Christina Marie Cole is an ordinary 7-year-old caught up in the current dinosaur craze. She likes them. She likes them so much that she wouldn't mind having one for a pet.
"I like them pretty much because you could ride on them or you could slide down their tails, if they were alive," says the blonde cutie.But since romping with Dino instead of Fido is out of the question, Christina did the next best thing - she went for a dinosaur ride on paper. The first-grader at the Waterford School, Sandy, drew a picture of herself atop a pterodactyl and won a national art contest.
Christina, daughter of Boyd and Beth Cole of Salt Lake City, was the Utah winner in the "If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today" national drawing contest for first-graders sponsored by Scholastic News, a national classroom newspaper for 3.3 million children in grades 1-6, and Playskool toys.
Christina's drawing was selected as one of 50 winners out of 47,486 entries. By winning she can become a dinosaur mini-expert. She received two dozen dinosaur replicas and two dinosaur books.
But, despite her love of creatures of long ago, Christina doesn't plan on concentrating her artistic talents solely on paleontology. For school she is just finishing a storybook that she illustrated herself. The subject? Animals, of course.