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Dinosaurs and This American Life

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My favorite radio show is, without a doubt, This American Life.

It has a real tendency to be entertaining and then suddenly bust out with something incredibly profound right after you’ve been thoroughly disarmed.

This show was on a topic that would inherently interest me (Simulated Worlds), but one of the acts was about the Dinosaur exhibits one sees at musea. The interviewer asked the curator of one of the exhibits and asked why dinosaur exhibits are such common features in musea.

The curator replied that dinosaurs had been the most successful life-form on this planet and they ruled for thousands of years - and then one day, they simply went extinct - and there was nothing they could do about it.

So, why are we obsessed with dinosaur exhibits?