|
There is the hubris narrative, for instance, that reminds us that we,
like the dinosaurs, are transitory and ephemeral creatures. “Thy ruled
their earth for tens of millions of years, kings of their domains atop a
bloody and violent food chain, only to vanish through natural disaster
in the wink of an eye...” We may be talking about ourselves, Homo
Sapiens, as well here. We “rule” the planet in our time, presumably
“taming” a wild natural environment and subordinating all to our will.
We project back in time and on to the dinosaurs these descriptive
monikers. It is unlikely that Terrible Lizards “thought” of themselves
as king, emperors or rulers. These are, after all, human devices and
require a degree of self awareness and descriptive talent which
dinosaurs likely did not possess. By instinct and perhaps some training,
they ate, migrated, reproduced and did whatever else was required for
the basics of survival.
We have thus constructed a dinosaur story or narrative which we
constantly embellish using the minutiae of paleontological evidence.
We debate, for instance, not only the possible physical characteristics
of the dinosaurs (how big? how fast? how much did they eat?) but
their likely behaviors, drawing parallels with ourselves. Perhaps there
is a degree of comfort in knowing that dinosaurs “nested,” and flocked
and that even the most predatory of them, the T-Rex, was a bit closer
to us since she may have “nourished” her offspring.
MAYHEM
Dinosaurs have become a friendly reminder that humans, too, despite
ruling the earth (or at least having the veneer of doing so) may occupy
a similarly precarious niche in the greater scheme of things. We, like
the Terrible Lizards, may find ourselves in the debit column of the
existential accounting, downsized and fired from our tenured posts on
planet earth.
Before December 31, 2020 it was easy to dismiss this sort of talk as
so much fin de siecle blues, the jitters that writers like
Hillel Schwartz (1) and
Stjepan Mestrovic (2) say
accompany the calendric roll over
from one century to another. Certainly our contemporary piquancy
about AIDS, Fatima and the Virgin Mary, and, yes, the extinction jitters
-- huge asteroids smashing into our earth, or terrible killer viruses
unleashed from secret laboratories -- all have their parallels in the late
19th and early 20th century concerns with similar themes. Emerson,
perhaps a few decades ahead of his time, lamented the “godless,
materialized” attitudes of urban denizens.
“There is faith in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in
machinery, in the steam engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels,
sewing machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes,” he
lamented.
Mestrovic says that Europeans, especially the French sensed in their
fin de siecle events and theme remarkably similar to own. “Syphilis,
wars, political scandals, economic catastrophes, the increase in rates
of mental illness, suicide, smoking, and drug abuse concerned them.
They read in their newspapers about Satanism, devil worship, and the
spread of the occult, and of course, our media is saturated with similar
reports.”
And more: Mestrovic observes, “They started talking about the rise of
homosexuality -- lesbianism became almost a fad. Sado-masochism
was much discussed, and they wrote much about the rise of immorality
in the family, in sexual relations, and the general style of life...”
All of this predated the admonitions and apocalyptic warnings of our
modern televangelists who fixate on similar themes. Pat Robertson’s
“700 Club” is a potpourri of cautions and near-predictions about
rampaging storms, volcanoes, twisters and other mayhem -- the “signs
and warnings” that a Biblical chronology is ticking away, and that we
have entered the End of Days period where the returning Jesus is
lurking just around the corner. (Not too far from the sentiment of the
bumper sticker which declares, “God Is Returning Soon And She Is
Really Pissed!”) Robertson’s novel, “End of the Age,” included disaster
themes-’a-plenty beginning with a giant asteroid impact (a weak sister
of the Chicxulub catastrophe that may have helped killed off the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago?) As a literary work, Robertson’s opus
was panned by mainstream reviewers, but he had managed to fuse
scientific speculations with his premillenialist religious beliefs -- no
tawdry feat!
