Reconstructing History, Piece by Piece

Hi, Nate here. Today, I'm hosting a study in Duplo paleontology. Won't you join the discussion? We're serving tea. Well, actually, it's imaginary tea that I meticulously brew in my plastic kitchen, but Mom and Dad say it's tasty. No, really. Sit down. You might learn something.

Today's seminar topic is dinosaurs. Working from available fossil records and the tiny, colorful shards of molded plastic collected in caves along the Connecticut River Valley, we can say with certainty that a wide variety of dinosaurs not only roamed the pristine, unsullied landscape, but tooled around in tall, unwieldy, brightly hued, mechanized vehicles, one of which I have recreated for you today. The dinosaurs would gather for heated, often bloody competitions of skill and strength -- or, when they were especially tired, Scrabble -- to determine which reptile earned the right to man the roof-mounted water cannon. Unfortunately, this early combustion engine wasn't too thrifty on mileage, and gasoline wasn't easy to come by (basically, they produced it by crushing the loser of the aforementioned competition between two sheets of rock for a very, very long time), so the dinocruiser wound up languishing in the garage most days.

Without regular transportation, especially during the long winter months when they could no longer carpool to Miami, the dinosaurs began to feel vulnerable to the elements, so they aggressively mined the vast reserves of colorful plastic that lined the valley's network of caves, using the plentiful material to construct great fortresses, where they hatched war plans and took turns riding the crane attachment (only the wealthier dino families had those). But as any great society eventually learns, the dinosaurs could not remain cocky and complacent forever.

Despite their impressive achievements in architecture and engineering, the dinosaur culture of prehistoric New England inevitably fell to ruin. Did they perish beneath a catastrophic dust cloud caused by an asteroid strike? Did they run out of food, or succumb to disease, or endure a horrific string of traffic fatalities? Perhaps their brains exploded during a particularly heated argument over whether UNNGZNUH was an acceptable alternate spelling for UNNGZNAH when the 50-point bonus was at stake. Alas, no one really knows, and historians still wrack their considerably-larger-than-a-walnut brains trying to determine how these majestic creatures met their untimely end.

Personally, I suspect aliens.