Yesterday I fell in love with Joy Wellboy, a band, that is: a girl and a man, who quickly managed to transform the impression of two clashy antipodes into a remarkably charming performance (them standing in front of a magical image of estragon might have contributed to that). In a later talk with Anna we got deep with dinosaurs. I remembered some weeks ago a paleontologist from Lebanon, who currently works in the Berliner Naturkundemuseum, had told me that the DNA of mammoths has actually been deciphered. Having said that it would be more of an ethical, less of a technical challenge to start the process of cloning them. One could just start with an elephant as a female carrier. Anna didn’t believe me and instead started another discussion. We should understand dinosaurs, she said, as generic metaphors for the Lost-World-Motive. Their depiction – in early World Fairs like the infamous London World Fair in Chrystal Palace in 1851 or in movies like, well, Jurassic Park – would respond quite concretely and very detailed to the geopolitical motive of inventing and conquering what we call the New World. Dinosaurs would mirror the twisted symbiosis of that imagined promise / present heritage of colonialism and the arising idea of progress itself. The flipside: The coevally utopian and often fatal moments of confrontation between seemingly contradicting zones (man – dinosaur / new world – old world / progress – regression) prove that the project of modernity itself is doomed to fail. Dinosaurs run away, they hide, endanger and eat us, they internally contradict the idea of human progression. By the way, my favorite dinosaur as a kid – even before Jurassic Park – was Triceratops. He combines the antipodes of a tenable, muscular survivalist and some sort of sweet milk cow. Thanks for that evening all of you!