“Jurassic Park” and its sequel may have dispensed with religious
trappings, but voiced similar anxieties and cautions about these same
anxious themes. The dinosaurs are creations of white-coated
laboratory scientists playing fast-and-loose with the genetic code. Are
they appropriating the natural world or Emerson, or perhaps even the
sacred world of the Creator? Dig deeper into the thematic message,
and we can appreciate the fact pointed out by W.J.T. Mitchell, that the
menacing Velociraptors are females (3). The “feminization” of dinosaur
imagery -- and T-Rex Sue is the most compelling and recent example
-- suggests deeper issues are at work here involving gender and the
status of females, empowerment, and the tension between patriarchal
tradition and “uppity women” threatening, like the parthanogenic
raptors, the whole sexual and cultural order of things. Not only are
these “Jurassic Park” reptilian terrorists the profane results of
“tampering with God’s kingdom,” they procreate without the need for
males on any level. They have full control of their biology, having
escaped the confines of scientific management, and are free to do as
they choose sans male control. They are, in a sense, symbolic icons in
the ultimate Promise Keepers nightmare.
EXTINCTION: BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS...
It is difficult to ignore the synchronicity of two events linking
dinosaurs -- or, rather, our curiosity about them -- with the notion of
extinction, and the latter being closely fused with the concept of
evolution.
The word “dinosaur” was coined in 1842 by Sir Richard Owen
(1804-1892), anatomist and superintendent of the British Museum,
who combined Greek words deinos, meaning “terrible” or “marvelous”
with sauros, “lizard.” He distinguished dinosaurs from their reptilian
relatives by noting the vertebrate structures, including the pelvis and
hipbones. Dinosaur imagery and references go further back, though,
and some have suggested that the 5th century b.c.e. Greek historian
Heroduotus may have been referring to these terrible lizards in his
description of griffins -- legendary beasts that were part eagle and
lion.
In Owen’s time, though, another discovery bears equally on our
story. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) helped to outline the skeletal
structure not of dinosaurs, but a theory which sought to explain the
evolution of all forms of life through a gradual process of natural
selection. After matriculating at Cambridge, Darwin in 1831 departed
on a British survey ship, HMS Beagle as on-board naturalist. Five
years later, he returned and set down his observations in Notebooks
on the Transmutation of Species. His developed theory of evolution
was announced in 1858 in a paper coincident with another penned by
Alfred Russell Wallace. In 1859, Darwin’s classic On the Origin of
Species, “the book that shook the world,” appeared... and the rest is,
indeed, history.
At this point in human history, the bulk of the scientific community
was beginning to critically examine, and in most cases reject, the
notion of a “young Earth.” Churchmen such as Bishop James Ussher
(1581-1656) had accepted a literal interpretation of the Bible, and with
it the carefully delineated chronological time line which began in
Genesis and presumably ended in John’s Book of Revelation (4).
Genesis and Revelation were the metaphorical bookends defining the
whole and entirety of human history. In the intervening pages was the
history of the church, and the successive generations from Adam and
his progeny, a long but comprehensible list of “begets” through the
centuries -- all 60 or so of them, according to Ussher. It was, under
this scheme, possible to calculate with exquisite if questionable detail,
precisely when the The Word became real, and when the frightening
events of the Apocalypse would unfold.
There was comfort and predictability in all of this. How different
Ussher’s scheme was (and how different the whole Judeo Christian
linear view of history) from the pagan sensibilities of time! The latter
often perceived time as infinite, repetitive, cyclical, the Ouroborus
consuming itself, an endless loop punctuated perhaps in some religious
systems by occasional creations, destruction’s and recreations (5).
Not so, said the Hebrews and later the Church Fathers of Christianity.
Time was finite and short; more important, it had a purpose, a
direction. Time was that which framed the sequence of events
beginning with the Creation of the world, the fall of man, and the other
dramatic events of the Old and New Testament.
