On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share and sometimes the realities

we don't. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

With the little visitors who are fascinated by this giraffe-necked terror of the swamps, with eyelashes like a movie queen.

Announcing Sinclair Dino Supreme.

Creationists also take the story of Noah and the Flood, literally.

Welcome to Jurassic Park.

No matter how old you are, I bet you can still name your favorite dinosaur.

The Stegosaurus was mine, the armored vegetarian with those punk rock plates lining its back.

It spiked tail like a chain mace swinging around and stabbing predators right in the face.

I had a plastic version I played with all the time, until I generously gifted it, along with a teenage

mutant ninja turtle toy that could do a backflip to my beloved pet box turtle Barney.

No relation to the dearly Sackeren singing purple dinosaur, the final neutered form of the

Tyrannosaurus rex, which was once known as the

tyrant lizard king.

There the 90s toy stegosaurus sat in a smelly terrarium with its distant relative, 165 million

years removed, stretching its wrinkled neck toward a fragment of banana.

Of course, alongside Barney and Friends, I had been watching the 1993 adventure thriller Jurassic

Park religiously, announcing, like so many other millennials, that I would one day become a paleontologist.

Siblingless at the time, I would hang out by myself in the backyard, hunting for fossils, breaking open rocks with

bigger rocks, and smashing my fingers over and over again. Once I even discovered a shape

protruding from a slab of stone that looked like it could be a skull, at least in my imagination. I chipped away at it for hours using a screwdriver and a hammer made of yet another rock. And that, my young friends, was childhood before the internet.

Anybody hear that?

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