Dinosaurs and Santa Clause

Have you ever had a childhood belief that sort of lingered into your adulthood? Recently, I discovered that I still had one belief that has held on on these years.

As a child, I loved to "pretend" and act out wonderful fantasy-like scenes. I didn't need a Barbie house, I had a "cave" made out of a big comforter. I didn't need a sailboat, I had a bed that sailed the uncharted seas. The funny thing is, as much as I loved to "make believe", I knew that my stocking was not filled by a magical whiskered man. I knew my Easter basket was a gift from my parents not an egg-laying bunny. And though I always left my teeth under my pillow, the only mystery to me was how my parents got the money under my pillow without waking me up. All of those fantasy figures, were just that: Fantasy. I suppose my imagination just had its own set of rules because I did however, believe that I had a fossil of a dinosaur.

Just recently, while foraging through the attic for Ebay treasures to sell, I came across a box of things I had saved many years ago. There were cards I received when our children were born, yearbooks from as young as third grade and many drawings and writings I had created while in high school. Deep down in the box I discovered a rock that was once given to me by my dad. He had found it as a child in Oklahoma and it held a strange fossil on one side. Somehow, in grade school, I had come across a dinosaur book and decided with my "very skilled" eye that it was indeed a dinosaur embryo. Never mind that the rock was the size of my palm.

I decided to do a search on fossils, came across a website called "The Fossil Web" and posted a picture of my fossil. I got back an answer from someone who believed that it "Looks like it might be a limestone nodule with broyzoans (tiny colonial animals that generally build stony skeletons of calcium carbonate, superficially similar to coral)." And though I still can not see anything but a sea dinosaur embryo, he assured me he was certain it was not, in fact, a dinosaur.

Maybe, as a child, I would have been crushed to discover that my "dinosaur" was only a plant impression with a few scattered sea "bugs", but now as a logical grown-up, I think I will keep my small lingering dream that I own something really special,

a "dinosaur-looking" fossil.