On the Origin of My Species
- Apr 25, 2025
- 2 min read
by Robin Wilder
He wanted to be a paleontologist. Unearth fossils jutting from Montana sediment, all the femurs and mandibles of dragon lizards he learned were more like breeds of cockatrice than Jurassic Park attractions. Those dozens of dinosaur figurines migrating across his walls, the shelves housing ancient bedrock secrets, each one anatomically incorrect. He imagined them with feathers, the pillow-stuffed down of ducks and swans, thought maybe scaly monstrosities just sold better than tyranno-chickens. It made sense in the detached way of profit margins. On career dress-up day, he still wore a menagerie of chisels and brushes, letting his dad’s wide-brimmed Indiana Jones-esque hat swallow most of his head as he explained to every classmate who would listen that a velociraptor was actually a flightless eagle with really long legs. Beautiful and terrifying and important to know.
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She wanted to be a dinosaur. Buried beneath the igneous discharge of a pyroclastic flow — molded by eons until her jagged edge presented itself to the boy. He’d remove the chisel on his hip, tap into her eye socket, her labyrinthine vertebrae, dust the ages from the record of her. She needed him to find her remains and arrange them properly, recognize the imprinted plumage baked along her fractured radius and not commission a reconstruction in service of such reptilian convention. If she died and spent 65 million years passed over by diamonds and silt and men who tried to wave away her feathers as an abnormality, at least let her skeleton announce its colors to a person who knows velociraptors are actually eagles.
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And You.
You want the boy and the girl to interlock. You want to fuse their fingertips together and discover new nerve endings. You want them to look at one another, stare so hard their bodies become a tunnel of fluid with no beginning or end or concern for cardinal direction. You want to know if there ever was a separation, a divergence in that 65 million years since the volcano shot lava and ash into the stratosphere. You want to display them both in a museum as a single exhibit. You want everyone to read the plaque and understand the evidence is right there in the fucking bones, the liminal history, the inevitability of being. You want to unzip Your Skin and usher the boy and the girl inside You.
Robin Wilder is a non-binary writer, graphic designer, and illustrator based in Missouri. Their work can be found at or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, the museum of americana, Roi Fainéant, and elsewhere. Robin lives with their two cats, Ash and Carbon, who graciously listen to new stories. Unfortunately, neither gives very good feedback. Follow Robin on Bluesky @robinwilder.bsky.social
