{"id":129645,"date":"2018-09-28T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T13:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129645"},"modified":"2018-09-28T12:50:58","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T16:50:58","slug":"the-surprising-history-and-future-of-dinosaurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/28\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-dinosaurs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising History (and Future) of Dinosaurs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Heinrich Harder, Pteranodon<\/em>. Reconstructed by Hans Jochen Ihle, 1982.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Most dinosaurs are dusted off as fragmentary skeletons. Paleontologists like Stephen Brusatte, author of the recent book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs<\/a>, say they are \u201cscrappy.\u201d But those few bones can be enough to describe a new species, and on average, a new species is discovered every week. We are in the golden age of paleontology. \u201cWe\u2019re up to around fifteen hundred,\u201d Brusatte told me by phone in August. About a third were found in the last decade, with some, like Yi qi in 2015, \u201cgoing viral and then vanishing from the news cycle.\u201d Yi qi was pigeon-sized; a single specimen was located in northern China. It had feathers, like many dinosaurs, but also fleshy wings, like a bat. \u201cAre you sure Yi qi\u2019s not a Pok\u00e9mon?\u201d I asked. \u201cIt would make an adorable Pok\u00e9mon,\u201d he said. \u201cVery licensable.\u201d Unfortunately, the reference echoes an insult that Brusatte and his discipline cannot forget: in 1988, the Noble Prize\u2013winning physicist Luis Alvarez told a New York Times<\/em> reporter that paleontologists were \u201cmore like stamp collectors\u201d than \u201cgood scientists.\u201d Brusatte laughed. \u201cIt\u2019s not about finding them,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about finding out. The more dinosaurs and other fossils we can study, the more we learn about what\u2019s happened on Earth, and what might happen.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story of dinosaurs fascinates most children\u2014you probably think you remember the outline. The Mesozoic era saw the periods Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The first humble dinosaurs appeared approximately two hundred and forty million years ago, in the Late Triassic. Their ancestors were only as big as house cats. Pangea, meanwhile, had begun \u201cto unzip down its middle,\u201d as Brusatte writes. Continents \u201cbleed lava\u201d when they rend, and volcanoes resulted from the gnarliest of cracks, called fissure vents. Over the course of six hundred thousand years, in pulses, the rift zone threw up orange-red curtains \u201cfrom hell.\u201d Gases rode up with the flow and warmed the globe to the degree of an extinction event in which thirty percent of all species faded out. The continents continued to drift in an \u201cancient divorce,\u201d and with thin competition from other vertebrates, dinosaurs diversified in wild shapes and sizes. By the mid-Jurassic, they were everywhere. They ruled.<\/p>\n

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Extinct Animals<\/em>, after Philip Henry Delamotte, 1854.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Then, sixty-six million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous, they quite suddenly disappeared. North of seventy percent of species were lost in the fifth mass extinction. Over the years, bunk theories about what damned the dinosaurs suggested cataracts and an out-of-control appetite for each other\u2019s eggs, but scientists also considered an extraterrestrial kill shot\u2014perhaps a comet. Maybe an asteroid. In 1980, Alvarez, the physicist who would pan paleontologists, and his son Walter, a geologist, identified a spike of the rare platinum-like metal iridium in the stratum that dates to the die-off: the smoking gun. Next, a crater with a one hundred and ten\u2013mile diameter was observed beneath the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula: the bullet hole.<\/p>\n

The impact of the asteroid carried the force of a billion A-bombs. It loosed nightmares. The ground morphed \u201cinto a trampoline\u201d that bounced even the heaviest dinosaurs \u201cseveral feet off the ground.\u201d The sky reddened and rained hot glass. Fire swept the forests. Clouds spun into sooty tornados. Tsunamis reared at twice the height of skyscrapers. Volcanos hemorrhaged\u2014and then the heavens blackened and a worldwide winter set in for up to a few thousand years. When the sun finally streamed on the post-apocalyptic planet, the age of dinosaurs had concluded. That is how most everyone thinks it went. But Gerta Keller, a paleontologist tenured at Princeton, and a splinter of others, believe it was not an asteroid in Mexico but volcanic fissures in India. When I asked Brusatte, a former student of Walter Alvarez, about the alternate theory, he dismissed it. \u201cI just stopped myself from likening it to climate change denial, because climate change denial is insidious and political,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cThe data\u2014to support Keller\u2019s theory\u2014isn\u2019t there, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

