Still there are plenty of decent comic moments in this little manga. In one of the better entries, two Proceratops re-tell the story of a headless Tyrannosaurus that is reportedly rampaging through the "haunted forest." They meet up with a Troodon, who Shioya explains is "believed to be one of the most intelligent dinosaurs." The Troodon scoffs at the two herbivores' campfire ghost tale: "Current theories," he states, "posit that the phosphorous released by decomposing corpses looks like departed souls to the naked eye." Our learned dino turns out to be wrong, of course, but not before he also spends some time debunking the UFO myth.
The cartoonist also devotes a couple of stories to wittily dissecting the way images of specific dinosaurs have changed since he was a boy. In one "Bone," for instance, he humorously re-imagines Velociraptors with feathers, drawing them as giant chicks with menacing bird claws. In another, he forces a Tyrannosaurus to walk the way that current paleontologists propose he moved around — less upright, with his tail elevated — over the long-standing image of the creature most of us carry from stop-motion monster movies. Perfect fodder for young dino geeks, even if it does make my lost-in-time mini-comics decidedly out of date.
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