Favorite Dinosaur?

I was at a neighborhood block party the other day, and quickly left the "grownup table" to go have fun with the kids. Conversations about mortgage rates and lawn care aren't completely irrelevant to me, but they're more like work than what I wanted to be doing on the weekends. So after a session of "Wrestle Monster Attack" in the bounce house and a abrupt cessation of "Dizzy or Not Dizzy" on the swing due (nothing bad, just a couple of scraped knees) I looked for something else fun.

Somebody thoughtful had left color chalk on the sidewalk, so grabbed a chunk and started drawing dinosaurs (old habit) on the street. The kids got excited and started scribbling in their own (various skill levels), and more importantly, every single kid I questioned replied immediately with their favorite kind of dinosaur. Velociraptor! Stegosaurus! Passa-rolo-cephalo-saurus! (not a real one but good effort Braiden!). I was so jammed on the dino-mania didn't even get pedantic when they incorrectly named a pterosaur or Mesozoic marine reptile. I added them to the street as fast as I could, but it honestly only takes one Brachiosaurus to slow things down (even at 1/5 scale)

But grooooan, the adults.

Not one of them had a favorite. Not one. In fact, most of just smiled awkwardly, then said they sure liked my "brontosaurus" (don't get me started). How do you deal with people like this?

There is simply no excuse. The most awesome terrestrial organisms on Earth deserve to be ranked higher in importance than copays on dental insurance, local school board elections, or even the new farm-to-table Burmese place off Broadway. What happens to the human brain between the ages of 8 and 40 to make these things irrelevant?! I get that you might not have space for a 100,000 pound sauropod, but at least let a little Compsognathus or something in?

It's undebatable that T. rex is more interesting than interest rates, of any type, ever. Forget your Roth IRA. Forty feet of apex predator with a bite force that could crush the face of a Triceratops, and walked around just a few hundred miles from here beats the trendiest local mocktails. You want to talk about how annoying Zoom meetings are? You're annoying! Because you're already dead inside! The Cretaceous is way more relevant than you, even 100 million years later! Where's your imagination? Where's your sense of wonder?!

Look, I'm not saying to quit your mid-level software engineering gig and go be an amateur paleontologist. I grind it out week to week and pay my bills too. I don't expect you to be a die hard dino-fan. I realize that not everyone was ten years old and already obsessed with dinosaurs when Jurassic Park came out and had their mom take them out of school under the pretense of a doctor's appointment but actually they went to see a matinee on opening day (true story, thanks Mom!). But for Fukuisaurus's sake, at least have a favorite!