It’s no secret that the costume of a dinosaur, or anything else for that matter, is a matter of taste. There’s always some opinion, some person who has something to say about what you’re wearing.

If you really want to put others off, go as a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s the most popular costume, and it hasn’t changed much in the past hundred years.

But if you don’t mind being a dinosaur, there are plenty of other choices out there. I would suggest going as an “Irish Velociraptor” or a “Saurolophus”, for example. If you are an adult and have been collecting credit cards for some time (which is not impossible), why not combine your wardrobe with that?

Fashion is something you wear. You can’t make a “fashion dinosaur.”

You can, however, make a “dinosaur costume” — a costume with something in it that looks like a dinosaur. So how do you decide what kind of dinosaur you are on Halloween?

First: What kind of dinosaur were you in your prehistoric life? If you’re an ornithischian (meaning “bird-hipped”), that’s easy: You’re a Tyrannosaurus rex. If you’re a sauropod (meaning “lizard-footed”), then it’s the Brachiosaurus. For an ornithopod (meaning “bird-footed”), the answer is less obvious: It depends on whether the animal had big stomping feet like a bird or little flappy toed feet like a bird-hopping dinosaur.

Second: If that’s not enough, there are fossilized dinosaur skeletons around, too, so if you don’t have time to build your own costume, maybe you could go to a museum and find out which kind of dinosaur skeleton belongs to your chosen species.

I admit it: I hate dressing up for Halloween. It’s not so much that I hate the idea of being a big scary monster with fake blood on my face, though I do have that part down pat. It’s that the costume is such a crap shoot. For example, if you don’t get the costume right before Halloween, then you’re stuck looking like something else.

But here’s what I realized: You can always be the dinosaur. You can always be the one thing that your friends have to dress up as, even if they don’t know what it is or what they are supposed to be doing in it.

What makes this possible? The most obvious answer is that dinosaurs never died out. Yet there are at least three types of dinosaur that you can choose from and still look good for Halloween: pterodactyls (flying reptiles), stegosaurs (brave lizards), and Tyrannosaurus rex (scary killers). Even better, in all three cases you can make an argument for why you are more like them than like any of the humans around you.

Whichever type of dinosaur you choose, you will probably want to buy all your own clothes apart from your shoes and socks, which are readily available in any store

Most people assume that dinosaurs looked like T. rex, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, with bony plates and a long neck. But why should that be the only possible way they could look? Dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes. For example, the prosauropod Sauroposeidon, which lived about 165 million years ago in what is now southern China, had teeth as long as eight inches. That’s like having teeth bigger than your head! (Its weight would have been about as much as a small elephant.)

As for looks, there are no restrictions on what types of dinosaurs we can like. Some of them were probably scary-looking. But some of them were not: If you’re going to dress up as a dinosaur, don’t just pick one that looks scary. You could have a dinosaur costume party at which everyone is dressed in costumes that are completely innocent looking.

I have wanted to be a dinosaur for as long as I can remember. But the dinosaur costume I chose for Halloween, this year, was not the one I’d be happy with forever. It was my first serious attempt at dressing up in a costume, and it didn’t go well.

I’m going to share my mistakes and lessons learned here.

First, the costume: it’s a mannequin, which made it easy and fast to put on. Cheap, too; they’re relatively cheap and easy to find at any fabric store.

The mannequin came with a wig of some kind of synthetic fur that was the right color and so stiff that it didn’t get tangled easily. But I didn’t know how to use it properly, so it ended up looking like something out of an early-1990s anime cartoon – maybe like Feral from Beast Wars or Bit Cloud from Macross 7 . Still, it looked okay.

There were also two different kinds of rubber gloves: one molded over mittens, and another that were just gloves with no fingers. These were both fine for holding the prop sword; they could even be worn for painting your nails or whatever you normally do when you are pretending to be a dinosaur; but they got all oily

There are a lot of different kinds of dinos, so you can be any kind—a run-of-the-mill carnivore or a stupendously long-necked herbivore, or a sauropod with a football helmet for a head. What kind you are depends on your size and shape. If you are small or round, you’re probably a bird or mammal. If you’re tall, like a giraffe, or narrow, like a camel, odds are you’re an herbivore.

Tropical dinosaurs get to play with their feathers; cold ones get to wear their fur cloaks. But if the right color and right pattern is all that’s needed to make your costume work, then the dinosaur costume is a bargain after all.

If you want to be prehistoric but not yet extinct (which is harder than it sounds), then think about what would have happened to plants and animals at that time. Then check out some of these ideas:

When you think of Homo erectus (the first human species to have walked the earth), you think of a big, hairy guy with a big brain. But maybe the perfect costume for a modern human is a little different.

The minimum requirement for this outfit is human: You need two hands and feet. But that’s not so easy. Most of us don’t have hands, and in any case they are not exactly necessary unless you want to use them to pick up cans. The feet are another story. Some people can walk on their hands, but most can’t. That leaves bipedal locomotion as the only realistic option, which brings us back to the feet again.

But here’s where it gets interesting (and you can explain how it’s a little bit like the rest). Our feet are adaptations for having gait with both legs in contact with the ground at all times; we need them for running and for standing upright, but also for walking on two legs at all. We actually have three different types of foot: plantigrade, digitigrade, and unguligrade.

Plantigrade feet are basically flat, like ours; they’re good for walking on flat surfaces, especially when you’re running or climbing or dancing