Each time I drink Diet Dr Pepper, I am newly astonished. Look at what humans can do! They can make ice-cold, sugary-sweet, zero-calorie soda that tastes like everything and also like nothing. I don’t labor under the delusion that Diet Dr Pepper is good for me, but, in moderation, it also probably isn’t bad for me. Drinking too much Diet Dr Pepper can be bad for your teeth and may increase other health risks. But as Dr. Aaron Carroll puts it in his book The Bad Food Bible, “There’s a potential—and, likely, very real—harm from consuming added sugar. There is likely none from artificial sweeteners.”
So Diet Dr Pepper probably isn’t a health risk for me. And yet I feel as if I’m committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it’s an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I’ve always felt like I need a vice. I don’t know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.
In my teens and early twenties, I smoked cigarettes compulsively, thirty or forty a day. The pleasure of smoking for me wasn’t about a buzz; the pleasure came from the jolt of giving in to an unhealthy physical craving, which over time increased my physical cravings, which in turn increased the pleasure of giving in to them. I haven’t smoked in more than fifteen years, but I don’t think I ever quite escaped that cycle. There remains a yearning within my subconscious that cries out for a sacrifice, and so I offer up a faint shadow of a proper vice and drink Diet Dr Pepper, the soda that tastes more like the Anthropocene than any other.
After going through dozens of slogans through the decades—Dr Pepper billed itself as “tasting like liquid sunshine,” as the “Pepper picker-upper,” as the “most original soft drink ever”—these days the company’s slogan is more to the point. They call it “the one you crave.”
I give Diet Dr Pepper four stars.
VELOCIRAPTORS
UNTIL 1990, when Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was published, velociraptors were not particularly well-known dinosaurs. The book, about a theme park containing dinosaurs created from cloned DNA samples, became a runaway bestseller. Three years later, Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation brought the novel’s dinosaurs to awe-inspiring life with computer-generated animations the likes of which moviegoers had never seen. Even decades later, Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs still look astonishingly lifelike, including the velociraptors, which are portrayed as scaly creatures, about six feet in height, from present-day Montana. In the film franchise, they are not just vicious but also terrifyingly intelligent. In Jurassic Park III, a character claims that velociraptors are “smarter than dolphins, smarter than primates.” In the movies, they figure out how to open a door—in fact, the first time I remember hearing my brother, Hank, curse came as we were watching Jurassic Park. When the velociraptors turned the door handle, I heard my ten-year-old brother mutter, “Oh, shit.”
Crichton’s velociraptors are the kind of scary, intimidating animal you might want to name, say, a professional sports franchise after, and indeed, when the National Basketball Association expanded into Canada in 1995, Toronto chose the Raptors as its team name. Today, the velociraptor stands alongside T. rex and stegosaurus as among the best-known dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous period some seventy million years ago have almost nothing in common with the velociraptors of our contemporary imagination.
For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana; they lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence the scientific name, Velociraptor mongoliensis. While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins or primates; they were probably closer to chickens or possums. And they were not six feet tall; they were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a long tail that could stretch for over three feet. They are estimated to have weighed less than thirty-five pounds, so it’s difficult to imagine one killing a human. In fact, they were probably mostly scavengers, eating meat from already dead carcasses.
Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly but feathered. We know this because researchers found quill knobs on a velociraptor’s forearm in 2007. But even in Crichton’s day, most paleontologists thought velociraptors and other members of the Dromaeosauridae family were feathered. Although velociraptors are not believed to have flown, their ancestors probably did. Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History put it this way: “The more we learn about these animals, the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” Indeed, as a guide recently pointed out to me at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.
Velociraptors probably did sometimes hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called protoceratops. The velociraptor appears to have had one of its sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor’s arm when they were both suddenly buried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don’t know how often velociraptors hunted, or how successfully, or whether they hunted in packs.
Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors. Crichton took the name “velociraptor” because he thought it was “more dramatic,” which presumably is also why the theme park is called Jurassic Park even though most of the dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic age, which ended one hundred and forty-five million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous age, which ended sixty-six million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.
And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them. Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect. In ancient China, dinosaur fossils were believed to be dragon bones. In 1676, the first dinosaur bone to be described by European scientists, a piece of thigh bone from a Megalosaurus, was thought to have come from the kind of giants depicted in the Bible.*
Megalosaurus was first described in a scientific journal in 1824, around the time the paleontologist Mary Ann Mantell discovered the first known fossils of an iguanodon. The Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t named until 1905. The first velociraptor fossil was discovered in 1924.
Scientists have been debating for more than a century whether the long-necked brontosaurus of the Jurassic age even existed or is just a misidentified apatosaurus. The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.