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From Dinosaurs by Design<\/em> (1992).<\/p><\/div>\n

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I sort of did. I had attended a Pentecostal prep school in Florida which taught that man walked with dinosaurs. \u201cBehold now behemoth, which I made with thee,\u201d Job 40:15 begins. The animal \u201cmoveth his tail like a cedar,\u201d scripture continues. \u201cHis bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.\u201d Dinosaurs were among the original beasts in the Garden of Eden, and that meant Noah would have dutifully brought them on his ark\u2014in egg form (how he knew which eggs were male and female was never explained, of course). We\u2019d had a visit from Duane Gish, a notorious Young Earth creationist with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Berkeley. The Gish Gallop,\u00a0the tactic<\/a> by which a debater overwhelms their opponent with verbose, zig-zagging untruths, is named after him. When he claimed a scientific team was out looking for the Loch Ness Monster, part of a surviving shoal of elasmosaurs, I was spellbound. After assembly, I bought Gish\u2019s children\u2019s book on the subject, Dinosaurs by Design<\/em>. I loved the book too much to ever junk it later on. Among other gems, the book contains an illustration of cowboys roping pterodactyls in the American West. It seems to me now a fabulous reflection of our country\u2019s brand. It also speaks to our struggle to live with the ramifications of the fact that the planet is very old and we humans are very new.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>

Ideal Landscape of Cretaceous Europe<\/em>, unknown, c. 1886.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Around 300 BC, the historian Chang Qu wrote of \u201cdragon bones\u201d found in Sichuan. His is the first record of dinosaur bones in human hands. In 1676, a naturalist named Robert Plot logged part of a thighbone from Oxfordshire with \u201cdimensions, and a weight, so much exceeding the ordinary course of nature\u201d that \u201cit will be hard to find an Animal proportionable to it, both Horses and Oxen falling much short of it.\u201d Plot included drawings, another first. He credited the femur to a giant the likes of Goliath or the big brute in the Cornish fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk\u2014but the thing was a megalosaur.<\/p>\n

Charles Dickens\u2019s part-time narrator of Bleak House<\/em> made the first mention of dinosaurs in fiction in 1852, moaning: \u201cImplacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.\u201d At a conference a decade earlier, Dickens\u2019s friend, the Victorian anatomist Richard Owen, first bannered them\u2014Megalosaurus together with Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus\u2014under the taxon Dinosauria. It meant \u201cterrible reptile.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>

Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyorov, Tarbosaurus and Armored Dinosaur<\/em>, c. 1955<\/p><\/div>\n

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Following the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, its famed glass expo building was converted into the world\u2019s first theme park for mass entertainment. Among the draws on the two-hundred-acre grounds was a prehistoric swamp with dinosaurs created from tiles, bricks, and cement: the first full-scale models. On New Year\u2019s Eve, 1853, as a stunt before the June opening, Owen hosted members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science inside the mold for the iguanodont. A chandelier glinted above curried rabbit while Owen sat in the brain area of \u201cthe jolly old beast\u201d\u2014at the head of the table\u2014and the men toasted the dinosaurs and H.M. Punch\u00a0<\/em>magazine ran their story with the headline\u00a0\u201cFun in a Fossil.\u201d The finished menagerie caused the first wave of dinomania; park goers could score figurines of dinosaurs in what may have been the world\u2019s first gift shop. Later, the Crystal Palace would burn. \u201cThis is the end of an age,\u201d Churchill pronounced when he heard. But in a twist of fate, the dinosaur sculptures survived. Some were restored for visitors in the aughts\u2014others still languish in disrepair<\/a>, awaiting sufficient funds. After the theme park opened, in 1954, Charles Darwin dedicated himself to drafting On the Origin of Species<\/em>. Though torn between faith and science, and allergic to public fights, he published in 1859. The initial run sold out in one day. Owen spat on Darwin\u2019s notion of natural selection. \u201cBelieve me,\u201d Darwin signed off in a letter to Owen that year. Modern answers to antique questions were stacking up, and while he did not train his pen on dinosaurs, they were already a once-upon-a-time plot with serious reverb.<\/p>\n

