How Did You Get Into Dinosaurs?

For me it was a mix of Jurassic Park and having access to the Field Museum at such a young age (my parents encouraged my learning from a very early age without being one of those super-school parents). I was shown Jurassic Park when I was 3 by my Aunt, and I will always remember being awed by the Brachiosaurus that used to sit in Stanley Field Hall when I was a tot. Then the pack of 4 Herrerasaurus that stared down on you in the Mesozoic section of the Evolving Planet exhibit, and of course the Parasaurolophus, Pteranodon, Daspletosaurus, Triceratops, and the Apatosaurus that adorned the hall. *has nostalgia tsunami*

Watching When Dinosaurs Roamed America when I was 3. It is also what got me into accuracy and science in general, leading me to never whine about feathered dinosaurs like most people have.

Jurassic Park entirely.

Had a bad accident as a two-year old. Family and friends bought me books with dinosaurs and I was hooked. Jurassic Park just came around at the right time a couple years later.

I have been into dinosaurs since I was young. I was three when Jurassic Park 1 came out and I was dumb by stealing glances at it when I was younger. Dinosaur books was the first ones I was in to. I have been a dino freak for easily over 23 years.

Walking With Dinosaurs when I was 4.

I was a dinosaur nut when I was a kid. Jurassic Park didn't even exist yet.I used to bring home books about dinosaurs every time I went to the school library in Elemntary. I used to watch old dinosaurs movies that were horrid but I loved, like "The Last Dinosaur." I just had a draw to them.

Then, one night my parents dropped my sister off a sitter. I had no idea why and asked why we were going somewhere so late at night. Well they surprised me. It was the opening of Jurassic Park. From that moment forward I've always been a fan. I'm 30 now and still a huge fan of dinosaurs and the JP Franchise.

Well, for me when I was around 4~5 years old and I got a Brachiosaurus toy. I remember looking at it curiously and thinking "what a cool dinosaur, I want to have more!", then at age 6 I was already a dinosaur fan, and my aunt took me to a store FULL of rubber chinasaur dinosaurs with all sizes, I got crazy and choose a 30cm Brachiosaurus (bc it was my first dinosaur I even got) and a medium sized Dimetrodon and Pteranodon. I also remember getting a collection magazine about dinosaurs, I've got miniatures and skeleton from it and also a mini book about dinosaurs, so I started reading about them and couldn't stop. That's how I learned about them, since I didn't have internet that time. I loved dinosaurs as a kid. I was like Tim/Gray, what you would call a dinosaur nerd. I also suffered a lot of bullying bc of that. I never got accepted bc I loved dinosaurs and everything I did was dinosaur related. I remember when I came to the library of my school and they had PCs with internet, I had to do a homework in group about something, but instead I took the PC, entered on wikipedia and started to read about dinosaurs, while the other classmates wanted to enter on Orkut, MSN, and those stuff. They even looked at me in a weird way like "why you're searching about this stuff?". I was like 11 years old, and in my teenage I've got ashamed of myself and even stopped being so crazy about dinosaurs for years, bc I didn't want to get bullied or stuff. I regret a lot in doing that.

I also loved biology in general, and I've got many biology books as a kid, some of them were far ahead of my grade, but I still read them. I think that's why I accept and understand more concepts like Evolution. Reading and educating yourself since a kid can make a GREAT difference.

I also remember by the age 7 to start watching JP movies, I didn't pay attention to the characters/plot, just the dinosaurs. I also remember playing with my dinosaurs on my backyard and pretending I was John Hammond and made a park full of dinosaurs.

When I was a teen I read Crichton's books and then I've started to love JP franchise as well.

Getting dinosaur toys when I was very little. I was hooked into learning more about them. As for dino movies, I first saw The Land Before Time films and loved them as a child. The original was so dark for a kids film and I love it. I also still have a fondness for the sequels but mostly out of nostalgia because they were completely little kid films. An other dino animated film I like is "We're Back: A Dinosaur Story". But the film that really got me into dinosaurs was you guess it: Jurassic Park.

Richard Levine wrote:

Jurassic Park entirely.

This. I don't think I realized what a dinosaur was until I saw JP. It was eye-opening.

Jurassic Park when I was 5 years old

I'm sure I've told this story before, but since every record of the story is gonna disappear in about five and a half hours, I better tell it again.

TBH I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in dinosaurs. It's always been a part of me. Exposure to dinosaurs in the media only fueled that fire. I was born slightly too late to experience the JP craze at its height, so Walking with Dinosaurs filled that initial void.

When I found out, at the age of five, that there was a whole movie about dinosaurs, I demanded to see it. When my parents said that it was a scary movie and I might get nightmares, I didn't care. So I watched it anyway, on a grainy old VHS tape, and did not get nightmares. As a matter of fact I loved it. The other two movies soon followed, as well as the novels, which were the first full-length novels I ever read.

Around the same time I received a very special gift. Knowing that I was so enamored with dinosaurs, my godparents gave me a fossil fish as a birthday present. I was fascinated, and started looking into the science behind the dinosaurs, instead of just scratching the surface.

Thus my fate was sealed. I start my undergraduate degree in geosciences in a few months, on the road to paleontology. I couldn't have asked for anything better.

Honestly, it was a combination of things for me but it can more or less be summarized as such: they have always been apart of my life. Museums, Godzilla (yes I know, I know), JP, Walking with Dinosaurs, birds, the list goes on and on. I seriously can't remember a time in my life where I wasn't in love with dinosaurs. It seriously feels like its just apart of my DNA to love them.

