This photo is of a little raptor-like dinosaur lurking in stencil-form on the outside of the Blood Services building on the southern end of campus. I first saw him from the bus one day & I later walked past on purpose, in hopes of catching a good photograph in his natural habitat amongst the (very Cretaceous-looking) pine-bushes. This city has some very whimsical stencil-artists.
This reminds me of how when I was 5, I really wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. I spent a lot of time reading about dinosaurs & collecting stickers in this little book, learning all the Latin names. Sadly, I've now forgotten most of them... my geography obsession (which led to the linguistics-anthropology obsession by the time I was 12) really kicked in soon after & the dinosaur-names faded. However, I'm fairly confident that the specimen above is a Velociraptor... or perhaps a Deinonychus? The arms are a bit long, perhaps. Maybe it's a fantastical invented species.
I recall that when I was young, I liked the raptors a lot, but was most partial to the friendly plant-eating hadrosaurs with their duck-bills & head protrusions.... I also felt sorry for the Tyrannosaurus, because although powerful, he wasn't too bright... & had stubby little arms I thought were cute. But my favourite was the earliest of the birds, the Archaeopteryx, despite its similarity to a primitive sort of magpie.... (Did you know loons are the oldest of the 'modern' birds? Perhaps they're implicated in so many of the Earth-Diver creation myths across the northern hemisphere... ;) )
Dinosaurs being (linguistically) silly in DinosaurComics:
Spicing up their verbs!
Pondering the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis!
Undermining the very foundation of language!
Un dinosaure qui parle français!
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