Rex Appeal - The Enduring Appeal of Dinosaurs

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Rex Appeal - Why are Dinosaurs So Popular

Dinosaurs, or to be more precise dinosaur has 500 teeth, may have been extinct for sixty-five million years but they seem to have found themselves very much at home in our society and culture. Many children go through a phase of being fascinated with these prehistoric animals, many retain this fascination as adults and with the plethora of television programmes, books, films and websites dedicated to dinosaurs their popularity shows no sign of waning. This article sets out to explore this phenomenon and suggests some reasons why these ancient reptiles still enthral us today.

The Birth of the Term - Dinosauria

The term Dinosaur, was first officially coined by the Lancashire born, English anatomist, Richard Owen in 1842. He was to be knighted later in his life for his work in developing the embryonic Earth sciences and for helping to found the British Museum, known today as the Natural History Museum of London. Owen had been given the task of classifying the strange fossil remains that had been discovered over the years in southern England. He had correctly deduced that these bones represented reptiles; but their size and scale was like nothing known to the scientists of the late Georgian and early Victorian eras. Using the conventions laid down for formal scientific description, Owen concluded that these strange fossil remains represented reptiles so different from those alive at the time that they merited their own taxonomic Order. He chose the name Dinosauria using the Greek for "fearfully great lizards", or as many people refer to dinosaurs today as - "terrible lizards".

Owen, in what many academics now believe was a deliberate attempt on his part to gain credit for the work of others or in a bid to discredit his contemporaries, stated that he had used the term Dinosauria as early as 1841, several months before the term was officially accepted.

At the time the Order was announced there were very few recognised members of the Dinosaur family, barely a handful in fact, but with the opening up of the western United States and Canada, soon a huge number of dinosaur discoveries were being made and many more dinosaur genera were added to this ancient group of reptiles scientific classification.

In England during the mid to late Victorian era, studying the natural world was thought to be an appropriate pastime for the learned gentry, the clergy and other educated classes. With this national interest and against the controversial backdrop of the development of Darwinism (the ground breaking book on natural selection written by Charles Darwin was first published in 1859); museums and other bodies arranged displays of fossils of long-extinct, ancient creatures. These proved very popular and indeed a number of travelling shows peddling a range of "curiosities" including dinosaur fossils imported from the United States toured the country helping to cater for the Victorians interest and passion for the natural world.

First the Giant Mammals and then the Dinosaurs

At first, it was the prehistoric mammals that held centre stage, fossils of animals such as the armadillo-like Glyptodonts and Giant Sloths that had been discovered in South America. Sir Richard Owen was responsible for formally classifying a number of these animals. Indeed, he named a species of giant sloth (Mylodon darwini), after Charles Darwin, a friend of his at the time, although the two men were to fall out over Darwin's theory of natural selection and the concept of species being immutable. These prehistoric mammal fossils were more abundant in relative terms than dinosaur fossils and large numbers of such specimens were finding their way into Europe as South and Central America was explored and opened up. With the expansion of American settlers into the western half of the United States, more and more spectacular dinosaur fossils were being found and it was the dinosaurs and their remains that were to take hold of the public's imagination.

Museums and universities competed against each other for bigger and more complete dinosaur fossils. The late 1870s and 1880s saw a huge rise in members of the Dinosauria. Very well-known dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Allosaurus and Triceratops were all officially named and described during this period when there was a sort of "gold rush" for dinosaur bones, with wealthy individuals sponsoring excavations for the prestige of finding bigger and better specimens.

Rex Appeal - Why are Dinosaurs so Popular?

From the late 1880s onwards the Dinosauria has never looked back. Today more than 1,000 separate genera have been described and dinosaurs (plus Pterosaurs and marine reptiles) have proved to be an endless subject of fascination for the public. But why are these long extinct creatures so popular?

Firstly, writers and film makers have used dinosaurs in a number of projects. Dinosaurs and their kind are not out of the media for very long. Team members at Everything Dinosaur have estimated that a new dinosaur species is named and described every twenty days or so. Often such announcements are picked up and carried by the world's media. Winsor McCay produced the first film featuring a dinosaur in 1914. This short, animated feature starred "Gertie the Dinosaur", a long-necked Sauropod. McCay had used "Gertie" in his travelling show for a number of years, no doubt latching onto the popularity of big dinosaurs such as the Sauropods as the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had been busily organising copies of the amazingly well-preserved fossil skeletons of these animals found on expeditions funded by his vast fortune that had been unearthed in the western United States. Dinosaurs with their fearsome reputation have been frightening movie goers ever since, from the days of stop motion animation right up to the CGI spectaculars of today. Indeed, the "Jurassic Park" trilogy - "Jurassic Park", "The Lost World" and "Jurassic Park III" are three of the highest grossing films of all time.

Authors have not missed out on the popularity of dinosaurs. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote a book about an expedition to a fabled "Lost World" where dinosaurs roamed. You have to give the Dinosauria credit, as new mediums such as the internet and computer games have evolved, so dinosaurs have found themselves at home. Psychologists would suggest that since these ferocious creatures are long dead, children become fascinated with them as monsters "who can't harm them any more". Many cultures and societies have their own myths about monsters and the supernatural, but for dinosaurs, one of the first things people learn about them is that they are all dead, so they are classified as "safe monsters", dangerous in the extreme but not likely to do us any real harm as all we have these days are their fossils to study.

It's the Mums and Dads

The psychologists may have a point. We have heard many academics and scientists espouse this point of view. However, there may be another contributory factor to dinosaur's enduring popularity. We meet lots of mums and dad who are very proud of their very own young palaeontologist who can pronounce all those difficult dinosaur names and seem to know so much about them. Children pick up a fascination with dinosaurs from books, television programmes, the internet and so on and crucially their parents and guardians seeing a scientific foundation to their play and interest indirectly and often directly encourage them. Young children are amazingly perceptive and can pick up the positive signals given to them by their parents, grandparents and guardians - so they too take a greater interest in the dinosaurs, encouraged by the feedback from the grown ups in their lives.

With the advent of the creative curriculum in England, teachers are using dinosaur based lesson plans and schemes of work with children as young as four years of age, so this link between liking dinosaurs and education is being strengthened.

It seems that although dinosaurs have only been known to science for less than two hundred years they are going to have an enduring impact on generations of children for many years to come.