Darwin’s theories as well as the findings of other physical scientists
required a more expansive sense of time, though. A few housands of
years meant little, especially to uniformitarians who saw geological
processes occurring over long eons. Ussher’s chronology was far too
brief to explain anything substantial, whether the gradual evolution of
Darwin’s creatures or the formation of sedimentary layers unearthed in
an extinct ocean. Deep time was required here -- millions, then tens
of millions, then hundreds of millions of years. Equally important was
the demand that any explanation concerning life and the universe had
to be made from the perspective of scientific method, not the religious
doctrines of Ussher and others. Some Christians recast Genesis and
Revelation, treating the Biblical accounts as coded, symbolic narratives
rather than literal history. Others, the “creationists,” set about the
laborious task of trying to reconcile the evidence of geology,
paleontology and astronomy with the Procrustean requirements of
Ussher and other “young earth” believers.
Dinosaurs emerged as perhaps the most evocative symbols of this
deep time. They existed long before human observers, their remains
laid down in ancient riverbeds, or beneath layers of deposits including
iridium, that crucial evidence that their demise was somehow tied to
the arrival of an enormous asteroid tens of millions of years ago. We
can only smile as modern-day creationists attempt to fit whole
communities of “Terrible Lizards” on to Noah’s ark, or suggest that
dinosaurs and human beings both coexisted on earth only a few
hundred or so centuries ago. That is the stuff of Biblical
fundamentalism, Conan Doyle’s “Lost World,” and, of course, “Jurassic
Park.” In the Paluxy River Valley, near Glen Rose, Texas dinosaur
footprints were found in the early twentieth century. Some Biblical
creationists have claimed to also discovered “giant man tracks,” large
elongate footprints which they say confirms the literal Genesis account
and proves that dinosaurs and humans coexited. There is even a
nearby creationist museum. (6)
Percival Lowell |
Another name deserves mention here, not so much on account of
dinosaurs, but because of evolution and deep time. Percival Lowell
(1855-1916) came from a family of Boston Brahmins which included
poetess Amy Lowell and a slew of Russells, Putnams and Cabots, and
went down in history as the popularizer of the so-called “canal theory”
of Mars (7). True to his patrician roots, Lowell went Ivy League and
then embarked on The Grand Tour writing memoirs of his travels in
books like “Choson -- The Land of the Morning Calm” (1885), “Soul of
the Far East” (1888), “Noto” (1891) and “Occult Japan”(1895). He
excelled at mathematics and developed a passionate interest in
astronomy, which may account for his subsequent lack of interest in
commercial business.
Lowell was also interested in a debate played out not only in
scientific circles but the popular press. Was there life elsewhere in the
universe, possibly on the planets of our own solar system? It was a
legitimate question, and one certainly raised by the work of men like
Charles Darwin which suggested natural underpinnings for the origin of
life forms. If living creatures could manage to arise out of a primordial
soup, living in a range of seemingly inhospitable climates and times
here on our Earth, why not elsewhere? Copernicus and Galileo had
wrought a revolution in thought over how the solar system operated,
dethroning Earth -- and with it, humankind -- from the center of the
universe. Darwin, it was suggested, went a step further, placing
human beings and animals on a level field. We were all the products
of powerful and persistent natural evolutionary forces. If not here,
why not there?
Lowell was particularly interested in the work of Italian astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) who had discovered the major
asteroid Hesperia in 1861, and demonstrated that swarms of meteor
(which often fall into our atmosphere as “shooting stars”) travel in
cometary orbits. In 1877, Schiaparelli announced that he had seen
markings on the planet Mars that he described as “canali” or
“channels.” This naturally gave rise to speculation that these were
non-random structures, the result of intelligent life. Not all
astronomers agreed, and many suggested that the “canals” or lines
were optical artifacts and wishful thinking. Others, including Lowell,
insisted that, indeed, they saw a web of intersecting lines on the
Martian surface.
Lowell typified the end of a period in history when “gentlemen
scientists” dug up fossils, experimented with plants, and observed the
heavens in their private observatories, or funded the work of others.
