The Dinosaur Poo

I am not very old. I can’t count, so I don’t know how old I am!  I have not been out of my egg for very long. I was getting squashed in there – we dinosaurs stay in our eggs longer than the other reptiles. I really was getting squashed even though my egg had a soft shell – I just had to come out.

What a shock!  It was so crowded! It was only me in my shell, and now there were so many other baby dinosaurs and all their mothers and some of their Dads too. You see, my family gave you the birds, and a lot of them are very good parents and we started all that! My Dad helped my Mum build a nest somewhere nice for us eggs, – it was often somewhere near their friends – and he watched out for us even before we hatched.  A good thing too. I don’t like to think about it, but lots of animals – including the early mammals – like to eat us up as eggs.  You should know because you’re a mammal and don’t you eat a bird’s egg yourself, sometimes? But my Mum and Dad and their friends fought off animals that wanted to eat us up.   And they helped me after I was hatched too. 

I am not saying I was a good walker when I hatched, but you humans, though you think you’re so clever, it takes you ages to learn to walk.  We dinos walk straight away! Not quite as well as a bit later, but we do walk straight away which is more than you do! But going to get our food is a bit much.    It isn’t just that I have to walk to get it, it is what I had to walk through!  You see we herbivores can’t use all the ferns and stuff that we eat, and so we make really gigantic poos! A million times bigger than the cow pats that you have in your fields!

And the more there are of us, the more poo there is! And there are a lot of us: my Mum and Dad often lay 24 eggs or so at a time, and so do all their friends. They have to, as very sadly not all of us survive. It is like frogs and tadpoles: there are plenty spare.  And sooner or later we have to go and get food for ourselves. The trouble is, the more of us there are in our dinosaur colony, the further we have to go, because all the leaves and ferns and grass nearby are eaten up. And the more of us there are in our dinosaur colony, the more poo there is! We don’t think our own poo is so bad, but everyone else’s! 

Now I’m going to tell you what happened to my friend, Dino 2.  I call him this because he is a dino too (and I can’t remember a lot of names). He calls me Dino 1. Yesterday we went on our first trip to get some food. We were still a bit shaky on our legs, and all that poo was very slippery. We couldn’t hold hands like you humans do sometimes, but I held on to Dino 2’s tail. We slithered and slipped about, but we did manage to cross quite a lot of that poo, and the trees beyond, with lovely yummy-looking leaves, were not so far. All of a sudden, Dino 2 tripped and fell. There was my support gone. 

Dino 2 moaned and groaned – his legs slipped away as he tried to raise himself. I called for help, but it was terribly noisy with all us dinos, and my Mum and Dad couldn’t hear me. And nor did Dino 2’s Mum and Dad. I felt very sorry for Dino 2 as he lay there struggling in the poo, but I couldn’t do anything and decided to go back to our nest and try to get help. It wasn’t easy to get back, and I had to be very careful as I didn’t want to fall, but I did get back.

I told my Mum and Dad, but they weren’t interested – Dino 2 wasn’t theirs. I did manage to find his parents, but the trouble was I couldn’t tell them where Dino 2 was, I had forgotten!

I am not very clever. Most dinosaurs aren’t clever. So my poor friend…. I don’t like to think about it. But something I have thought is that perhaps we dinos are clever: after all, we lasted for millions and millions and millions of years, and you humans haven’t even reached 1 million yet, have you?

If you want listen to the audio of the Dinosaur Poo, – here is the link.

Enjoy, and hope to see you next month,

Charlotte Sebag-Montefiore