A lot of the dreams we collectively had as children have, somehow, someway, thanks to feats of science and marketing, come true. For example, in 2016, Domino’s Pizza made history by creating the world’s first pizza-delivering drone. Yes, a robot can bring you a pizza now—which is straight out of the mind of a 10-year-old. And you can order that pizza with the incredibly sophisticated computer you carry around in your pocket all day: a smartphone. Also on that smartphone, you can hit up Netflix or Hulu and watch pretty much every TV show ever made. The future is now!
Perhaps the only childhood dream that hasn’t come to fruition, or at least the one that seems to be taking way too much time, is getting dinosaurs going again. We were all under the impression that the scientists would have extracted enough DNA from 70 million-year-old bones by now to clone a dinosaur, preferably something friendly and huge, like a brontosaurus or a triceratops, and not something terrifying and huge, like a Tyrannosaurus rex.
But while dinosaur re-creation technology has apparently stalled, costume science has advanced at a rapid clip. You can get yourself a pretty good-looking dinosaur costume these days, and you can proudly wear it out in public and give people their dinosaur fix—no advanced, morally ambiguous cloning technology or fear of being eaten required.
Dinosaur worlds collided as Colorado Symphony Orchestra conductor Christopher Dragon put on a T. Rex costume and directed his musicians. What piece did Dragon (which is basically a dinosaur) conduct? John Williams’ moving, inspiring theme from Jurassic Park, of course, because that’s a movie about dinosaurs. It was part of the C.S.O’s “Symphonic Tribute to Comic Con,” featuring scores from movies and video games.