If you have the money, do you hesitate when presented with the opportunity to buy a dinosaur skull for your children? The answer should be unflagging YES. YES YOU SHOULD. And yet, we think there’s a more important — very quick — follow-up question to ask before buying said dinosaur skull. It’s a question a child would ask, but a question that a well-meaning father (like the beloved star of Gladiator Russell Crowe, for example) might forget to ask. And that question is: What kind of dinosaur skull?
On June 20, 2019, Vulture reported that Russell Crowe has been telling the tale of the time he got shit-faced on vodka and bought a real dinosaur skull from Leonardo DiCaprio. “I bought it for my kids, and you know, cut myself a little bit of slack here, there was a bunch of vodka involved in the transaction and it happened at Leonardo’s house,” Crowe told Howard Stern. So far, so good, right? If you had the kind of income Crowe has, you’d do this for your kids, too, right? I mean, my kid is two-years-old, and she already loves dinosaurs. But, also relevantly, like all cool children who love dinosaurs, my two-year-old can already distinguish between types of dinosaurs. This is a super-power most little kids have, and it makes them all seem like they know more about the world than they actually do. My daughter can tell the difference between a stegosaur, a triceratops, and yes, even a pachycephalosaurus. Guess who probably can’t remember the importance of these distinctions? Yep, you guessed it, a shit-faced Russell Crowe!
From back to front: Ankylosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus, Triceratops, Struthiomimus, Pachycephalosaurus, and the unnamed dromaeosaurid and caenagnathid now named Acheroraptor and Anzu respectively.
The dinosaur skull Crowe bought from Leo was a Mosasaurus. A what? That’s right, it’s that underwater dinosaur that was a big deal in the first Jurassic World movie. Now, I’m not saying this kind of dinosaur isn’t cool per se, but it’s certainly not 30K cool, and I bet my daughter would be disappointed we missed some mortgage payments over this particular dino skull.
A T-Rex? A Triceratops? I mean, I think anyone could understand. But, a dinosaur that looks like a glorified crocodile? This seems like the real mistake here.
The lesson here is very clear. If you’re making late night drunken purchases of the remains of prehistoric creatures, you should, by all means, think of your children. But, more importantly than that, if you want that purchase to matter, think like a child.
This article originally appeared on Fatherly. Follow @FatherlyHQ on Twitter.
