I walked across Capitol Mall towards the hotel, and stopped into the National Museum of Natural History, which still had about an hour and a half before closing time. I love that it’s free to enter the Smithsonian. If it wasn’t for my sketchbook I could have still seen a lot more of that museum, but I wanted to draw dinosaurs. Or rather, Dinosaurs And Other Prehistoric Creatures. The dinosaur displays at the Smithsonian are pretty great, and I did see as many as I could in such a short time, but I really wanted to draw the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex biting into the frill of a stricken Triceratops. It was a real frill-seeker. The museum was quite busy, and this was a popular display. Poor Triceratops though.

Nearby was this ashen-boned skull of an Allosaurus, another of my favourite dinosaurs when I was a kid. As with so many things, my all-time top-five dinosaur (and other prehistoric creatures) list was established when I was about five or six from the two very important dinosaur books I owned (one of which I still have, ‘Dinosaurs Discovered’ by John Gilbert), and specifically from the Guy Michel artwork inside. This was back when dinosaurs stood upright like people or kangaroos, letting their tails trail on the floor behind them, the good old days. One of those favourites was the Allosaurus, which I think I liked more than the T-Rex because it had three fingers instead of two on each arm. A bit like Mourinho holding up three fingers to show how many Premier Leagues he has won. I still remember being a young dinosaur lover, going to the Natural History Museum with my big sister, and still have my original pronunciations of prehistoric words in my head, like the ‘cretackus’ period, or the ‘velo-kee-raptor’, or the great feathered ‘archie-oper-terrix’. I wouldn’t say those now, but Diplodocus is and always will be ‘diplo-DOcus’, not ‘di-PLOD-uckus’, none of that nonsense. Allosaurus is easy enough to pronounce, although this one being ‘Fragilis’ reminded me of A Christmas Story, the box marked ‘fra-gile’ which must have been Italian.

One creature whose name I’ve grudgingly accepted isn’t pronounced my way is Dimetrodon (more ‘di-MET-rodon’ and not ‘DYMER-TRODON’, whatever).I say creature because this one is not actually a dinosaur, coming from a much earlier time period, the early Permian period (the Cisuralian epoch of that period if we are being precise, and there was no way five year old Pete was pronouncing Cisuralian without bursting into laughter, even forty-nine year old Pete thinks it’s funny). This one was on my top five list for sure, because I had a plastic toy of it and it had that cool sail on it’s back. Did you ever have those old plastic toy dinosaurs? I don’t mean like flimsy easy to break ones, no these ones were completely indestructible. In the early 1980s when we were all having nightmares about nuclear war (we still get those, don’t we fellow Gen-X-ers!) I knew for a fact that the only things that would survive a nuclear bomb were cockroaches and my toy dinosaurs. Even though this is not a dinosaur, as far as I am concerned it is part of the club. It’s like John Hagen, he was part of the Corleone family, but they would always remind him he was German-Irish and not really Sicilian. I had never seen a Dimetrodon skeleton in the, er, flesh, so I had to sketch this beauty. You would not mess with this. I’d like to see fight between a Saltwater Crocodile and a Dimetrodon, or Luca Brasi and a Dimetrodon. Things were better in the old Permian period though weren’t they, not like now. There weren’t all these ‘continents’ that you have nowadays, it was just one continent, Pangaea, and one ocean, Panthalassa. It was just better wasn’t it. If you were a Dimetrodon back in the old Cisuralian epoch, you could walk from Gondwana to Laurasia and not get hassled by ice ages. Then all the continents started breaking up, egos got involved, the dinosaurs came along, the Atlantic Ocean started filling up, and now there’s all this.

Before the museum’s closing time, which as coming at me like a steam train, I decided to fast forward several hundred million years to the Time of Mammals. The continents were not quite where they are now but they were well on the way, I think India was still sailing through it’s Ocean, leaving Antarctica very much out in the cold, and England had just started counting it’s ‘years of hurt’ since winning the World Cup. This is the Uintatherium Anceps (I’m not even going to try to pronounce that, I couldn’t even spell it while writing the word down from a sign), which was an early ungulate relative from Wyoming, you’ve all had those relatives. I think it was a bit like a massive rhino, but with big tusks like a Smilodon. Elongated Tusks were still quite fashionable back then, before everyone realized how weird they were. This skull is an amazing shape though, you wouldn’t want to tread on a plastic toy of this, never mind Lego blocks.

And then the people came around to tell me that the museum was closing, and the last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the museum. I’ve seen those films, they are very scary. I walked back out onto Capitol Mall with a book full of new sketches, and then decided to go and do some more. See you in DC Part 5.