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How long is too long to pretend to be a pterosaur?
When a little person is pretending to be a furry flying vertebrate soaring the unfriendly prehistoric skies at a special exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, the answer is clear.
Because there’s a sign. And the sign says don’t hog virtual lab when others are waiting.
This honor system seems fitting for a museum, although the integration of what feels like an Xbox game into the experience brought out some primal parental conflict one recent weekend.
Here’s what happened:
One father and his son dominated the pterosaur virtual lab in which a person stands, arms spread, and pilots the pterosaur on a screen ahead. Another father approached them and told them it was time to give others a turn.
At that point, sparks flew, teeth were bared, and the ensuring argument felt like two T-Rexes on the set of the McLaughlin Group.
Father No. 1 was not going to take the public reprimand, and ridiculed father No. 2, who stood his ground, gaining righteousness as he spoke for the group.
Except the group was mute.
My husband, who’d been in the line long enough to see father No. 1 cut to the front, didn’t say a word. Even I kept quiet, my mouth open, unable to say what was on my mind.
Of course father No. 2 was correct. But the other dad was a bully and there was no point picking a fight. He wasn’t going to change his ways and had quite a lot of accessible anger.
“Oh, man,” I said when I got home, “what does this mean for my offspring?”
Still, I felt like a plant eater, doomed to walk the slow but steady path towards extinction while the aggressive types dominated the scene.
So I did what any modern mother (reporter) would do. I contacted a friend who used to work at the museum. He referred me to Dr. Brian Andres, an assistant professor in the geosciences department at the University of South Florida.
Fortunately, Dr. Andres had been to the exhibit. There is simply no record of how pterosaurs, flying reptiles of the late Triassic and Cretaceous periods that kicked the bucket 66 million years ago, behaved while waiting in line, he explained.
He did say, however, that their reproductive biology appears to be something between birds and crocodiles. Based on the fossil record, pterosaurs had nesting colonies, which indicates that the individuals “could stand each other’s presence.”
So far, they seemed better behaved than father No.1.
And, Dr. Andres said, there is evidence that both males and females likely cared for the eggs and the young for a certain amount of time. But the men were larger and had “more extravagant crests.”
Father No. 1 did have a nice head of hair. In fact, he looked and sounded like a cross between Alan Rickman and Vladimir Putin. Not so warm and fuzzy.
We don’t know how female pterosaurs behaved, Dr. Andres told me, but their relatives, birds and crocodiles, defend their offspring.
I wanted to join the mammals, anyway.
And there was the evidence I needed. In the game of life, or the halls of a museum, wasn’t it all about protecting our young? Father No. 1 wanted to give his son the advantage in the group, experiencing the thrill of prehistoric flight until he dominated the virtual landscape. Father No. 2 fought for equality and a decent chance. And I, mother, whom Dr. Andres gamely described as a pterosaur with a slightly smaller form and “less conspicuous head crest,” just wanted to get out of there unnoticed.
Anytime my oldest child watches adults behave in ways that might earn them a visit to the principal’s office, she asks me a lot of questions, which lead to my own. Is there a less confrontational way to speak to someone you suspect is ready for a fight? At what point do you step in? And when do you listen to your instincts about knowing when to let things play out on their own? Our visit to the pterosaur exhibit revealed much about human behavior, it turned out.
Fossil record or not, there’s always someone who cuts to the front of a line and wants to stay there. So much of parenting feels like knowing when to compete and when to walk away. The best answer I had for my 9-year-old’s many questions was to explain that the same idea applies to growing up.
Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff blogs at The Educated Mom and is an editor at Mindprint Learning. Follow her on Twitter.
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