Bakker / The Question of the Day

[Stang1996@aol.com]

For, me it wasn't Bakker that sparked my interest in dinosaurs initially; it
was, as everyone else has said, the dinosaurs.  My dad brought me to the
elementary school book-fair and bought me the Random House Pictureback
"Dinosaurs" be Peter Zallinger.  I still have this book.  I think that Rudalf
Zallinger painted the pictures back in the fifties or something (If it was
before I was born, exact dates don't matter :).  Some of them are OK, but
others are awfull (Ornitholestes is chasing Archaeopteryx, Brontosaurus has
Camarasaurus' head, Ankylosaurus looks like an armadillo, Teratosaurus is a
dinosaur, all the plant-eaters' tails are on the ground etcera, etcetera).
 Anyway... there is a view of the AMNH's gallery old-style.  By the way there
are only three people in the AMNH.  I don't know about you, but every
dinosaur museum (even the Burke) has lots more than three people in them.
 After that i got lots more books.

After that I sort of slacked off dinosaurs for a while; I still liked them, I
just didn't want to make a carreer of them.  Then Jurassic Park (the book)
came out in 1990 (seems like a million years ago) and after reading it about
the tenth time (I have read it upwards of seventy times I'm sure) I decided
this is it, this is what I'm going to do.  So then, that's when I got very
interested in Bakker.  The books that I had just made passing references to
him, but still I had to figure out who is this super Bakker-god?  I got
_Heresies_ right about then and I have read it and _Predatory Dinosaurs_
about ten times each (you can see that my reading is SOO diversified).  So
now I'm seventeen just itching to go to who knows where when I get out of
school next year!  Anyone want to recrute more for their school?  Please.

Anyway.... I actually hadn't even foud a fossil untill two years ago (unless
you haven't noticed, your not really tripping over fossils in Seattle).  Last
summer I went to New Mexico and found lots of leaves and didn't take them
with me because it was the first day of 12 day a hiking trip and they'ere
large pieces of rock, so I thought "Oh, this is fossil-land USA, I'll find
more."  I didn't.

My favorite dinosaur is?  Changes every day.  Obviously T. rex, but
Carnotaurus, Velociraptor, and Oviraptor also.  Mammenchisaurs and Omeisaurs
are my favorite kind of sauropod.  I like Dicraeosaurs too.  I like
Edmontonia, Saichania, and Dryosaurs.  Also Telmetasaurus and Edmontosaurus.
 I like Homolocephalus and Monoclonius (as in appertus).  That's as narrowed
down as it's getting.  Some dinosaurs that I wish would have stayed in the
ground are Lambaeosaurus magnicristatus and all of the Stegosaurs (I don't
really mean I wish they'd never been found).

Peter Buchholz
Stang1996@aol.com