I meant that our very distant ancestors, the mammals who co-existed with the dinosaurs, might have developed an instinct to fear all giant lizards. It seems possible - although, I admit, romantically speculative - that the instinct persists in a vestigial form.
I suspect the other instincts that I named date from pre-human evolution as well.
Evolution is miraculous, but it isn't very efficient. Neither the human body nor the human brain has a designer. Thus, weird stuff can end up in the works.
Spike Jones wrote:
>
> Elizabeth Childs wonders:
>
> > ...if we don't have some aesthetic memory of the dinosaurs...
>
> We dont. Missed em by several tens of millions of years. However,
> if the ancients found dinosaur skeletons, they would be at a loss to
> explain them. Perhaps the flood legend recorded in the book of
> Genesis came from finding fossils of sea creatures on mountainsides,
> and the dinosaur legends were spawned by the discovery
> of a t-rex skeleton? spike