U Pick: Dino Robots

Thanks to the Interwebs, even zoos are becoming more democratic, allowing webbies to vote on the name of a baby ocelot, among other things. Well, now you web-folk can choose which animatronic dinosaurs to install in the Oregon Zoo’s upcoming exhibit on the prehistoric animals.

There’s something about dinosaurs that is hard to comprehend — given their size, grotesque features and all-around brutality towards each other — thus giving them a seemingly mythological status, like unicorns or sasquatch. However, my Moab, Utah-based geological surveyist brother keeps finding dinosaur fossils in the broken up concrete in his backyard (apparently dinosaur bones were seen as structurally-sound material in 1921). So a zoo exhibit with “realistic” dino robots may be the kind of “seeing is believing” evidence we all need to make these creatures come alive in our minds.

My vote is totally for the Kentrosaurus (a Stegosaurus cousin), Pachycephalosaurus (you might remember them from The Lost World: Jurassic Park), Torosaurus (related to the Triceratops, only more bullish), Velociraptor (for sheer creepiness factor) and, of course, Brachiosaurus (for its size and the fact you probably will be able see it from Hwy. 26). Everyone will pick the T-Rex, so that beast goes without saying.