Your dinosaur-obsessed kid is smart, not just annoying

When he was 5, my son Sawyer wore dinosaur T-shirts, kept a flashlight shaped like a dinosaur next to his bed, and stuffed his pockets with plastic dinosaurs.

He buried and then dug up plastic fossils in his backyard sandbox.

At night, Sawyer insisted I read aloud from his favorite book, “Dinosaurs of the Land, Sea and Air,” which I thought was the stuff of nightmares: an Allosaurus with a Diplodocus firmly in its grip, a Megalosaurus taking down a Scelidosaurus.

“Mom,” Sawyer said impatiently when I pretended a plastic Stegosaurus and a plastic T-rex were dancing together. (Apparently, Stegosaurus had been extinct for 80 million years before T-rex showed up.)

He’d hand me a Diplodocus to dance with the Stegosaurus instead. Not that they danced, Sawyer said, sighing.

I’d look it up to see if he was right, about the time period, not the dancing. He was.

For his third-grade science project, I drove Sawyer to the museum to interview a paleontologist about why prehistoric undersea scorpions were so big. (Answer: “Basically because they could be,” Dr. Robert McCord said. Also: no gravity, oxygen-rich environment, plenty to eat and no real predators.)

For three years, it seemed Sawyer talked about nothing else.

I knew more about dinosaurs than I wanted to know. (It ruined the Jurassic

Park movies for me. Velociraptors were just a half meter tall and feathered. Dilophosaurus did not spit venom.)

It’s called an “intense interest” in the world of psychology, I read in an article the other day. A study showed kids who are obsessed with dinosaurs — or planets, trains, or bugs — develop knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper linguistic and information-processing skills.

They’re strategies they use later in life. Smart kids.

For me, Sawyer’s dinosaur obsession was the first time I realized that he would know something I didn’t. I could learn from him. Smart mom.