Time Traveler’s Dream of Riding Dinosaur Ends in Bloody Pulp

A man who spent his life building a time machine for the sole purpose of riding a dinosaur finally achieved his dream Thursday, only to discover that prehistoric reptiles do not come equipped with saddles, brakes, or any interest in being ridden.

Eyewitnesses — mostly velociraptors — confirmed that the unnamed traveler landed his machine in the late Cretaceous, pointed at a triceratops grazing peacefully, and shouted, “This is it, my destiny!” Moments later, his destiny looked more like “a red streak under 12 tons of confused reptile.”

Local paleontologists, when informed of the event millions of years later, shrugged. “That tracks,” said Dr. Mark Sullivan of the University of Toronto. “Dinosaurs had no evolutionary incentive to let hairless bipeds hop on board. It’s less like taming a horse and more like trying to hug a bulldozer running at full speed. The outcome was predictable, but at least his last words were enthusiastic.”

Neighbors back in 2025 described the man as “eccentric but harmless” and “weirdly obsessed with Jurassic Park despite never having finished the movie.” According to close friends, he had previously failed in attempts to ride a cow, an emu, and once, disastrously, a peloton bike. “This was the logical next step,” one said, “though we assumed the next step would be a lawsuit, not temporal liquefaction.”

His family issued a brief statement: “We take solace in knowing he died exactly how he lived: ignoring all warnings and trying to sit on things that clearly did not want him there.”

Meanwhile, scientists speculate that the bloody pulp left behind could fossilize into a new species of sedimentary rock, tentatively named Homo Stupidus Pancakus.

Funeral services are scheduled for whenever they can retrieve anything that isn’t already part of the geologic record.