Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for November 29, 1992
November 28, 1992
November 30, 1992
Transcript:
Narrator: Recess! A School day break for play and exercise. Little does Susie realize how much exercise she is about to get! She turns at the sound of running feet behind her. Have her friends come to join her? No! It's a pack of ferocious deinonychus dinosaurs!! Screaming, Susie hurls herself toward the school doors, but the pack is closing in! With the grim efficiency of wild dogs, the predators have a meal. Across the playground, students huddle in stupefied horror! Which one of them will be next? Thus the weak and stupid are weeded out in a heartless, but essential, natural selection, keeping the human population in check. At least, that's how it ought to be. Miss Wormwood: Thank you for that tastelss and entirely uninformative report on overpopulation. See me after class. Calvin: You like that, Susie??
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Calvin’s Mom: Calvin, what did Deinonychus eat?
Calvin: Mom, its main prey was the plant-eating ornithopod dinosaur Tenontosaurus.
Calvin’s Mom: When and where did these dinosaurs live?
Calvin: In western North America during the early Cretaceous, about 45 million years before T. rex.
Calvin’s Mom: How big were they?
Calvin: Deinonychus (“terrible claw”) weighed about 50 pounds, and was about 3½ feet tall and 10 feet long including its 6-foot tail, which was stiffened by bony tendons for balance as this theropod ran. The longest claw on each of its feet measured about 7 inches along the outer curve when the dinosaur was alive (the bony core alone was about 5⅓ inches long, but it would have been longer with the keratinous sheathe). Deinonychus had about 64 backward-facing teeth, up to half an inch long. Tenontosaurus (“tendon lizard”) was 2¾ feet high at its hips, and 12¾ feet long including its 7¾-foot tail. Its tail, like Deinonychus’s, was stiffened by bony tendons for balance. Tenontosaurus weighed approximately 270 pounds. Fossil evidence indicates that Deinonychus hunted in packs to bring down Tenontosaurus.*
*I’ve calculated this from information provided by The Complete Dinosaur (©1997) by James O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman (editors) and by the The Dinosaur Society’s Dinosaur Encyclopedia of (©1993) by Don Lessem and Donald F. Glut.