Dinosaur Obsession

Parasaurolophus Bowl

When I was a little girl, I had an obsession with dinosaurs. I used to lie on the kitchen floor in a weird shape and tell my mother and grandmother I was a fossil. I used to sit and watch documentaries on dinosaurs while simultaneously illustrating my own dinosaur non-fiction books. People told me I would one day be an artist; in my head, I said I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I even sat my little brother and a young girl who used to visit down, as if they were schoolchildren and I was the teacher, and tried to lecture them on these weird, long-gone animals. Bless them, they weren’t interested but they still sat politely.

Stegosaurus Bowl

Autistic people often have obsessions, and a fascination with dinosaurs is rather common. Intense fixations can of course interfere with life at times. I think when I was a child and my social skills were not yet as refined, it was harder for me to tear myself away from certain things. I remember in nursery I was playing with toy dinosaurs with a friend and the teachers instructed us to stop for whatever reason. We couldn’t, and subsequently had the toys confiscated from us, which I seem to remember was upsetting. There was another time when I was sitting an entrance exam to get into a secondary school. It was very boring; my attention turned to the pigeons outside. Birds, descendants of dinosaurs, are a huge fascination of mine too. The pigeons were far more interesting than that paper or the thought of getting into this school. And no, I did not pass the entrance exam.

I like how ceramics can have functions, and I like the thought of moulding clay into animals that are shaped to fit with the functional object. Who wouldn’t want to rehydrate their house plants with a Diplodocus watering can? Who wouldn’t want to put little trinkets into a Stegosaurus bowl? The Parasaurolophus bowl: I just have to keep it for myself. Parasaurolophus, a member of the hadrosaur family, was probably the dinosaur I was most drawn to as a child. I had a dream about them when I was seven in which the females were a bright green, the males were coloured like Siamese cats. I loved Parasaurolophus because of their crests, which were perhaps used to make booming calls. In my eyes, they were beautiful. I imagined them being loud, social creatures.

People who are autistic often go into great detail with their interests, to the point where one can be rather pedantic. I think this is perhaps because of the need to completely envelop oneself in a world that is not unpredictable and overwhelming. I used to have a collection of dinosaur encyclopaedias and I would stare at the intricate illustrations, imagining so clearly what the Triassic or the Jurassic or the Cretaceous would have been. I found it so wondrous seeing all these life forms, not just dinosaurs but pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs too, and the prehistoric plants that made up ancient habitats and all the weird creatures (gorgonopsids, trilobites, pelycosaurs, too many to list) that came in the eras before dinosaurs first evolved. I loved imagining what colours all these beings were, what strange sounds they would have made.

Looking at all the animals, present and prehistoric, it is as if the universe is a gallery. Life, in all its forms, is art. To realise that life will always adapt and evolve into weird-shaped, colourful beings, is humbling. There is something comforting about knowing you are just one small creature amidst the massive continuation of life through time and space.

Diplodocus Watering Can