The Age of Dinosaurs

Elena Megalos | Longreads | April 2, 2026 | 2,523 words (10 minutes)

Approaching the American Museum of Natural History without my children felt like a betrayal. At best, a lie by omission. (On my way out the door, I’d told them I had “an appointment in Manhattan.”) Of course, my relationship to the building predated motherhood. Long before, as a child who lived in California, I’d visited like most tourists. My husband and I had shared a membership when he was still my boyfriend. In the years since having children of my own, though, the museum had become the framework in which my best parenting occurred. It brought order, wonder, and central air to countless school holidays. It was the cathedral to which my sons and I journeyed; it was our most successful date spot. 

The problem was, in all our visits, we’d never successfully visited the fourth floor. It’s the famous one, the floor that displays the fossils. My older son, now a first grader, had not developed an interest in dinosaurs, and I held myself responsible.

At six years old, my son’s “age of the dinosaur,” so to speak, was about to end—and it had never even begun. For most children, the age of the dinosaur straddles years four and five. It wasn’t that an interest in extinct reptiles was impossible for an older child (the Jurassic Park films were not aimed at preschoolers; certain adults had nurtured the flame so effectively that they’d become paleontologists), but that an encyclopedic obsession with dinosaurs would have peaked by now. Islands of expertise—periods of deep topical knowledge—coincide with the brain development of most four- to six-year-olds. In these years, children are so good at categorizing, memorizing, and imagining that passionate time travel comes easily. 

There were selfish reasons I’d hoped my son might enjoy a dinosaur phase. This, I believed, differed from the way my husband hoped he might be the kind of child who wanted to play catch with his dad. (So far, to my husband’s chagrin, he was not.) It wasn’t that I wished our son would keep me company on a Jurassic island I already occupied. The truth is, I was clueless about dinosaurs and wanted to learn, too. I was prepared to be a good student—when our son was two, hadn’t I gamely absorbed the names of the construction vehicles?—and expected meaningful payoff. In devoting my attention to the distant past, I planned to finally deepen my understanding of this planet I took for granted. Child rearing had raised the existential stakes, but it had also narrowed my reality, made me stingy in my care and attention. Ruminating on extinction, under the slanted tutelage of my child, felt like a responsible thing to do. 

In theory, I’d hoped my son’s dinosaur phase might establish a blueprint for other child-led intensives that would fill my knowledge gaps and make my shrunken world bigger. It was an injustice, really, that I remembered so little of what had captivated me before puberty, at which point my capacity for wonder had already plateaued. If a tree began its life when I did, I sort of imagined a sequence like this:

If my hypothetical tree-twin’s timeline was to be trusted, then my son and I were behind schedule, still luxuriating in the age of animals when we should have moved on to more rigorous concepts. 

The itinerary we followed every time we came to this museum reflected our developmental lag. We started with a bathroom visit, then kicked off our diorama tour in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals. We turned left into African Peoples to see the miniature irrigation models.* From there, we hurried past the birds and entered the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples (quick pit stop at the Silk Road miniatures) en route to Asian Mammals, then up the stairs to the second level of the Hall of African Mammals, then around the corner to the Reptiles and Amphibians. If we had the energy, we descended two floors to the Hall of North American Mammals and concluded beneath the blue whale in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.

*The miniatures didn’t exactly fit my “age of animals” theory (though two of the irrigation models featured beasts of burden, and there were tiny camels traversing the Silk Road trade hubs). When my son was three, we’d stumbled upon the models while trying to get from one continent to another, and he’d been enchanted ever since. We couldn’t pass the glass cases without my son narrating the motions of the simple machines: “The man wants the water under the ground. He hits the bull with his stick so the bull will pull the wheel. The wheel spins another wheel and the water fills the jugs. The water spills out for the man’s crops.” This had been my explanation the first time we’d encountered the scene; for three years now, my son had been speaking my words back to me, inverting our teacher-learner dynamic. Each visit to the museum brought us further from our original interaction, but we indulged each other all the same, pretending no time had passed. 