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Alexander Mikhailovich Belashov, Detail from Tree of Life<\/em>, 1984.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The bones of dinosaurs mineralized and turned to stone, as fossils. Technology, such as animation software and CAT scans, has taught us much about the way they lived and moved. Dinosaurs had bird-style lungs, which involved a network of air sacs extracting oxygen during both inhalation and exhalation, and which supported and lightened their frames. More likely than not they were warm-blooded, like birds, and \u201cundoubtedly much more birdlike than reptilelike,\u201d Brusatte stressed. Probably most had some kind of feather. The feathers could be colorful: ginger, iridescent. In August, researchers studying flowers trapped in amber announced those plants were making the same compounds as those used today in modern fragrances. When they speculated the dinosaurs were attracted to them, The Cut<\/em> ran \u201cThe 6 Best Perfumes for Dinosaurs\u201d<\/a>: La Tulipe by Byredo for Stegosaurus, Santal 33 by Le Labo for Triceratops, classed as \u201cthe basic bitches of dinosaurs.\u201d I emailed Brusatte: \u201cIs that accurate?\u201d He replied: \u201cOh God, that one is above my pay grade.\u201d But he had referred to the keystone herbivores as \u201cthe cows of the Cretaceous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in 1898, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie spotted news in the paper: \u201cMost Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West.\u201d He clipped the item and posted it and a cheque for ten thousand dollars to the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, with a note: \u201cMy Lord\u2014can\u2019t you buy this for Pittsburgh\u2014try.\u201d By 1901, the Carnegie Museum had named Diplodocus carnegii<\/em>, a sauropod with a horizon-long neck and tail. Soon, Carnegie began to gift casts to national museums in Latin America and Europe, making the dinosaur, the museum points out, \u201cthe first that millions of people ever saw.\u201d The inaugural copy went on view ahead of the original, in 1905 at the British Natural History Museum, where it was quickly given a pet name: Dippy.<\/p>\n

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Dippy, the diplodocus, in London.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Like other national history museums, Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9um national d\u2019Histoire naturelle, established in 1635, grew out of the continental Wunderkammer. Their Paleontological Gallery opened around when Carnegie\u2019s dinosaur was being excavated, and, in 1908, the hall received its own Dippy. That day in June, French president Armand Falli\u00e8res dedicated the mount in front of the public and scientific community; the sight of the more than sixty-five-foot dinosaur, though, was overpowering. \u201cQuelle queue<\/em>! Quelle queue<\/em>!\u201d (\u201cWhat a tail! What a tail!\u201d) Falli\u00e8res managed. \u201cDiplodoquoi<\/em> \u2026 Diplodocoquus<\/em> \u2026 \u201d He stammered. Anyway, Dippy\u2019s star turn was over seven years later. The Yanks produced T. rex.<\/p>\n

As Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom<\/em> screened across France this June, the museum welcomed Trix, a Tyrannosaurus rex who was my age, thirty, when she died sixty-seven million years ago. \u201cShe\u2019s very beautiful, but you only need five minutes,\u201d a Frenchman told me as he exited the show and I entered it. \u201cMinutes?\u201d I teased. Minutes were ridiculous in the scheme of eras and epochs\u2014as the museum copy inside impressed on readers: \u201cThe time that separates T. rex from human beings is only half that between T. rex and the earliest dinosaurs.\u201d Besides Trix, the sole figure in the hall was a statue of the father of paleontology, Georges Cuvier. The naturalist and zoologist had rejected transformisme<\/em>, later called \u00e9volution<\/em>, but came up with the concept of extinction in the midst of the French Revolution\u2014\u201cprobably not coincidentally,\u201d as Elizabeth Kolbert has remarked. Also, a fissure vent had erupted in Iceland for eight months in 1783-84, spewing enough poisonous gas to destroy French harvests, resulting in the food poverty that helped topple the ancien r\u00e9gime. Cuvier scrutinized such \u201crevolutions on the surface of the earth,\u201d and used the fossil record to prove catastrophism. Honor\u00e9 de Balzac asked, \u201cHave you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read the geological writings of Cuvier?\u201d<\/p>\n

About fifty of the tyrannosaurs have been recovered in western North America, in states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, plus the provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan. T. rex lorded over the dinosaurs in their final twenty million years. Stephen King\u2019s first horror story, composed when he was a boy, was an account of a town terrorized by a dinosaur, and while King was unavailable to confirm, surely that was a rex. The apex predator\u2019s X factors included a smart car\u2013sized head, banana-sized and -shaped claws, and puny-seeming arms that, in reality, were capable of holding a herbivore with a duckbill good and tight. They were brainy; their vision, hearing, and sense of smell, all sharp. They stalked on tiptoe. They were ambushers who hunted in packs. They had feathers. As teenagers, tyrannosaurs put on five pounds a day, reaching seven to eight tons. \u201cAnd they lived so hard,\u201d Brusatte writes, \u201cthat we have yet to find an individual that was more than thirty years old when it died.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trix stands thirteen feet tall. She is the color of toasted marshmallows and the texture of driftwood. She was posed in an open-mouthed lurch\u2014with her tail extended, for balance. Her mouth was open as if to swallow the info an au pair was feeding to her charge: \u201cTrix is about seventy-five percent complete. But another T. rex\u2014Sue\u2014is even closer!\u201d Ninety percent of Sue is all there. \u201cYou met in Chicago, do you remember?\u201d The caretaker asked the kid, who was standing with an iPhone in the zone the museum recommended for selfies. Sue is darker than Trix. She is more worn brown leather jacket. (\u201cFossils present with the quarks of whatever minerals took over the bone,\u201d Brusatte explained. \u201cOpalized fossils have come out of Australia<\/a>.\u201d) McDonald\u2019s and Disney got together in the nineties to buy Sue at auction for the Field Museum. She was put on display in 2000. I was twelve that summer, and I went to the Field. Where the uncertainty surrounding Y2K had filled me with dread about the future, the mystery of the past left me in awe.<\/p>\n