The gap between professional and amateur was widening. Lowell
managed to straddle both worlds, though, and in 1893-94 constructed
an impressive observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in part to satiate his
curiosity about Mars (8). The following year, the first in a series of
speculative books about the Red Planet and related topics appeared,
Mars (1895) followed by The Solar System (1903), Mars and Its Canals
(1906), Mars As the Abode of Life (1908), The Evolution of Worlds
(1909) and The Genesis of the Planets (1916).
They were masterpieces of systematic logic, betraying Lowell’s
extensive talents as both a Renaissance person and a scientific
generalist. The reasoning is thoughtful, logical, tenacious and
exacting; reading the Mars series even today, one cannot help but
occasionally wonder: how could he have been wrong?
Lowell hypothesized that the “canals” were real, and served the
purpose of transporting water from Mars’ polar caps across the surface
to its temperate zones. Canals seemed to appear, darken and become
engorged with the seasons -- an agricultural cycle? Where they
intersected were larger patches of similar dark markings. Were these
the remnants of Martian cities, the last redoubt for a titanic race of
genius engineers living on a dying planet whose water was running
out? The theory possessed a certain thematic symmetry and internal
logic -- if the canals really existed...
Mainstream astronomers rejected Lowell’s speculations, though, and
questioned whether he (and others) were really seeing canals, or were
simply the victims of optical illusions. History supports the latter, and
suggests that Schiaparelli, Lowell and other “canal” theorists were
connecting indistinct surface markings in their minds, imagining a web
(and web makers!) where none really existed. Lowell rejected these
arguments, of course, arguing that his telescope and observatory
possessed superior observing conditions, that other astronomers failed
to see the canals because they simply lacked such serendipitous and
favorable circumstances. Dreams and speculation of Martian canals --
and with it, perhaps a dying or lost civilization -- lived on after Lowell’s
death. A popular 1956 children’s book, “Exploring Mars” (Roy Gallant,
illustrations by Lowell Hess, Garden City Books, N.Y.) displays a map
of the Martian surface covered with channels. Even the naming --
“Mare Acidalium,” “Arcadia,” “Utopia” -- suggests a romantic Marscape
and civilization. The dream was finally put to rest by a series of space
probes beginning in the late 1960s which showed Mars a world
battered by meteoric impact with no grand “canals” or other artificial
structures. True to Darwin, some form of microbial or other primitive
life on Mars may have evolved and could even now be stubbornly
occupying niches beneath the surface; it certainly does on earth, from
arctic terrain to sulfurous “black smokers” in the depths of the ocean.
Lowell’s Martian civilization, the result of eons of evolutionary
processes at work on the Red Planet, is likely wishful thinking.
For his time, though, Lowell took full advantage of the latest
scientific findings. In Evolution of Worlds, he discussed the orbital
inclinations of planets noting “we have every angle of departure from
orthodox platitude to uncomforming uprightness,” adding, “This point,
that heavenly bodies, like terrestrial ones, show all possible grades of
indistinction, is kin to that specific generation by which Darwin
revolutionized zoology a generation ago. It is as fundamental to
planets as to plants...”
Further on, he contrasts Darwin’s treatment of evolution and the
theories of the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre LaPlace.
In Mars As the Abode of Life, Lowell continued his examination of
geological epochs on earth -- truly, a sense of “deep time” --
attempting to tie together the evolution of everything from planets to
life.
Lowell’s Martians reflected the predominant ideological ethos of his
time. What sort of civilization would, or could, embark on such a
titanic engineering project, one that dwarfed the scale of deLessep’s
Suez canal, or the later Panama channel? “Quite possibly, such
Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not
dreamed, and with them electrophones and kinetoscopes are things of
a bygone past, preserved with veneration in museums as relics of the
clumsy contrivances of the simply childhood of the race,” he mused.