Now that I thought about it, our itinerary was as lopsided as it was aggressive. Way more mammals than necessary. How had I lost track of time and allowed this to happen? How had I permitted such stasis, forgetting to integrate fossils, minerals, and celestial bodies? What about forests, given my fondness for tree metaphors? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited my once-favorite display, the Mark Twain Tree, a nine-ton sequoia cross-section depicting 1,342 annual rings. Sliced from a tree felled by loggers in 1891, the cross-section was annotated with historical events that marked its 13 centuries of life, from the beginning of Chinese book printing to the Crusades to the invention of the telescope.

Like the fossil floor (up so many flights of stairs!), I’m sure we hadn’t meant to forget the sequoia slice, discreetly tucked away in an older, quieter wing of the museum. I’d probably assumed we’d get there eventually, underestimating the trappings of comfort. Not only was our route familiar, but it showed us the familiar: animals (and the occasional tiny human) we recognized.

Today’s solo visit was my attempt at remediation. Even if I’d allowed my sons—and, by extension, myself—to remain so firmly rooted in what was comfortable rather than broadening their perspective, I could still course-correct, map possibilities for new routes and insist upon them during future visits. I’d go back in time, taking humans and present-day species out of the picture. Most crucially, I’d take my own humans out of the picture. The presence of my children would only distract me, keep me soft and narrow. I climbed the stairs and an employee scanned my ticket.

Inside, I instinctively located the nearest bathroom. I wasn’t even sure I had to pee; did I use public bathrooms when I wasn’t coaxing my kids to “just try”? Watching other mothers pull their young into too-tight stalls made me feel far away, the way I felt when I witnessed teachers on subways corralling hordes of students. (I, too, am a classroom teacher.) Exhausted on a stranger’s behalf, a little guilty to feel such distance and relief. 

The museum’s architecture didn’t lend itself to a chronological tour, but I figured I’d begin in the forest with my old friend the sequoia, then work my way backward. Dinosaurs would be next. Then the Hall of Planet Earth. Finally, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a wing through which we always entered and exited the museum, but only because it was stroller accessible and this had once mattered. I’d end at the beginning: with the Big Bang. 

The sequoia slice was even bigger than I remembered, but it wasn’t its size that startled me. In the dim light, I squinted and saw that the rings had been scrubbed of their timeline. Rather, the century markers remained, but the accompanying text was gone. History was a minefield. Maybe the curators had considered revising statements like “Columbus discovers the Orinoco River” before deeming the entire undertaking too controversial. With only 13 slots, who were they to prioritize one civilization’s achievements over another’s? Or maybe the curators figured that, given the escalating climate crisis, it was anthropocentric to project human progress onto a tree that never asked to speak our language.

I sheepishly found myself longing for the old text. Maybe other visitors were content to let the tree speak for itself; maybe it was just me who preferred to imagine it accruing its rings alongside generations of nameless people who were born and became children who became grown-ups who died, who, once in a while, created extraordinary things that outlasted them.

I needed something older, something so old that I wouldn’t feel compelled to project my kind onto it. I needed something that my children might find boring, that evenI might find boring. I told myself the dinosaurs wouldn’t mind if I took a detour to look at rocks first.

The Hall of Planet Earth was challenging; I’d avoided it even before children, my mind glazing over at the sight of words like “mantle” and “tectonics.” There were really old rocks here; geologists had determined one fragment to be 3.96 billion years old. 

I understood the importance of this room, how every good citizen ought to be spending more time in it. The Hall of Planet Earth wasn’t just a tribute to our planet’s past; it warned of its future. It explicitly predicted where we were headed, climate-wise. The migration and extinction of vulnerable species. The disruption of worldwide ecosystems. The displacement of millions of people. Global food and water shortages. Political instability. If my sons became fathers, they wouldn’t lose sleep over whether or not their own kids expressed sufficient interest in dinosaurs; they’d have plenty of other reasons to lie awake at night. 

And still—still!—the objects in this room struggled to hold my attention. The rocks looked so cold. I didn’t have to touch them to shiver. It’s not as though the stuffed mammals in those dioramas generated heat, either, but I imagined them warm. Even the sequoia slice, I believed, would share my body temperature if I pressed my face against it. I couldn’t draw a rock well; it felt so far away from me. This was my problem.  

