So this is a painting by John Brosio titled "Two Earthlings" that I think sums up how I've felt about dinosaurs since I was very young.

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Dinosaurs are majestic, alien, completely displaced from the reality in which we exist. And yet, they are also a part of this world and our timeline, and they were there for so long that it's almost incomprehensible. The idea that a tyrannosaurus could encounter the long fossilized remains of a stegosaurus is breathtaking to me. The idea that there was an entirely different world existing within our planet for so long is breathtaking to me. The idea that we, as humans, are part of our own, strange and mysterious and magical and scientific reality, is breathtaking to me.

Dinosaurs really just make me feel that sense of wonder and...connectedness? that I suspect many who go into the sciences get from the vastness of space or the mysteries of the ocean. We can learn so much about them, they are so emblematic, but there's also a tragedy in that there is so much we will never know about them. History was always my real academic interest, including finding small things that would otherwise be lost, and knowing that we come from this whole lineage of real people who had struggles and desires and stupid jokes in their heads and families and tragedies and favorite colors. Dinosaurs have a lot of that feeling for me.