Do-It-Yourself Dinosaur
To A Good Home: Cuddly fossilized biped carnivorous pet. Near-perfect skull, 13-inch daggerlike teeth, 98,000,000 years young. All papers in order. Permanently housebroken.
Perhaps you've heard that Lycos is auctioning off the skeleton of an entire Tyrannosaurus Rex. All you need are 60,000 Franklins under your mattress and a porch strong enough to hold the thing when UPS makes the delivery.
Which got us wondering: just how popular are dinosaurs online these days? To find out we took a look back at 1999's top 50,000 search terms.
First things first: the most popular dinosaur search last year was, simply, dinosaurs. (Duh.) It was medium-popular, getting about the same number of searches as did body piercing, autism, Wisconsin, and Catherine Zeta Jones.
Beyond that that the surprise is how few individual dinosaurs got heavy searches. The only individual species (breeds?) to make the top 50,000 were:
Tyrannosaurus Rex
Velociraptor
Triceratops
Sorry, brontosaurus. Sorry, diplodocus. You're not on the hit list. T-Rex was the clear #1, getting about 60% of the searches among the three. Megalodon, the scary-huge prehistoric relative to great white sharks, did get about the same number of searches as velociraptors.
Other dino-related queries making the top 50,000 of 1999 were, in order: video game Dino Crisis; fossils; archaeology; movie/book Jurassic Park; paleontology; and computer game Nanosaur.
We almost forgot! One other species did make the list and was even more popular than T-Rex. In fact, this creature's name was a very close second to dinosaurs on the search logs. You can view this creature right here. Now, that really is cuddly.
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