I miss the brontosaurus.

My four year-old daughter and I were reading Jane Yolen’s How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight for the first time. One each page of these books, Yolen hides the dinosaur’s name within the illustration so you can properly identify it, but on this particular page, I couldn’t find the name.

“Hold on, Clara,” I said. “I can’t find the name.”

“Well, it could be an apatosaurus,” she said. “Or a brachiosaurus. Or maybe a diplodocus. Or a supersaurus.”

I was impressed. Pictures of each of the dinosaurs she mentioned are below, and she was right. They all look about the same. It’s could’ve been any of them.

“Or maybe it’s a brontosaurus,” I added.

“Dad, there’s no such thing as a brontosaurus.”

Though there was such a thing as a brontosaurus when I was a kid, she was right about that, too.

The girl knows her dinosaurs.

It’s no surprise that one of her doll’s imaginary parents are a team of paleontologists.