The Queue: I am he, the ancient, from the grim past I bear secrets

Most of those secrets involve my back and how much it hates me.

It’s a lot.

This is the Queue. I am one year older. Let us ruminate on the mysteries of the universe.

I mean, there were more dinosaur species than we actually even know about, we’re discovering new ones all the time and the nature of the fossil record is such that there are untold numbers of them that lived and died in places that do not form fossils for various reasons — acidity of the soil, lack of proper layering conditions, scavenging to name just a few — and that means it would be utter folly for me to attempt to determine the magical systems for them. Furthermore, most dinosaurs weren’t as intelligent as modern birds, so I would assume they were Warriors.

I love Warriors, but come on, look at your Warrior’s intelligence sometime. It’s not great compared to the casters.

But let’s assume we’re talking about a really intelligent one, like a T-Rex (yes, T-Rex was in fact really smart for a dino) or Stenonychosaurus. I see no reason to confine them to specific magics — after all, while T-Rex had small arms in proportion to its body, they were fully mobile and fleshed with strong muscle, and were only limited the same way most arms in theropods were, unable to pronate as well as humans can. But humans are unique among mammals in how thoroughly flexible our limbs are and how much pronation and supination these arms can actually perform — theropod arms should still be capable of a fair range of motion.

Combine their relative intellect and relative limb movement, and I’d be willing to believe some Coelurosaurid dinosaurs like raptors, Tyrannosauridae or what have you could perform magic as well as modern birds.

Thank you (and thank you to everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday) and I certainly don’t have a secret doorway in my house that leads to the Mesozoic stop asking.

I said I don’t have a passageway to the Mesozoic! Much less a more flexible time corridor that also allows me to visit the Permian, the Cenozoic, even the Proterozoic! I’m just over here being a perfectly normal human who doesn’t time travel at all, and has never visited the Maastrichtian age at the end of the Cretaceous and spent years popping a year into the future at a time while causing Stenonychosaurus to develop advanced tools, industrialization, and eventually space flight so that they could build a giant arc and escape Earth in time.

So really, it’s one thing to doubt the official story, and another to believe that I have created a colony of dinosaurs on one of the moons of Jupiter that exists there to this day.

No, but I read the comics and heavily criticized their accuracy, especially the original ones. Every time a dinosaur appears in a game, movie, TV show or any other media, I am and always have been that guy.

Also, there are other problems with the various depictions of Turok in media, but I don’t feel qualified to really dig into those.

Oddly enough, it turns out Triceratops may have had spiky keratin sheaths on its back, meaning that the World of Warcraft models aren’t as inaccurate as we thought.

Sure! It’s been a rough year for everyone, I’m totally okay with it. It’s nice to celebrate making it through another year, you know?

Also, unrelated but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say hey, Jalamenos, what’s really messed up about that mission is that it’s very similar to the technology that caused V’s problem, isn’t it?

I actually don’t really mind the injections nowadays. I actually get antsy when the doctor wants to skip them. But I’m happy for you if they stress you out a lot — I’ll admit they do still stress me quite a bit.

This is a lighthearted joke referencing Sauron, the X-Men villain who is a big hypnotic humanoid Pterosaur, who once told Spider-Man that he didn’t want to cure cancer, but rather, to turn people into dinosaurs.

But George Perez, a comics living legend, just revealed he has terminal pancreatic cancer and maybe has six months to live, so I’m going to say I’d cure cancer.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. And that’s my birthday for 2021. See you next week for more Queue, and I hope next year for another birthday.