Dino Ornament

A dinosaur ornament asks for a decision most ornaments never face: how to pose something nobody living has ever seen. This one stands upright and confident in hand-blown glass, tail balanced, head high, painted in a green that the fossil record can neither confirm nor deny. The body is blown full and round so the silhouette carries across a room, the eye and the grin arrive last, in the finest strokes of the day, and a capped loop at the spine keeps the whole animal level, mid-stride, clearly going somewhere. My nephew Thaddeus corrected a museum docent at age seven, turned out to be right, and has never once allowed the family to forget the vindication. Every skeleton in the ROM's dinosaur halls is a reconstruction, and every reconstruction is an argument — bones plus a claim about how they stood — revised whenever better evidence walks in. This dinosaur makes its claim in glass, and never has to update it.