Years ago, when I visited the Museum of Nature in Ottawa, there was a fascinating “humanoid” dinosaur sculpture, life-size I guess. It had green skin, big yellow eyes, and dinosaurian haunches with an upright posture. Clearly it was someone’s guess at how dinosaurs might have looked had they evolved into something intelligent. You could tell because of the shoulders. Intelligent critters in fictional images almost always have human-like shoulders to show that they’re “people.” So did this fascinating critter.
I turned to someone in a museum uniform. “Shouldn’t this have narrow shoulders like a cat? We have flattened shoulders because we went through a period of brachiating, but this one never did. It’s not built for it.”
And you know, the next time I went in, some years later, that pretty sculpture wasn’t on display. I hope they just wanted to rotate something else into view and it wasn’t my fault!
