The other day the postman arrived with an unexpected parcel. I opened it and slowly realized it contained various articles from my childhood, chiefly dinosaurs and Hot Wheels™ cars.

I was stunned. I was certain they had been lost forever on that fateful day so long ago*.

Most of the dinosaur toys were from a series by Playskool called Definitely Dinosaurs!, which were essentially the poor kid's version of Tyco's Dino-Riders. In both cases, continuity was ignored and human figurines were packaged with the dinosaurs, which weren't always dinosaurs. Dimetrodon, for instance, was definitely not a dinosaur.

Even as a boy, I was well aware of the significance of geological time and the implications of finding fossils in this bed as opposed to that. It was absurd to package cavemen alongside a Tyrannosaurus (and even more so to include a mountable seat so that the cavemen could ride Tyrannosaurus!).

This was, however, easily reconciled: I promptly threw away the humans.

This, of course, plays into the unfunny exchange between the two cars in the strip. The Burgess Shale, as we all know, is famous for its Cambrian fossil record.

* _{Many, many years ago, a boy was busy playing A Boy and His Blob on NES. He had failed to set aside items for the pending garage sale, as he had been repeatedly asked to do. So his mom dug through the toy box, pulling out one item after another and asking, "How about this?" for each. The boy, never turning his attention from the stubborn video game, answered "Sure" and "OK" to each. The next morning he noticed a kid walking down the street with one of his favorite toys. He ran home and discovered, in the garage, lay his prized possessions, or what was left of them. It was on this tragic day the boy became a man.}

Do you still play with toys?