When I say that today’s column will be about prehistoric foreplay, you might wonder if you can hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped. In response to that, I’d argue that there are some pieces of information that, once learned, you can’t keep to yourself. If you found out that there was life on Mars, for example, of that your next-door neighbour was keeping an increasingly proliferate store of cadavers in their garden shed, you’d probably want to tell someone about it.

So today I found out from an article in the Guardian that the tyrannosaurus rex used to rub noses with other tyrannosaurus rex (rexes?) in an adorable precursor to some (presumably less adorable) dino-loving.

“Completely and utterly useless information, but utterly incredible nonetheless”

Apparently, some scientists (who clearly have nothing better to do) have discovered that the snout of the T-Rex was just as sensitive as human fingertips. Small nerve openings on the nose meant that, in a similar way to how crocodiles get in the mood today, the T-Rex could get a good bit of stimulation going before they got it on.

Isn’t that incredible? Completely and utterly useless information (unless you’re a T-Rex looking for tips in the sack, in which case, apologies, also, how do you type with your tiny arms?), but utterly incredible nonetheless. Incredible to think something like that might have happened, but also incredible that someone was able to find that out. When I was younger, I was adamant that I was going to be an archaeologist. I carried around a bucket of dinosaurs (influenced by Ian Whybrow’s edifying page-turner Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs), I dressed as a dinosaur and dreamt about dinosaurs.

I did then realise that dinosaurs were extinct, at which point archaeology became a less interesting pursuit (I moved swiftly onto DRAGONOLOGY, and unless someone out there can give me physical evidence that dragons don’t exist, then I’m still holding out on that one). However, I was always amazed that, at some point, stonking great big lizards were knocking about on planet Earth.

Stumbling upon that useless scrap of information made me wonder. That’s it. I felt wonder. And then I wondered when was the last time I’d felt wonder. I think ‘wonder’ pretty much sums up the feeling of finding something out, and needing to tell someone. Needing to tell as many people as possible. It’s probably a feeling that can often get a bit obscured in academia. ‘Wonder’ becomes replaced with deadlines, stress and analysis, and when we’re all hammering away (figuratively speaking, I imagine a very small percentage of students have genuine hammer experience), we can lose sight of the feeling of learning something and thinking, ‘well that’s cool.’

Considering I’m at university, I feel I don’t do nearly enough talking to people about things that have been the good kind of baffling. Maybe my first port of call should be prehistoric foreplay rather than ‘I could do with a biscuit’ or ‘I’m bored of writing essays.’ When you get that feeling of wonder, it’s hard to imagine how a conversation could ever fall flat. The world is full of wonderful things: a study has shown that playing Tetris could help ease trauma, another that bees can recognise human faces, there’s a bloke called the ‘grammar vigilante’ who goes around at night correcting shop signs in Bristol. Incredible.

Sometimes you’ve got remind yourself why you’re doing a degree. Even if it can feel terrible, you’ve shown up to find stuff out. And some of it might be wonderful (not quite t-rex sex wonderful, but close). And maybe you’ve found that it’s not for you, maybe your course doesn’t make you wonder.

Maybe you find wonder in other things, like the way some people can hear a song once and then bash it out on piano, and others can take a piece of paper and transform it into, I don’t know, a bloody swan. The second we stop feeling wonder, the second we stop having that ‘well, that’s cool,’ feeling, we might as well pack it in. I suppose this has all got a bit circle-of-life, but we started with tyrannosaur sex, so the only way was up