MARGINALIA
Dinosaurs as a Cultural Phenomenon
Keith Thomson
Few sciences have been as successful as paleontology in remaining
serious yet broadly accessible at the same time. Much of its
popularity may come from the image of the paleontologist-explorer
who pits himself against the wilderness and brings back fabulous
things. The image is even partly true, because in the 19th century,
dinosaurs (and paleontology) became part of the myth of the American
West. No longer were important discoveries made by European
gentlemen in suits and ties who directed a couple of workmen in an
obscure quarry. Instead, fossil collecting had become
"prospecting": A man with a horse and a pick—and of
course a rifle—could venture out West and, like his
gold-seeking cousins, bring back untold wealth from the rocks. That
fantasy carries much more weight than the reality of the scientist
in a lab coat, noting tiny details in endless trays of museum
specimens and preoccupied more with statistics and geochemistry than
with campfires in the badlands. No matter that most paleontology
concerns undramatic taxa like graptolites and brachiopods, the field
continues to enjoy a reputation as a richly rewarded, swashbuckling enterprise.
But why dinosaurs? They were not the first prehistoric creatures to
gain wide attention. In 1801 Charles Willson Peale, a talented
artist, showman, and inventor of the modern natural history museum,
excavated the remains of three large mastodons from Newburgh, New
York. The display of one of Peale's mastodons in Philadelphia helped
start the public fascination with fossils. In the 1820s and '30s
Mary Anning excavated an amazing array of ichthyosaurs and
plesiosaurs from the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. In 1824
William Buckland described the world's first
dinosaur—Megalosaurus—and the next year Gideon
Mantell followed with the herbivorous Iguanodon. An 1830
watercolor by Henry de la Beche first depicted such creatures in
life settings, but to judge by popular science books of the
mid-century, ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs were much more captivating
to the public. The modern popularity of dinosaurs has partly to do
with the creatures themselves; it owes even more to astute
showmanship and media savvy.
Fame and Fortune
Right from the beginning some dinosaur sleuths promoted their
discoveries (and themselves) in ways that other fossil hunters did
not (or could not). The anatomist Richard Owen, for example,
featured them in a display at Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851.
For this event, sculptor and master promoter Waterhouse Hawkins
created life-sized reconstructions of dinosaurs, which were later
removed to a permanent site in South London. Hawkins's famous dinner
party inside a half-built Iguanodon moved paleontology a
long way towards its modern cultural status.
In 1858, the first articulated skeleton of any dinosaur was found in
a New Jersey clay pit. Waterhouse Hawkins traveled to Philadelphia
to mount the new Hadrosaurus for Joseph Leidy (the leading
paleontologist of the day) and then offered casts of it for sale to
museums around the world. His mounted skeleton caused such a
sensation that the Academy of Natural Sciences instituted admission
charges to limit attendance.
The gentlemanly Leidy (once described as the last man who knew
everything) was soon eclipsed by a group of well-funded
scholar-adventurers who competed bitterly for some 30 years.
Archrivals Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale and Edward Drinker Cope in
Philadelphia collected thousands of fossils, including some 120
different dinosaurs, from the American West.
The story of Cope and Marsh is one of the great sagas of science, at
turns funny, reprehensible and tragic, but there was no doubting
their determination. In 1875, Marsh negotiated with the Black Hills
Sioux for permission to collect on their lands and later became
their advocate in Washington. In 1876, Cope collected specimens in
Montana just a few weeks after the Sioux victory over the U.S. 7th
Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, reckoning that
"since every able-bodied Sioux would be with the braves under
[their chief] Sitting Bull … there would be no danger for
us." Yet neither Cope nor Marsh brought their work to the
public, perhaps because they were too busy collecting and describing
fossils and feuding with each other.
Real
The key to modern dinomania may have been the discovery in 1884 of a
whole herd of intact Iguanodon skeletons in a Belgian coal
mine. Two years later, Camille Flammarion's popular book on Earth
history, Le Monde avant la Création de l'Homme (or
The World Before the Creation of Man), showed an
Iguanodon in a theatrical pose: taking a meal from the
"fifth floor" of a Paris apartment building (in France,
the ground floor is the unnumbered rez-de-chaussee). Even
so, it took a while for this sort of dramatic depiction of dinosaurs
to catch on in the USA, until American newspapers followed in 1897
(American Century) and 1898 (New York World and
Advertiser) with similar depictions of the far larger
Brontosaurus against a backdrop of skyscrapers. The
reception given to these fantastic images firmly established the
potential of dinosaurs to capture public interest.
