The photo above was taken by paleoartist Emily Willoughby in 2015. It shows Harvard fossil MCZ 4371, the foot of a specimen Deinonychus. Go check out her website of paleoart here.

I was a fairly typical kid of my generation; I loved to read about dinosaurs. It was this, let’s say ‘healthy’, obsession that led me to frequent public libraries and devour everything I could find about these ancient amazing creatures. And I gradually took notice that they had books on other topics too, and became a young bibliophile. But it was the dinosaurs that first lead me to love the library at age 5.

The word ‘dinosaur’ was about 123 years old when I first heard it. In 1841 Sir Richard Owen, at the time a respected palaeontologist and fossil hunter, first proposed the term ‘dinosaur’ in a paper for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In…