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The top ten dinosaurs. Ever

Hear that roar?

Hear that roar? That's the sound of a permanent reminder that we are merely tenants on Earth, keeping it warm until dinosaurs make their inevitable return from whatever planet they fled this world to colonise. All they left behind were fosillised tokens of life as it was, but from them we've built up a picture of enormous, cold-blooded titans of death. It bodes badly for our chances of striking a deal once do their return. Here are the ten best of the bastards.

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10. Dinosaur Jr. Naming the son after the father is very common in the dinosaur world. Family honour is reflected in this symbolic process. A former palaeontology student and member of the Ross Geller School of Post-modern Dinosaur Enactment, J Mascis was very familiar with this process. His blistering solos are merely a reflection of the space afforded in dinosaur society for self-expression within the collective sphere. A point Lou Barlow struggled to understand.

9. Megalosaurus When the first dinosaur bones were found no-one knew what the hell they were. When a thigh bone was brought to Oxford’s Professor of Chemistry in 1677 he thought it might be from an Elephant or, in a great piece of wishful Biblical thinking, a giant human. “Please let it be Goliath, please let it be Goliath…” Then the 1820s rolled round, the decade of enlightenment, and academia realised that these bones came from some kind of crazed reptile. And so the first dinosaur was christened Megalosaurus, meaning “giant lizard”. But Hollywood doesn’t want pioneers; it wants personalities, so the first dinosaur has made fuck all of a cultural impact since.

8. Dino the Dinosaur The purple Snarkasaurus was, in many ways, the Kramer of The Flintstones. You want light relief? He’ll give it to you. You want charging through a door? He’s there. You want washed up racist stand-up? He’s on it. 7. Compsognathus Long enjoyed the kind of fame that can only come when you are referred to as “chicken sized” and are thought of as the smallest dinosaur ever, however recent discoveries suggest that Compsognathus towers over at least three other dinosaurs by well over a centimetre. Still, it earns its place here because it suffered from a great case of violent small man syndrome and, like Napoleon and the Japanese, it liked to eat small lizards that it could outrun in a single bound, and it liked to eat them whole.

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6. The old CEO of a failing company Damn it I won’t change a thing round here! Good service is still good service. Call me a dinosaur all you want but I know what the clients want, and that’s leaded petrol in their cars and tapes in their VCRs!

5. Tyrannosaurus Rex As tall as a house and in possession of around sixty teeth, the tyrant lizard (imagine a gecko with the head of Stalin) was the largest predator to walk the Earth. Often depicted fighting his nemesis, Triceratops (usually while a meteor hits the Earth in the background), T-Rex will hunt you down and find you, even if Jeff Goldblum is getting jittery beside you. Don’t think you can run away either because with a top speed of over 30 miles an hour he’s definitely quicker than you are, you fat tub of non-prehistoric lard.

4. Diplodocus Diplodocus’ story is one of love; the love between a 19th century industrialist and an enormous lizard. We all grew up thinking it was the longest dinosaur around but we seem to have been victims of a propaganda campaign by Diplodocus’ soul mate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who at 5 foot 10 was a tall man for his time, identified very seriously with the elongated beast, and would suffer no man who suggested that; maybe, Diplodocus was not quite the longest dinosaur in the paddock. It’s just like Young Victoria, only with Albert being played by a giant scaled breast with a dick stuck on either end.

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3. Robbie Sinclair This proto Seth Cohen used to be the object of my girlfriend’s affections. That’s before I came along, smacked the teenage Dino-geek in the chops and told him that if he kept up his smart chat there’d be trouble down south. Still, he was always pretty heroic in his skinny clever dude way, even when he succumbed to the temptations of steroids in an effort to beef up for the girl he loved.

2. Stegosaurus Equipped with the smallest brain known to dinosaur, Stegosaurus, or “covered reptile”, was armoured, walked on four legs, had huge plates of bone along its back and a spiked tail to stop anyone tickling its ass. Teary-eyed lovers of the lumbering beast insist that it isn’t stupid; that is has a second brain in its hip and that; anyway, it has the right-sized brain for its lifestyle. They’re right. If you’re lifestyle consists of hulking around, watching predators bounce off your impenetrable defence and arguing with your auxiliary brain about which end to put food in and which to shit it out of, you probably don’t need an Einstein-sized thought box.

1. Godzilla When you are the looming symbol for American imperialism, the atomic bomb and the dead of Hiroshima you can pretty much do what you want. When you can blow blue flames at tanks, giant moths, and flying creatures named after 19th century sculptors, you can do so even more. And what does he choose to do with his unstoppable power? He chooses to fight The Man. Honestly, if it looks corporate, he’ll crush it. Pinstripes drive him into fearsome stomping rages and no doubt, more than anyone, he believes in corporate culpability. In Godzilla vs. Monster Zero our radiation mutated dinosaur friend stomps down a group of aliens “merely posing” as sleazy businessmen, Naomi Klein ever do that shit? Nuh, huh, no she didn't.

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