Cope suffered financial ruin later in life and sold his private
collection to the American Museum of Natural History in 1895. The
museum's director, Henry Fairfield Osborn (himself a
paleontologist), made the dinosaurs a showcase attraction. The AMNH
sent out Barnum Brown's 1902 expedition that bagged the first
Tyrannosaurus rex. In the 1920s and '30s the museum
sent a series of expeditions (not forgetting the movie cameras) to
the Gobi Desert, led by the dashing Roy Chapman Andrews (the
prototype for "Indiana Jones"). The original intent had
been to search for early human fossils, but instead they made
startling discoveries of horned dinosaurs and nests with eggs still
inside. Not to be outdone, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, with
the financial backing of its eponymous founder, launched major
efforts of its own, followed in turn by the other major museums,
which bought specimens if they didn't mount their own expeditions.
Today the search for dinosaurs and other fossils spans the whole
world, from the Arctic to Argentina, China to Greenland, Australia
to Africa, and dinosaurs are big business. Publications on dinosaurs
continue to multiply, from classics like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Lost World, Karel Capek's satirical War With
the Newts and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, to
simple picture books. Giant fossil creatures (again mostly
dinosaurs) featured centrally in Bill Watterson's classic comic
strip Calvin and Hobbes—no shortage of literary
allusions there. The fascination may have peaked with Michael
Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990), which began as a book but
became a blockbuster movie with two sequels. These films were the
first to show dinosaurs in an authentic style with realistic
behaviors. Since then, the BBC has gone a great deal further in its
animated TV series Walking with Dinosaurs. In books, films,
television, toys, computer games, newspapers and
magazines—whatever is current—dinosaurs sell.
Half-Real
Granting the extraordinary marketing and publicity that surrounds
dinosaurs , it remains true that unless they were fundamentally
interesting, such efforts would surely have fizzled out by now. Part
of the reason for their hold on our collective imagination may be
that, of all extinct organisms, dinosaurs are the most paradoxical.
On the one hand, dinosaurs were long believed to be clumsy and slow.
They are extinct (with the exception of the bird lineage) and ought
to be symbolic of failure. On the other hand, some (but not all)
were big, strong and ferocious. As the largest-ever land animals,
they symbolize power. The Sinclair Oil Company used a dinosaur as
its logo. Compared with living behemoths such as elephants, rhinos
or hippos, we mostly experience dinosaurs through reconstructions
that are quite static. And until the advent of modern animation and
computer-enabled reconstruction, dynamic representations of
dinosaurs were far clumsier than the originals could ever have been;
many (like the original Godzilla) were simply laughable. To see past
these often inadequate depictions requires imagination.
As an old museum guard once told me, the secret of the fascination
of dinosaurs, especially for the young, is that "they are half
real and half not-real." The resulting tension gives them a
particularly exotic nature. In the mind of a child, they are half
dangerous and half safe, half scary monster and half special pal.
They are powerfully strong but cannot reach us. They are in many
ways familiar and near, and yet also very far away in time and
totally foreign to our experience. Other extinct creatures, whether
ammonites, trilobites, flying reptiles or mammoths, similarly
fascinate us with their strangeness and antiquity, but they lack the
same emotional connection.
Unlike a child's conception of the "real" world, which
includes human and near-human monsters and living creatures like
snakes and bugs, the world of dinosaurs can be wholly controlled in
the imagination. With control comes power, which is wonderfully
reinforced as children master (at surprisingly young ages) the
special vocabulary of dinosaurs. The lexicon of dinosaur names is a
closed world to parents (or they pretend it is) and therefore
becomes a private world for the child. Some
names—Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Iguanodon or
Apatosaurus (children know it is no longer
Brontosaurus)—roll off the tongue. Others, such as
Eustreptospondylus, Archaeopteryx or
Pachycephalosaurus are almost tongue twisters, but that is
no barrier to a determined two-, three- or four-year-old. Surely
this precocious, polysyllabic facility is an invaluable boon to
cognitive development.
At a time when science (and especially evolutionary science) is not
as fashionable or well taught as it used to be, paleontology is one
of the most accessible sciences for children as well as adults. It
does not require the mastery of arcane mathematics or bafflingly
complex genomics, and discoveries in paleontology are usually
identified with, and explained in public by, someone who speaks in
layman's terms. Any amateur can have an informed opinion about mass
extinctions, asteroid impacts and the age of the Earth.
Paleontology, and especially dinosaur paleontology, is the single
most accessible aspect of (embodiment of) the concept of evolution.
This leaves us with one last question: What will we do if dinosaurs
ever lose their appeal?