I’m sure I understood. I still obviously couldn’t be bothered to finish it though - it starts out by saying “two things were happening” then cuts out after describing the first. The second page continues from somewhere slightly later in the narrative, boiling down essential stages in the evolution of life on Earth to single sentences, each one accompanied by tiny, faintly-drawn pictures. Then a bunch of much larger pictures of extinct marine animals, the existence of which we only know about from fossils. Obviously, these are essential stages to know about if you want to understand the process which led to the existence of dinosaurs, but I can’t help thinking I must have found this stuff monumentally dull. I’ve obviously been waiting weeks for this book to become available again and, when it does, I copy it out in a cursory way, cutting corners wherever I can. It’s obvious with hindsight that something had to change. This Topic book had been flipping around from subject to subject with no clear sense of direction and I was in danger of getting terminally bored. That direction was obviously never going to come from the class bookshelf. But where it did finally come from still amazes me…

February 1980

Dinosaurs: 2