MARGINALIA
Dinosaurs, the Media and Andy Warhol
Keith Thomson
Dino-stories
Just why dinosaurs have always been so prominent in the public
imagination, and why they fascinate a particular age class of
(mostly male) children, has long perplexed scholars. An old
Philadelphia museum guard gave me a good answer: "They're half
real, and half not real." When Richard Owen, who coined the
term dinosaur in 1842, and Waterhouse Hawkins erected the
first life-size reconstructions of dinosaurs—half real, half
wrong, as it happened—for the Crystal Palace exhibition of
1854, they were openly courting the sort of public mania that has
persisted ever since. In the first half of the following century,
the fictional Professor Challenger of Conan Doyle's The Lost
World was echoed in real life by people like Roy Chapman
Andrews and his American Museum of Natural History expeditions to
the Gobi Desert, and a host of lesser but equally colorful
characters.
For today's hungry media, a cornucopia of new dinosaur science and
new-style paleontologists, some marketing themselves as a cross
between Indiana Jones and the mountain men of the Old
West—with beards, boots, silly hats, unwashed shirts and
unedited opinions—have been a gift from heaven. One is forced
to ask, however, whether some of those who have leapt onto the back
of this particular tiger might not be finding the ride uncomfortable
and whether more sober paleontologists might feel that their work
suffers something of a taint by association. If one had a truly
sensational discovery, one might in fact feel like hushing it up,
lest the media convert it into something quite appalling in order to
sell another day's newspapers, only to drop the subject equally
abruptly. On the other hand, in this media-driven world, grant
funding may require publicity.
The whole dinosaur publicity business got a boost from the famous
discovery of the iridium spike in the Earth's crust and its evidence
for an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous. Here was
something whose fame could last more than 15 minutes. But once
again, the public-relations aspect was dreadfully overblown. The
public was given the impression that at one moment there were
millions of dinosaurs, in their full diversity, doing their Mesozoic
thing, and then at the next moment all were extinct. The reality
seems to be that any dinosaurs made extinct by the impact were the
stragglers of an already dwindling group, whereas the real
extinction story was in less glamorous taxa.
In a neat example of journalistic excess, the London Times
of October 30, 1998, carried a story headlined: "Rock solid
proof that comet killed dinosaurs." The facts of the case,
which the article blithely laid out, were quite different. Two
scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had
discovered a chromium spike at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the
isotopic signature of which suggested an extraterrestrial origin.
Their work simply confirmed that there had been an asteroid impact,
and nowhere did they use the word "dinosaur." Apparently
the newspaper could not resist adding that the scientists had proved
that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. They hadn't. But it made a
better story.
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