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DINOSAURS AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON

Keith Stewart Thomson

ew sciences have been as successful as pa- of the mid-century, ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs leontology in remaining serious yet broadly were much more captivating to the public. The accessible at the same time. Much of its modern popularity of dinosaurs has partly to do Fpopularity may come from the image of the pa- with the creatures themselves; it owes even more leontologist-explorer who pits himself against to astute showmanship and media savvy. the wilderness and brings back fabulous things. The image is even partly true, because in the Fame and Fortune 19th century, dinosaurs (and paleontology) be- Right from the beginning some dinosaur sleuths came part of the myth of the American West. promoted their discoveries (and themselves) in No longer were important discoveries made by ways that other fossil hunters did not (or could European gentlemen in suits and ties who di- not). The anatomist Richard Owen, for example, rected a couple of workmen in an obscure quar- featured them in a display at Britain’s Great Ex- ry. Instead, fossil collecting had become “pros- hibition of 1851. For this event, sculptor and pecting”: A man with a horse and a pick—and master promoter Waterhouse Hawkins created of course a rifle—could venture out West and, life-sized reconstructions of dinosaurs, which like his gold-seeking cousins, bring back untold were later removed to a permanent site in South wealth from the rocks. That fantasy carries much London. Hawkins’s famous dinner party inside a more weight than the reality of the scientist in a half-built Iguanodon moved paleontology a long lab coat, noting tiny details in endless trays of way towards its modern cultural status. museum specimens and preoccupied more with In 1858, the first articulated skeleton of any statistics and geochemistry than with campfires dinosaur was found in a New Jersey clay pit. in the badlands. No matter that most paleontol- Waterhouse Hawkins traveled to Philadelphia ogy concerns undramatic taxa like graptolites to mount the new Hadrosaurus for Joseph Leidy and brachiopods, the field continues to enjoy a (the leading paleontologist of the day) and then reputation as a richly rewarded, swashbuckling offered casts of it for sale to museums around the enterprise. world. His mounted skeleton caused such a sen- But why dinosaurs? They were not the first sation that the Academy of Natural Sciences in- prehistoric creatures to gain wide attention. In stituted admission charges to limit attendance. 1801 Charles Willson Peale, a talented artist, The gentlemanly Leidy (once described as showman, and inventor of the modern natu- the last man who knew everything) was soon ral history museum, excavated the remains of eclipsed by a group of well-funded scholar-ad- three large mastodons from Newburgh, New venturers who competed bitterly for some 30 York. The display of one of Peale’s mastodons in years. Archrivals Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale Philadelphia helped start the public fascination and Edward Drinker Cope in Philadelphia col- with fossils. In the 1820s and ‘30s Mary Anning lected thousands of fossils, including some 120 excavated an amazing array of ichthyosaurs and different dinosaurs, from the American West. plesiosaurs from the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme Regis, The story of Cope and Marsh is one of the England. In 1824 William Buckland described the great sagas of science, at turns funny, reprehen- world’s first dinosaur—Megalosaurus—and the sible and tragic, but there was no doubting their next year Gideon Mantell followed with the her- determination. In 1875, Marsh negotiated with bivorous Iguanodon. An 1830 watercolor by Hen- the Black Hills Sioux for permission to collect on ry de la Beche first depicted such creatures in life their lands and later became their advocate in settings, but to judge by popular science books Washington. In 1876, Cope collected specimens in Montana just a few weeks after the Sioux vic- Keith Stewart Thomson is emeritus professor of natural history at tory over the U.S. 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of the Amer- the Little Bighorn, reckoning that “since every ican Philosophical Society. Address: Oxford University Museum, able-bodied Sioux would be with the braves un- Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK, and 41 Summit Street, Phil- der [their chief] Sitting Bull … there would be adelphia, PA 19118, USA. Internet: [email protected] no danger for us.” Yet neither Cope nor Marsh

