First, some sarcasm
I am not a psychic medium, and the ones that I know don’t speak dinosaur very fluently. So I can’t verify whether dinosaurs themselves were judgy and cruel to each other about their weight, but at least we know they didn’t have scales and couldn’t check themselves in the mirror. Their eyes point the wrong way!
Sarcasm aside, the dinosaurs aren’t to blame here. Rather, I blame archaeologists for everything you’re about to read here. Actually, you know what? I think these dinosaurs have been the victims of a body shaming shrink-wrap attack.
We gotta walk before we run. So. To start, you can picture a dinosaur, right? One of these guys:
Or heck, one like this:
Or this guy here:
Wait, no, that weird furry tooth-monster is not what we have in mind when we say the word “dinosaur”. Nope. No no no no no. That dinosaur illustration, my friends, is the product of a movement against what is unlovingly called “shrink wrapping.”
In industrial processes, shrink wrap is plastic that – gasp – shrinks when it is heated. So you drape the plastic over the object (a chair, a boat, etc), then you wave a very large hair dryer over the plastic to make it hug the thing you are wrapping. If you have ever gotten a package in the mail that has a plastic film over the package itself, you have experienced shrink wraps. I think of buying DVDs when that was still a thing.
And now, we come to the body shaming
Now that you have that very important context, you can picture how dinosaurs have been illustrated for years and years. Someone digs up a skeleton in the desert all Indiana Jones-style, then assembles them all in order and sticks them in a museum. Somebody then comes through and draws some scales and shit on top of the frame outlined by the skeleton and gives Spielberg a call.
But riddle me this: how much gets left out of that process? After all, no animal living today looks like a skeleton with skin. Here, seriously, look at what happens when you try to shrink-wrap a baboon:
Fuckin’ A, right? What is that monster? It’s a baboon skeleton animated by pure spite. It’s a monster, and a complete misrepresentation of everything that makes a baboon a baboon. I do not like it. I don’t. I do not like it, Sam I Am.
How to shame a puppy
Let’s take what we have learned so far and flip the question around. Look at this basset hound:
How much of this adorable guy would be completely lost to time if an archaeologist dug him up in a few million years? Not much, dude. All of the delightful and saggy skin on his face? Gone. His lovely floppy ears that hang all low? Gone. And guess what else: this guy isn’t exactly “fit and toned.” He has a nice belly and isn’t even starving or anything.
So the core decision any future person has to make is simple. Do they draw a skeleton with eyeballs and skin, or do they imagine what else might be? In a fatphobic society that values thinness and turns up its nose on body fat in people, it certainly doesn’t seem to me that the choice to shrink wrap was a coincidence.
So that, ladies, gentlemen, and those who lieth betwixt, is how we ended up fat-shaming giant thunder lizards that have been dead for millions and millions of years. Our fatphobia keeps us from imagining dinosaurs might carry any body fat, or look saggy or wrinkly or old or anything except taut and toned and ripped. It’s bullshit, but it’s OUR bullshit. We projected that onto them. We can take it back and imagine a better world where animals and people alike are allowed to come in lots of shapes and sizes. Even thunder lizards.