Dinosaur, you were a classic before Walt Disney even thought of Mickey Mouse, before vanilla ice cream crept into the suburban house, before the boot-cut jean made us all look fat.
You rocked the dinosaur before Was (Not Was) even wrote the melody. You had epic battles over cliffs before the term "cliffhanger" had even been coined, before the Land Before Time movies misused them.
You played hide-and-seek with cavemen before motley preschoolers wore the game out. And you always won, tearing through tree stumps and huts in villages to find our early ancestors cowering in terror, huddled in their favorite hiding spots.
You made your roars ring through the trees, singing of your triumph, as you crouched over your newly-defeated prey, eons before us modern humans even considered writing songs for people we hate.
You freaked each other out way before your descendents jumped out at me from the pop-up picture book we kept on the shelf when I was a kid. I flipped through the pages, every time knowing which spots would scare me. But the allure of underwater platypuses with needle-point teeth got me every time.
That's what you did for us, dinosaur. You never went out of style. You are the Marlon Brando, the Julius Caesar, the Alexander the Great, of prehistoric reptiles.