What else might be said of the Martians? In retrospect, Lowell and
Schiaparelli may have commented more on their own times and
perceptions than the state of any genuine Martian civilization. For the
Italian astronomer living in the cauldron of European revolutionary
movements, the Martians had established “a collective socialism
(which) would appear very likely to have resulted from one community
of interests and one universal solidarity among the citizens, a true
phalanx which could be considered a socialist paradise...” Not so with
Lowell, however; his Martians were ruled “by an oligarchy of the elite,”
writes astronomical historian William Sheehan. These alien denizens
are locked in a vicious struggle for survival on a planet running
dangerously out of resources, particularly water. Lowell wrote of the
“strength phenomenal” of this Martian race, “more godlike than any
Grecian god/ Who ever on Olympus trod.”
This Martian scenario, a despotic but advanced elite struggling
against its inevitable demise, resonated neatly with some
interpretations of Darwin’s work, especially those of the British social
philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Spencer embraced
Darwin’s theories on natural selection, and then attempting to apply
this same model to human social behavior. Natural selection held that
the most well-adapted survive and reproduce, thus allowing over an
extended period of time a population to operate successfully within a
given environment. Spencer suggested the “survival of the fittest” to
describe this dynamic within the human population; human
advancement was best facilitated, he claimed, by permitting unfettered
competition.
Although Spencer was a philosophical individualist, his theories were
used to justify a number of racist and authoritarian political ideologies,
as well as what some considered the excesses of capitalism and
industrial society. While Spencer viewed society and human progress
in strictly material, non-Divine terms, clergy such as the Rev. Henry
Ward Beecher (1813-1887) took up the banner of social Darwinism,
seeing it as a vindication of Christian belief. Referring to the robber
barons of his time, Beecher declared, “We need all the Jay Cookes we
have and a thousand more. God has need of rich Christians.”
Patricians and the financial aristocracy were made by a Spencerian god
“and He assigns particular duties to them.”
“Generally the proposition is true,” said Beecher, “that where you
find the most religion there you find the most worldly prosperity.”
Describing himself as a “cordial Christian Darwinist,” Beecher added,
“no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his
fault -- unless it be his sin.” (9)
“It is said that a dollar day is not enough for a wife and five or six
children,” Beecher wrote in the Christian Union magazine during the
nationwide rail strike of 1877. “No, not if the man smokes or drinks
beer. It is not enough to enable them to live as perhaps they would
have the right to live in prosperous times. But is not a dollar a day
enough to buy bread with? Water costs nothing; and a man who
cannot live on bread is not fit to live...”
Generalized interpretations of “survival of the fittest” subsequently
came to be used as a rationale for disparate political ideologies and
agendas, from the racist theories of fascism and national socialism to
the brutality of Stalin’s purges and bloodyclass warfare. (Were not the
bourgeoisie, kulaks and other counter-revolutionaries a spent species
on the grand stage of historical determinism?)
Darwin’s theory of evolution, and its application to human interaction
by Spencer and others, though, promoted wide discussion over the
question of human origins and destiny. Fundamentalist retreated into
a literal defense of the Bible (taking with them Ussher’s cumbersome
chronology) with awkward results. Others, like Lowell, found
confirmation of Darwin’s system not only on Earth, but in the heavens.
Mars, he declared, was an older planet than ours, its inhabitants in the
last stages of their war to tame a hostile environment. Humans here
would follow a similar path, all as part of the war to survive.
