Dinosaur Aesthetics
on an enduring fascination
The most popular exhibits in any natural history museum are, without doubt, the dinosaurs. These creatures' popularity grows each year, partly because of the recent resurgence of dinosaur movies, but also because a skeleton of a full-sized tyrannosaurus rex still has the ability, even 65 million years after its death, to chill us to the bone.
Ray Harryhausen, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life
While writing the previous post on the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, my mind returned again and again to a more general question. Why do dinosaurs have such a hold on our imaginations? Why do they so fascinate us from such a young age?
This post will attempt to answer that question.
For an illustration of just how much dinosaurs pervade our culture, you need only to visit the toy aisle(s) at your local big box store. Think of any children’s product, anything that a child could potentially wear or eat or use or play with — I guarantee that you can buy it in the shape of a dinosaur, or at least with the image of a dinosaur on it. I was certainly not the only child in love with dinosaurs. The ‘dinomania’ catalyzed by the success of Jurassic Park (1993) shows no sign of slowing down more than thirty years later.
It’s important to note that, although dinosaurs do appear to cast a particularly strong spell on children, they also play symbolic roles in our adult lives — and not just for paleontologists or museum curators.
Dinosaurs have probably overtaken the ruined statue of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” as the modern symbol of fallen greatness, of how everything ends and how the passing of time and changing of circumstances can dethrone any king.
In everyday life, this symbol has a become a cliche, with ‘dinosaur’ referring to anything outdated or perceived to be in decline. (As mentioned in the previous post, Victorian satirists were already calling reactionary politicians dinosaurs in the 1850s.) This truly stale cliche lives on, as seen in the following selection of headlines from this year:
China’s ‘Dinosaur’ State-Owned Enterprises Make a Green Pivot (Financial Times)
Forcing Workers Back to the Office Is 'Dinosaur Management' (Business Insider)
Is the Tasting Menu Going the Way of the Dinosaur? (InsideHook)
Google Was Silicon Valley’s Vanguard of Cool. Now It’s a Dinosaur. (Business Insider)
With Macy’s Closing 150 Locations, Is the Department Store Going the Way of the Dinosaur? (MarketWatch)
Healing Dinosaurs: Why Simply Trying Harder Isn’t Going To Fix Reality (Forbes)
While researching this post, I’ve come across no fewer than five LinkedIn posts that use the dinosaur’s extinction and the subsequent rise of mammals as a metaphor for businesses’ need to adapt to new market conditions.
This provides one possible, partial explanation for dinosaurs’ cultural cachet: the enduring metaphorical power of this story, which is both scientific fact and a kind of mythic ultimate origin of the human race. In the popular, mythicized version, dinosaurs are the complete opposites of our distant ancestors: gigantic, cold-blooded, sluggish, inflexible, stupid past-their prime kings versus small, warm-blooded, quick, adaptable, increasingly intelligent inheritors of the earth. This David and Goliath contrast serves as both the perfect introduction to narratives of human evolution as the triumph of brain over brawn and, as we’ve seen, as an easily digestible fable about the importance of adapting to new situations. And dinosaurs, defined in this fable as the polar opposites of the small mammals that would eventually evolve in humans, acquire a fascination through their utter otherness.
Another, perhaps even stronger example of dinosaurs’ metaphorical power comes from Japan.
Less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a team of filmmakers at Toho Studios sought to create a movie monster that would embody Japanese fears of nuclear warfare. In the words of producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, “the theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb.” They combined aspects of several dinosaurs — notably Tyrannosaurus Rex’s overall shape and Stegosaurus’s bony back plates — to create Godzilla, a dinosaur mutated into an unstoppable monster by nuclear radiation. 70 years and 38 films later, Godzilla lives on, not only as a box office attraction and quintessential movie monster, but as a character who can embody Japan itself, the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster and other themes as well as the terror of the bomb.
These are only two examples of how, far from being merely a group of reptiles that died out about 65 million years ago, dinosaurs have endured as powerful metaphors for our present-day hopes and fears. The rest of this post will identify three major reasons why.
First, dinosaurs resonate with myths that predate paleontology by thousands of years, specifically myths of dragons.
My own ongoing Substack series Necessary Monsters takes its title from a quote about dragons in Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. In his introduction to this modern bestiary, Borges notes that while most mythical creatures — specifically the mix-and-match assemblages of various human and animal parts — have fallen into obscurity, a handful remain truly archetypal. “We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe,” he writes
but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas.
From Japan to Wales, and in virtually every culture in between, dragons found a mythological habitat; in our post-mythical age, they have found a successful second career in fantasy novels, blockbuster films, video games and theme park attractions. (Dinosaur fossils themselves may have played a role in the origin of dragon myths. For instance, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine have a long history of grinding ‘dragon bones’ into a powder intended to cure various ailments.)
As I’ve discussed previously, the transition between those two states occurred in early modern Europe, when the rise of scientific zoology and the mapping of formerly ‘blank’ spaces on the map simply left no more room for dragons. (Linnaeus himself debunked at least one supposed dragon carcass.) Banished from the animal kingdom, and with no distant, unexplored lands to move to (in the public imagination), dragons took refuge in the world of acknowledged fiction. For the medieval European, dragons lived in the then-exotic and unknown lands of India and Ethiopia; for us, they live in Middle Earth or Westeros.
