guess what the most common question I got from kids when I worked at a dinosaur paleontology exhibit was

like far and away. no contest. #1 thing I got asked every single day for years.

“why did you kill them?”

every single day I was asked this question

every single day woke up and told myself that this would be the day I figured out how to make children understand that I was merely educating people about the remains of long-dead dinosaurs, that I was not personally involved in their murders and have a rock solid alibi of millions upon millions of years. and every day I would fail. some children simply could not wrap their heads around the idea that I could have some kind of authority over a dead thing unless I had killed it myself. I have no fucking idea why that was the first and most common assumption for a huge majority of young children but it truly haunts me.

you’re gonna see this post and you’re gonna want to reblog it with your brand new smart idea for an approach that I should have tried that would really have gotten through to them. and you’d be wrong. I tried so so so many ways to both answer this question and to cut it off before it could be asked. none of them worked. it didn’t matter what I said. even if they were able to understand it they weren’t fucking listening because they were so preoccupied with wondering why I’d killed any given dinosaur and/or all dinosaurs. it was unrelenting.