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Sue\u2019s skeleton.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s funny you should mention that,\u201d New Yorker<\/em> staffer Paige Williams said on a call, \u201cbecause Sue came together as part of a special Year 2000 consideration. Jack Daly, a McDonald\u2019s communications executive, thought a cast of Sue would make a great centerpiece for Year 2000 promotions. He told the press, \u2018I had been struck by something Bill Clinton had said about the millennium\u2014If you are interested in celebrating the future, try to honor the past.\u2019\u201d (Daly also viewed Sue as \u201ctimeless,\u201d something that would \u201clast forever.\u201d) Another tyrannosaur, the Asian version called Tarbosaurus bataar<\/em>, is at the center of Williams\u2019s true-crime saga, out this month. The Dinosaur Artist<\/a><\/em> is about a poached fossil and the folks\u2014paleontologists and commercial fossil hunters\u2014who try to protect and possess natural history. Her layering of science upon story is so crafted that the book itself could pass as a geological act. \u201cIt\u2019s real,\u201d Williams said. \u201cThese fossils help people connect to a past that otherwise is a bit unthinkable. There\u2019s a reason paleontologists and geologists have a word for it: deep time<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Paleoart<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(an XL book by TASCHEN), Zo\u00eb Lescaze assembles depictions of dinosaurs from 1830 up to 1990, before the digital age changed how they were conceived of and rendered. It includes murals, paintings, engravings, frescos, lithographs, and sculptures, like those made for Crystal Palace Park. When I showed the Dinosaurs by Design<\/em> illustration to Lescaze, she recalled parallels mapped by the art historian W. J. T. Mitchell between dinosaurs and cowboys: \u201cicons,\u201d \u201cbig and strong, but doomed to disappear, embodying both outsize power and obsolescence.\u201d She went on: \u201cTheir convergence, he believes, has to do with the history of paleontology in the United States, where the very mechanisms of westward\u00a0expansion that rendered lawless frontier life a thing of the past were also what enabled the excavation and transport of fossils.\u201d The scene oozes\u00a0fin-de-race\u00a0anxiety,\u00a0 in my opinion. \u201cIf prehistoric reptiles symbolize extinction,\u201d she reasoned, \u201cthen to lasso a pterosaur on horseback is to be the master of death.\u201d She considers such\u00a0images \u201coddly touching.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Taken together, the Williams, Brusatte, and Lescaze titles\u2014all published within the last year\u2014form the ultimate survey: an education consumable as entertainment. T. rex skeletons have always been articulated for audiences with that sense of double duty, and today the tradition is advanced by Sue\u2019s Twitter account<\/a>. Nearly forty-three thousand follow Sue for such bon mots as \u201cI\u2019m \u2018Tropical South Dakota\u2019 years old.\u201d She slavers over Jeff Goldblum, kvetches about the social-media grind, and edifies the masses\u2014as one devotee had it, \u201csue woke af yo.\u201d But she also relentlessly picks fights. (Specimen FMNH PR 2081 has been called an \u201capex troll.\u201d) \u201cTHIS JUST IN,\u201d she tweeted at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in August, \u201cSEA OTTERS ARE ADORABLE AND IMPOSSIBLY PHOTOGENIC AND YOU STILL CAN\u2019T LEVERAGE THAT AGAINST A DEAD (BUT SASSY) OSTRICH MONSTER.\u201d The aquarium fired back: \u201cjust in: the bones of a pre-extinct organism are more popular than a mission to inspire conservation of the Ocean, prolly bc big skulls with sharp teeth are less scary than introspection and fundamental changes in our society to prevent going the way of the murderchickens.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sentiment is catching. Last year, London\u2019s Natural History Museum replaced Dippy with a skeleton of a blue whale, an animal very nearly hunted to extinction in the sixties and now deemed more \u201crelevant.\u201d They named her \u201cHope.\u201d It was a controversial move. Brusatte appeared on live television with the marine biologist Helen Scales. He was meant to take Dippy\u2019s side, she was meant to take Hope\u2019s, but both told me they agreed on the newcomer. And yet, dinosaurs are unrivaled mementos, \u201cpicked up, looked at, and pondered over,\u201d as Williams put it. Such is the perspective from the Anthropocene: five major extinctions later, we\u2019re in a self-inflicted sixth. We don\u2019t generally think of our selves as living in deep time, and because of that Keller has said, a gradual doom like climate change does not really impress. Our lifespans are \u201cso short,\u201d added Brusatte, our attention spans are \u201cso fidgety\u201d that we are unable to appreciate temperature and sea-level upticks \u201cover even a few years.\u201d We worry about the immediate, like the doom that befell the dinosaurs. We worry that our home is due for a supervolcano blowup or an asteroid strike. Or that we will nuke ourselves.\u00a0Recently,\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0posted\u00a0a cartoon\u00a0of\u00a0Back to the Future<\/i>\u2019s Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd ensnared in the DeLorean between the teeth of a\u00a0T. rex. \u201cYeah, whatever,\u201d says Lloyd. \u201cAt least we got the hell out of 2018.\u201d Many humans retweeted it. So did Sue.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion\u00a0and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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