212 American Scientist, Volume 93 © 2005 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction with permission only. Contact [email protected]. Figure 1. This illustration from Camille Flammarion’s Le Monde avant la Création de l’Homme (1886) was the first to show a dinosaur (Iguanodon) in a theatrical, artificial pose. brought their work to the public, perhaps be- on Earth history, Le Monde avant la Création de cause they were too busy collecting and describ- l’Homme (or The World Before the Creation of Man), ing fossils and feuding with each other. showed an Iguanodon in a theatrical pose: taking a meal from the “fifth floor” of a Paris apart- Real ment building (in France, the ground floor is the The key to modern dinomania may have been unnumbered rez-de-chaussee). Even so, it took a the discovery in 1884 of a whole herd of intact while for this sort of dramatic depiction of di- Iguanodon skeletons in a Belgian coal mine. Two nosaurs to catch on in the USA, until American years later, Camille Flammarion’s popular book newspapers followed in 1897 (American Century) www.americanscientist.org © 2005 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 2005 May–June 213 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. and 1898 (New York World and Advertiser) with not all) were big, strong and ferocious. As the similar depictions of the far larger Brontosaurus largest-ever land animals, they symbolize power. against a backdrop of skyscrapers. The recep- The Sinclair Oil Company used a dinosaur as tion given to these fantastic images firmly es- its logo. Compared with living behemoths such tablished the potential of dinosaurs to capture as elephants, rhinos or hippos, we mostly expe- public interest. rience dinosaurs through reconstructions that Cope suffered financial ruin later in life and are quite static. And until the advent of modern sold his private collection to the American Mu- animation and computer-enabled reconstruction, seum of Natural History in 1895. The muse- dynamic representations of dinosaurs were far um’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn (himself clumsier than the originals could ever have been; a paleontologist), made the dinosaurs a show- many (like the original Godzilla) were simply case attraction. The AMNH sent out Barnum laughable. To see past these often inadequate Brown’s 1902 expedition that bagged the first depictions requires imagination. Tyrannosaurus rex. In the 1920s and ‘30s the mu- As an old museum guard once told me, the se- seum sent a series of expeditions (not forget- cret of the fascination of dinosaurs, especially for ting the movie cameras) to the Gobi Desert, led the young, is that “they are half real and half not- by the dashing Roy Chapman Andrews (the real.” The resulting tension gives them a particu- prototype for “Indiana Jones”). The original in- larly exotic nature. In the mind of a child, they are tent had been to search for early human fossils, half dangerous and half safe, half scary monster but instead they made startling discoveries of and half special pal. They are powerfully strong horned dinosaurs and nests with eggs still in- but cannot reach us. They are in many ways fa- side. Not to be outdone, the Carnegie Museum miliar and near, and yet also very far away in in Pittsburgh, with the financial backing of its time and totally foreign to our experience. Other eponymous founder, launched major efforts extinct creatures, whether ammonites, trilobites, of its own, followed in turn by the other ma- flying reptiles or mammoths, similarly fascinate jor museums, which bought specimens if they us with their strangeness and antiquity, but they didn’t mount their own expeditions. lack the same emotional connection. Today the search for dinosaurs and other fos- Unlike a child’s conception of the “real” world, sils spans the whole world, from the Arctic to which includes human and near-human mon- Argentina, China to Greenland, Australia to Af- sters and living creatures like snakes and bugs, rica, and dinosaurs are big business. Publica- the world of dinosaurs can be wholly controlled tions on dinosaurs continue to multiply, from in the imagination. With control comes pow- classics like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost er, which is wonderfully reinforced as children World, Karel Capek’s satirical War with the Newts master (at surprisingly young ages) the special and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, to simple pic- vocabulary of dinosaurs. The lexicon of dinosaur ture books. Giant fossil creatures (again mostly names is a closed world to parents (or they pre- dinosaurs) featured centrally in Bill Watterson’s tend it is) and therefore becomes a private world classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes—no short- for the child. Some names—Tyrannosaurus, Stego- age of literary allusions there. The fascination saurus, Iguanodon or Apatosaurus (children know may have peaked with Michael Crichton’s Ju- it is no longer Brontosaurus)—roll off the tongue. rassic Park (1990), which began as a book but Others, such as Eustreptospondylus, Archaeopteryx became a blockbuster movie with two sequels. or Pachycephalosaurus are almost tongue twisters, These films were the first to show dinosaurs in but that is no barrier to a determined two-, three- an authentic style with realistic behaviors. Since or four-year-old. I imagine that this precocious, then, the BBC has gone a great deal further in polysyllabic facility is an invaluable boon to cog- its animated television series Walking with Dino- nitive development. saurs. In books, films, television, toys, computer At a time when science (and especially evo- games, newspapers and magazines—whatever lutionary science) is not as fashionable or well is current—dinosaurs sell. taught as it used to be, paleontology is one of the most accessible sciences for children as well Half-Real as adults. It does not require the mastery of ar- Granting the extraordinary marketing and pub- cane mathematics or bafflingly complex genom- licity that surrounds dinosaurs, it remains true ics, and discoveries in paleontology are usu- that unless they were fundamentally interest- ally identified with, and explained in public by, ing, such efforts would surely have fizzled out someone who speaks in layman’s terms. Any by now. Part of the reason for their hold on our amateur can have an informed opinion about collective imagination may be that, of all extinct mass extinctions, asteroid impacts and the age of organisms, dinosaurs are the most paradoxical. the Earth. Paleontology, and especially dinosaur On the one hand, dinosaurs were long believed paleontology, is the single most accessible aspect to be clumsy and slow. They are extinct (with the of (embodiment of) the concept of evolution. exception of the bird lineage) and ought to be This leaves us with one last question: What will symbolic of failure. On the other hand, some (but we do if dinosaurs ever lose their appeal?