The Bearded Cave Girl

There’s a print ad for the Calgary Zoo where a little girl is dressed as a cavewoman, a fake beard glued to her face, and her expression is one of such pure, unself-conscious delight that it stops you cold. Joyful and completely ridiculous. I couldn’t stop laughing at it.

The series was advertising the zoo’s prehistoric section—dinosaurs, or recreations of them, the full Jurassic Park walk through deep time. The kind of thing I would have lost my mind over as a kid. My childhood dinosaur fixation was irrational and total. Tyrannosaurus rex was the obvious celebrity but I was more loyal to the weirder cast members: Triceratops with its absurd facial architecture, and Eoraptor, which I cited constantly as proof I was serious about this. Every kid has their obscure dinosaur. Eoraptor was mine.

Calgary sits somewhere in my mental map of Canada as a vague cold expanse I’ve never had reason to visit. I’d go for the zoo alone—mostly to make the same face as that kid.