Very young baby me got handed a Pachycephalosaurus toy by my awesome big sister and she read to me from her dinosaur coloring book as I slobbered on her crayons.

No seriously, got family movies of this.

Tarbtano wrote:

Very young baby me got handed a Pachycephalosaurus toy by my awesome big sister and she read to me from her dinosaur coloring book as I slobbered on her crayons.

No seriously, got family movies of this.

Not going to lie, that is beyond adorable. I'd love to see them (jk).

i've been into dinosaurs for as long as i can remember, but i think the first book i had was a VERY generalized one i think by the same guy as the Bearenstein Bears--it had that kind of art style

When I was two years old, my mum introduced dinosaurs to me by drawing them for me. I was never really into dolls like other little girls. I would always go for the dinosaur toys and enact prehistoric battles with my dad, or create prehistoric landscapes. When I was five, my parents took me to The Natural History museum in London where there was a "Dinosaurs Alive!" exhibition. And of course, I saw Jurassic Park for the first time. The first sight of the Brachiosaurus will stay with me for as long as I live, for me it was the most amazing thing and it remains so, being the first CGI creature I ever saw with my young, impressionable eyes. And as I grew, I only wanted to learn more about these fascinating animals of the past and collected as many books and watched as many documentaries as I possibly could.

All of this - the drawings, the toys, the animatronics, the documentaries, the movies, the dozens of books I accumulated over the years - all fed into my imagination and continues to nurture my love of dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park at 3 years old.

When I was 8 months old I found a dinosaur toy at my friends house and took it. I kept it everywhere with me. I was very sad when I had to give it back.

It's so interesting that everyone remember their moments as 2~3 years old. I can't remember anything before 4 years old.

The only thing I remember before it is when I was crying on my parents bed.

I also never been in a museum.

I was in Apple class, which is basically pre-Kindergarden, and I learned the basics when I was 4. Jurassic Park is what sealed the deal and I never looked back. Growing up in high school, it took a bit of a back seat as I expanded my interest-battleships, tanks, fighter planes and bomber planes, cryptozoology, cars, that stuff. But even then, dinosaurs were NEVER replaced as my first and favorite hobby. Mokele-Mbembe, the sauropod dinosaur that lives in the Congo rainforest/jungle is my favorite cryptid and I learned about a lot of other cryptosaurs because of it. Looking back, that was the one way how I kept my love of dinosaurs alive after the trainwreck that was JP3 and during the dead period.

I might have been about 4 or 5 years old, and animal films were all the rage at that age, especially animated Disney films. Then I saw The Land Before Time, and found that it fuelled my "dinosaur phase" that supposedly every child goes through, I appreciated the darker tone, the characters and the emotional weight, and of course it had dinosaurs!

That was my gateway film to watching Jurassic Park, which sealed my love of dinosaurs forever by giving me easily the best vision of them in real life that anyone at the time (and arguably today) had seen. It was the first live action film that I watched from start to finish and the first live action film I could say with all certainty that I loved.

Jurassic Park, The Land Before Time, and Walking With Dinosaurs

Being a little kid with dinosaur books, films and plastic toys, I guess. I can't really remember the exact occasion which jump-started it all, assuming there even was one.

Walking With Dinosaurs and Disney's Dinosaur were frequent watches back then, with Jurassic Park entering my life a bit later on.

I'm pretty sure I still have it lying around somewhere in my house, but I have a book from my childhood that has everything listed in alphabetical order.

I started showing an interest in dinosaurs around the age of 6 or 7. I remember going shopping with my mum and in one particular shop, I found a selection of "Wee Sing" books with cassette tapes. Among them was one titled "Wee Sing Dinosaurs". I don't have the original cassette tape anymore (it broke because I was always playing it) but I was able to get the CD version and now all the fun dinosaur songs I learnt as a kid are on my I-Pod, so I can still listen to them and I still remember the words to every song.

1) Dinosaur toys from early to mid-late 90's
2) Library dinosaur books from early to mid-late 90's, first only picture books but then some with text too lol
3) Land Before Time in 1995, sequels 2-5 sometime afterwards
4) Dino Riders (first couple episodes on VHS) probably by around mid-90's, it's hard to tell
5) Denver the Last Dinosaur, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, Dink the Little Dinosaur and other crappy cartoons like that by late-ish 90's
6) King Kong in 1997
7) Jurassic Park in 1997
8] The Lost World in 1998
9) Jurassic Park Novel sometime in the late 90's (also Lost World novel later but I hated it)
10] Jurassic Park 3 in 2001
11) Walking with Dinosaurs in 2001 or 2002

General Interest really started vanishing after that as I was going into teens but JP never died in my heart, also "found" Land Before Time again 5 years ago and it (the first one) is just amazing

My dinosaur collection is so big, I don't exactly how many dinosaur-related items I actually have
but my collection consists of almost everything from toys, stickers and a wall clock to books, bed sheets and a T-Rex key rack.

Well, the fact that I was born in 1991 greatly contributed to my dinosaur interests. Jurassic Park the film was released when I was 2 years old. Power Rangers were all prehistoric beasts. Beast Wars & the dino references within.

Visiting Drumheller, Jurassic Park, When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Prehistoric Planet, Walking With Dinosaurs The Live Experience, Allosaurus (a Walking With Dinosaurs special.) Those shows got me into dinosaurs I think.