The Hayden Big Bang Theater was close by. I could see it through the door. It would be inefficient to ascend four floors to the fossils, only to return to this very spot, so I decided (again) to tweak my route. I’d never been inside the Hayden Big Bang Theater or walked the cosmic pathway, a curved ramp at the center of the Rose Center that collapsed 13 billion years—the history of the universe—into 360 feet. It was designed so that every footstep moved you forward roughly 90 million years. Viewers were reminded to manage expectations, that earth wouldn’t even show up for the first two thirds of the journey. 

I felt compelled to move slowly, to notice each point of contact between my feet and the ramp. The birth of time. The cosmic dark ages. (Eleven steps.) The formation of the Milky Way galaxy. (One hundred steps.) The birth of the sun. (Two small steps.) The formation of earth and moon. (Nine steps.) 

As I walked the cosmic pathway, I kept glancing at a group of high school boys with pencils and packets who were clumped 10 feet and half-a-billion years ahead of me. The shortest among them was the teacher. He didn’t seem overwhelmed to be leading a field trip. His rapport made it clear he genuinely enjoyed the company of teenagers, the age group most parents fear. I knew I should have been learning the definition of a quark, but instead I stared at them. 

I eyed their feet and thought about how shoes, too, could measure time. I’d recently concluded the age of dainty leather flats and begun the age of comfortable sneakers with orthotics. 

At each billion-year marker, the placard repeated the same text: “The farther out in space we look, the further back in time we see.” The placard was talking about starlight, but what if there was another message here for me? What if I was looking not just back in time, but forward?

What kind of sneakers would my sons wear when they evolved into teens? When they were middle aged? Elderly? Where would they go without me?

The emergence of microscopic life forms. (Seventeen steps.) The oxygenation of oceans and the atmosphere. (Twenty steps.) The emergence of multicellular life forms. (Four steps.) The age of the dinosaur.

A toddler’s peak dinosaur window may have been brief, but the real age of the dinosaur lasted 186 million years. Roughly two footsteps. Kudos to the dinosaurs; they really did deserve the entire fourth floor.

I reached the end of the ramp and human time was waiting, a single strand of hair with a width that encapsulated the past 30,000 years. One tenth of a millimeter of the cosmic pathway was equivalent to the entire history of human art and creativity. I burst into tears. Thankfully, the teenage boys and their teacher had moved on.

A strand of hair—really? If that hair had been a wire instead, would that tenth of a millimeter have moved me? On whose head had that strand of hair once grown? The curator’s child, I’d bet. That’s what I would have done if I’d been the genius who conceived of this exhibit. Thirteen billion years of cosmic creativity and I couldn’t help loving human beings the most, more specifically the two human beings I’d made. 

Because in relation to stars or rocks or even trees, what is a child? Utterly, unbearably inconsequential. If a child’s parent doesn’t set aside this sublime and brutal fact and love them anyway—love them like they are the center—then who in the cosmos will?

I confirmed what I’d suspected: that zooming out and attempting to de-center my children had only brought me back to them. 

I’d only walked 145 steps, but felt exhausted. Too tired to ascend four flights of stairs, to take in 186 million years of fossils. (No disrespect to the dinosaurs; I would tip my hat to them forever, even if I never paid a visit). 

I wanted to sit. Somehow, though, my feet were still moving. I was walking, walking without thinking. My sneakers were pulling me along, course-correcting, transporting me to the door of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals and every other room that would follow.

This route didn’t matter because it told the story of the universe or the planet or even our young, young (newborn, really) species. It mattered because it preserved one specific moment in one specific childhood (and one specific motherhood) among billions. 

Time and distance would happen to my children, with or without my intervention. Everything I had seen today had confirmed it. But we also visit museums to bend time and distance, to shuck off the weight of perspective, however briefly.

So I paid my time capsule a visit.

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Elena Megalos is a Brooklyn-based teacher and visual storyteller. She is the illustrator of the middle grade novel Rat Rule 79 by Rivka Galchen and has contributed to Los Angeles Review of Books, Mother Tongue Magazine, Cake Zine, and other publications. For more information, visit her at www.elenamegalos.com or on Instagram. 

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Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens