MARGINALIA
Dinosaurs as a Cultural Phenomenon
Keith Thomson
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.
» Post Comment