The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Dinosaurs!

I went on a quest at my parents' house over the weekend to retrieve the copy of The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs that I had as a kid.  After about 20 minutes looking through the bookshelves, I found it. 

The book was originally published in 1960, based on the copyright information, and the copy I had was the 1976 printing.  (Printing, not edition.  It's not obvious that much, if anything, had changed in the 16 years between the original and my copy.)   I received it as a Christmas gift, and would have been reading it at around the age of 7, and from the condition of the book, I read it a lot.

In the 1970s, dinosaurs were pretty popular.  My school library had several heavily illustrated books, prominently featuring the usual suspects - Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus (the old name for what is now called Apatosaurus) - as well as less popular species that need not concern us here.  The typical 1976-vintage dinosaur was a slow, lumbering, cold-blooded, rock-stupid giant lizard.  T-rex, as depicted in The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs looked like this:

Figure 1: T-rex, as shown in The How and Why Wonder Book

I know I've seen that guy somewhere else - perhaps stomping through Tokyo...

Figure 2: Godzilla - not a real dinosaur...

This was a fairly typical reconstruction, and T-rex in this incarnation looks, frankly, absurd.  The tail-dragging posture, giant head, and tiny upper torso give the impression of a creature that can barely hold its head up, let alone catch and eat pretty much anything it encountered.

There were a number of reasons why dinosaurs were interpretted this way, including the presumptions of the paleontologists and other scientists doing the studies.   I tend to think that the work being done was being done in good faith, but the net result is that the typical child of the 70's (and well into the 80's) had what I'll refer to as the Big Dumb Lizard concept of dinosaurs.

In the mid-70's, though, the prevailing view of dinosaurs began to change, at least among the scientists investigating them.  In April of 1975, a paleontologist named Robert T. Bakker  published an article entitled Dinosaur Renaissance in Scientific American.  Bakker was an early advocate (dating to the late 1960's) of the theory that dinosaurs were, in fact, warm-blooded, active, relatively intelligent animals.  These ideas largely crossed into the public consciousness in 1986, with Bakker's publication of The Dinosaur Heresies, and achieved something of a tipping point in 1990 with the publication of Michael Crichton's novel, Jurassic Park.  (1992 was something of a speedbump - that year introduced the world to the Purple Abomination.)

 

Figure 3: Purple - the color of evil

Bizarre singing dinosaurs aside, by the mid-90's or thereabouts, the typical image of dinosaurs had changed.  No longer was T-rex a Big Dumb Lizard.  Now T-rex was a quick, agile creature that seemed quite capable of ruining the day of anything it encountered:

Figure 4: A more streamlined version

What happened?  Why the change? 

In broad terms, what paleontologists like Bakker were doing was to look at varied lines of evidence for how dinosaurs fit into their environment and analyze the data to form a bigger picture.  Fossilized nests yield clues about brooding behavior.  Trackways provide indications of the size and speed of the animals.  Knowledge of predator/prey relationships of modern animals could be used to gain insight into likely relationships amongst dinosaurs, and so on.  Science moves forward.  New evidence is incorporated.  Our understanding improves.

This past Christmas, I received a new dinosaur book - Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds, by John Long and Peter Schouten.  It's more of a coffee-table book than a text, but it features  amazing artwork by Schouten that brings the animals to life more vividly than anything I was reading in the 70's.  We've come a long way.

CB

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