Elegy for El Fósil

It’s hard to look at El Fósil and think about the Kronosaurus being alive. I have to press myself to see him on the move, slicing through water, or defending territory with an open jaw, or wiggling out of his mother. But it’s easy for me to picture him dying, because when we think dinosaur, we think mass extinction. And maybe it’s also because El Fósil was never moved from his place of death.

I have an old friend who smokes a lot of weed—a lot, a lot—and one day I convinced them to get stoned and go see Mamma Mia 2 with me. It was bad. So bad that my friend leaned over to me halfway through the movie and whispered that not even their good weed could redeem it, and so we walked out. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was just starting in the theater next door. We didn’t have a lot of time left but we agreed to watch the first forty-five minutes. In the last scene we saw before we left the cinema, a volcano erupts and lava curdles down a hillside toward the desperate dinosaurs who have gathered on a seaside cliff. They have two choices: die by drowning or by fire. As the camera pans out, a brontosaurus kicks onto his hind legs and releases a long, elegiac roar. He’s backlit by the glow of embers.
I have delicate sensibilities, so I fought back a tear, and yet my old friend couldn’t stop guffawing, pointing at the screen and squealing in delight. I dragged them out. They caught their breath when we got to the car and asked, “What if the movie had just ended like that? No resolution. All the dinosaurs just die.”
“It’s realistic,” I said. My defense.
“Oh, shit. You’re right.” They laughed some more, and I guess I don’t have much more to say about that except that I can just picture the Kronosaurus floundering in the low tide of a prehistoric beach, churning up sand with his frantic tail, his hopeful arms—sand that will smother him into fossil after seabirds, or whatever their Cretaceous ancestors were, pick his bones clean of flesh and carry away that back left flipper.