Ironically, there is a small but lively and growing movement that
looks to Mars as the future home of Homo sapiens, and our refuge if
catastrophic events -- say, another asteroid impact like the one which
probably wiped out Sue and her relatives 65 million years ago -- head
our way. American colonists, and later the frontier explorers often
described the North American continent in millenialist terms -- a
paradise, a fresh start unblighted by the sins and troubles of Europe, a
New Jerusalem. In many ways, it is Lowell’s Mars -- one populated by
an intelligent species (us) using advanced technology to tame a distant
wilderness, turn deserts green, in other words, to survive. Groups like
Robert Zubrin’s Mars Society speak of the Red Planet in such frontier
terms. It is a frontier; Mars or Bust (forget California!) reads a button
on one Mars Society conventioneer observed by writer Joel Achenbach
in his new book “Captured by Aliens.” (10) Mars enthusiasts speak of
a kind of interplanetary Manifest Destiny for the human race. For
some, it is a Spencerian spin-off from the halcyon days of 19th century
grand Imperialism, when the European powers threw their own web
across this planet, building not just canals (Suez and the attempt at
the Panama Isthmus) in pale imitation of Lowell’s Martians, but
launching fleets and armies to subjugate client states. Others, though,
seem caught up in the intoxication of possibilities. Why not terraform
an entire planet, if it can be done? Why bother with the cautious, even
timid NASA approach to space exploration? One conference speaker
suggested that we need to take more chances in order to colonize
space. There is even a touch of populism here, with Zubrin talking
about the need to have poets and musicians heading into space along
with the scientists.
For some, Mars has become the insurance policy against extinction
on earth. Build a viable presence on the Red Planet, become the
technologically savvy Martians Lowell and Schiaparelli dreamed of, and
the prospects of human extinction drop precipitously. Earth may
someday be hit by a mile-wide asteroid bringing nuclear winter and
extinction in its aftermath, but so what? The Martians will survive, and
the human story -- or so the story goes -- will go on.
So, here we are on the hump between two centuries and two
millennia. We made it through the angst of the end of the century,
solved the Y2-K problem, and seem to have avoided (for now, anyway)
the predicted killer asteroids, rise of the Antichrist and the prospect of
Final Judgment. We’re somewhere at the beginning of what we count
as the 21st century, but cannot seem to stop looking in the rear view
mirror. We have developed a national curiosity with our own
genealogy; the Mormon Church, with its vast ancestral database, is on
line, and people appear more determined than ever to trace their
predecessors as far back as possible. Ancestry, knowing one’s roots
provides many with a sense of grounding and anchoring. Like the
geneology of Genesis, this is time we can comprehend, get our arms
around so to speak. It tells us of our place in the linear scheme of
things. We go back even farther, though, to a time before humans,
when Sue and her relatives ruled the earth, and we look for parallels
with ourselves.
Dino-mania, then, the cultural romance with dinosaurs and all things
dinosaur, is inextricably linked to our concerns about origins and
extinction. Is it any coincidence that interest in dinosaurs come at a
time when the majority of Americans think that creationism belongs in
schools, that divine agency -- and not the “deep time” processes of
evolution -- gave rise to us and the world as we know it? These two
sensibilities (one a scientific fact, the other a mythic belief) seem to
coexist in a contrapuntal, uneasy alliance.
T-Rex Sue epitomizes so much about ourselves and our history, and
our future, that we feel a kindred spirit lurking within those fossilized
remains. “Dinosaur” describes a bevy of things and processes in our
world, from cumbersome, archaic political regimes and their leaders to
unsavvy corporate practices and obstacles to progress. We have
“tamed” the dinosaur in a sense; there is the popular belief that
dinosaurs are the source of oil, that substance our world runs on and
fights over. These Terrible Lizards died so we might live ... and drive.
They are icons of strength and terrifying power and menace, but also
reminders -- like the human skulls Victorians often displayed on their
book shelves -- of the passing of time and hubris. We too will
someday follow their footsteps down the path of extinction.
An alien archaeologist rummages through the debris of an abandoned
human civilization -- say, New York City or Chicago -- in some distant
future might unearth an exhibit of these creatures, and conclude that t
dinosaurs, “Terrible Lizards,” were possibly objects of reverential
veneration, worship, and certainly curiosity. Humans erected
pedestals and grand halls to display, and likely offered homage to
these extraordinary creatures. Were they gods, deities like the biped
found in similar temples, hanging from two pieces of crossed wood?
Were they beings that ruled the world and then, like the bipeds,
disappeared? The alien scientist wonders. He (for lack of a more
accurate gender identification) suspects that the dinosaurs roamed the
planet far, far earlier than the bipeds who found them so compelling
and seductive. He wonders if the people who built these cities saw in
the dinosaurs something about themselves, and their own tenuous
relationship with the universe around them. He would likely be right...
![[top]](../../uparrow.gif)
Notes:
(1) See Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End, An Orientation Manual Toward
the Yeart 2000 (N.Y., Doubleday, 1990)
![[back]](../../backarrow.gif)
(2) Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Coming Fin De Siecle, (London,
Routledge, 1991)
(3) W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1998)
(4) For more on ussher’s chronology, see Stephen Jay Gould,
Questioning the Millennium, A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely
Arbitrary Countdown, (New York, Harmony, 1997).
(5) See Paul Halpern, Time Journeys, A Search For Cosmic Destiny and
Meaning (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1990)
(6) An informative account of the “Man Tracks” controversy may be
found on line written by Glen J. Kuban: On the Heels of Dinosaurs.
(7) See Biography of Percival Lowell by A. Lawrence Lowell (New York,
MacMillan, 1935). Informative background on the canal controversy
may be found in Planets & Perception, Telescopic Views and
Interpretations, 1609-1090 by William Sheehan (Tucson, University of
Arizona Press, 1988)
(8) For more on Lowell’s activities in astronomy, see William Lowell
Putnam, The Explorers of Mars Hill, (Maine, Phoenix Publishing, 1994)
(9) See E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment, Aristocracy &
Caste in America (New York, Random House, 1964)
(10) For a write-up on the Mars Society, see the segment by Joel
Achenbach, Captured By Aliens in Astronomy Magazine, July, 2000
issue.
Copyright
© 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.
|
Youngsters love the playfulness of Barney, but they also stare (often
like their adult guardians!) overwhelmed and entranced at “Jurassic
Park” or the skeletal images mounted in museum exhibits, or the
growing number of documentary offerings. “Tyrannosaurus Sue” is just
the latest example of our romance with these extinct creatures. The
fossil is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of
paleontology, since so much of the beast’s skeletal remains were found
intact. The remains were first sighted by a free-lance fossil enthusiast,
Sue Hendrickson, who discovered them in the hills of South Dakota.
Sue’s fate -- the sex of the dinosaur remains undetermined, but the
moniker has stuck -- reads like an adventure novel. After years of
careful reconstruction, and a prolonged legal skirmish over who
rightfully owned the remains, Sue ended up with a permanent home at
the Field Museum in Chicago, gratis a partnership between the
museum and other cultural icons, McDonalds and Disney. Sue, once a
carnivore in her own world, is now bait and lure in a consumption
battle millions of years later for attracting worshippers, and selling
everything from Big Macs to movie tickets.
Since “Jurassic Park,” dinosaurs have become even bigger.
Museums, once dusty cathedrals for the enthronement of skeletal
remains (complimented by stodgy, if cautiously presented dioramas
with scratch narration at the hit of a button) have had to go high tech.
Today’s public, especially youngsters, demand dinosaur exhibitions
with IMAX films, moving models and full-sized recreations. The 1950s
fare of a water buffalo standing in a swamp, or some misty scene
populated with an occasion Brachiosaurus has given way to enormous
murals of a menacing T-Rex. We can even hear the dinosaurs, or at
least what the best paleontologists tell us they probably sounded like,
based on evidence from skulls and other fossil record. We devour
speculation about dinosaur family life, their gender wars and
interactions with others in their species. There are suggestions that in
the distant world of the dinosaurs, for instance, it was the female
T-Rex that was larger and more belligerent than her male counterpart.
In the Discovery Channel special, “Walking With Dinosaurs,” the
smaller male kills an aging Torosaurus as a mating offering for a more
physically imposing female T-Rex. After a brief series of couplings, the
male is “edgy” and she looses interest, and eventually chases off the
successful (if ephemeral) suitor.