But then, in an increasingly rational and scientific world, practitioners of the young science called paleontology began digging up the bones of creatures bearing striking resemblances to the dragons and sea serpents of myth. Unlike the fairly transparent early modern dragon hoaxes, which were assembled from the bones of a variety of animals, dinosaur fossils were not discredited but confirmed by the new science of paleontology.
The first major reason for our fascination with dinosaurs, then, is that, of all the animals that have ever inhabited this planet, they come closest to the dragon archetype haunting our collective unconscious.
Second, dinosaurs are sublime, in the Romantic sense of that word, in three distinct ways. I will take my definition from the 18th century Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, who codified the term in his 1757 book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In Burke’s words,
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.
Awe-inspiring is probably the best modern equivalent of sublime in the Burkean sense.
The first and most obvious aspect of dinosaurs’ sublimity is their sheer size. “Greatness of dimension,” Burke writes, “is a powerful cause of the sublime.” Sauropods — a clade of dinosaurs whose star members include the Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus — were the largest and heaviest land animals in the history of the earth. Similarly, either T. Rex or one of its fellow theropods was the all-time largest land predator.
With the possible exception of a mounted blue whale skeleton, as at London’s Natural History Museum, dinosaurs are simply the largest and most imposing parts of any museum. This by itself would make them interesting, as superlatives — the largest, longest, fastest, oldest, and so forth — always intrigue us.
Second, dinosaurs were not just gigantic but potentially dangerous, which adds to their sublimity.
“Terror,” Burke writes, “is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.” In a memorable passage, he describes potentially dangerous wild animals as sources of sublime terror; this terror, he writes, “comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros.”
The T. Rex skeleton at the museum, of course, represents a significantly larger and more fearsome predator than a lion or tiger. In the words of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen I quoted at the beginning of this post, encountering that skeleton and imagining that creature in its terrifying prime remains a potentially bone-chilling experience. And the Tyrannosaurus is only the most iconic example of just how dangerous dinosaurs must have been.
Jurassic Park, for instance, made the Velociraptor a compelling movie monster in its own right, with the danger coming not from pure size and ferocity but from intelligence and wolf-like pack behavior. Even herbivorous dinosaurs could pose many dangers to human beings in a Jurassic Park-type scenario: horns, spiked tails, the stomping feet of thundering herds, the crushing weight of a gigantic body.
The third and final sublime aspect of dinosaurs is the sheer amount of time that separates us from them. “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime” and this would seem to apply to the ‘fourth dimension’ as well as to the first three. While Burke himself never analyzes the potential sublimity of truly coming into contact with a seemingly infinite stretch of time, the British Romantics who followed him explored this idea in poetry and visual art.
For instance, the Romantic painter John Constable displayed his famous watercolor of Stonehenge at 1836 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition alongside this verbal description of its effect on his imagination:
The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period.
If an encounter with Stonehenge — perhaps 4,500 years old — can send a Romantic mind on a descent into the obscure depths of human prehistory, then an encounter with the fossil of a creature that died 150 million years ago could truly begin an imaginative descent through the depths of time into a primordial abyss.
Indeed, Crystal Palace Dinosaurs sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins uses this exact image when describing his artistic goals. His life-sized reconstructions of prehistoric animals, he writes, represent the “revivifying of the ancient world,” an attempt to bring dinosaurs “up from the abyss of time and from the depths of the earth.”
Dinosaurs, then, give us not one but three encounters with the sublime. The massive scale of the largest dinosaurs gives us a visceral sense of our own comparative smallness. An encounter with a fossilized T. Rex, the apex predator’s apex predator and perhaps the ultimate embodiment of “nature red in tooth and claw,” is an encounter with the sheer violence of the natural world: the world of death and predation that our technologies shield us from. And the millions of years between us and the dinosaurs puts the brevity of not just our own lives but of all of human history into a cosmic perspective.
Finally, the simple fact that no human has ever seen a living dinosaur creates tremendous room for the imagination.
An artistic representation of a horse or a dog or indeed of a human being is to some extent limited by our previous experiences with these animals and with our fellow human beings. We know (savoir and connaitre) hundreds if not thousands of things about dogs, for instance, from their walking gaits to the sounds of their barks to their general behavior. Except in a very stylized work, a painted dog that just doesn’t look like a dog or an animated dog that does not move or behave like one can and will break our suspension of disbelief.
Indeed, this is precisely what the term uncanny valley refers to — the sense of wrongness that a very imperfectly represented human can give by conflicting with what we know (whether consciously or unconsciously) about how other humans move, emote and behave.
Dinosaurs offer fewer limitations to the prospective artist because we simply know so much less about them. We have no real-life experience with dinosaurs that a representation of a dinosaur could fail to live up to
Unlike living animals, dinosaurs are only known to us by their fossils, footprints and other traces. Any visualization of any dinosaur is necessarily an artistic interpretation, involving best guesses about scale texture, coloration, posture and other major physical details; bones, teeth and a handful of fossilized skin or feather samples can only tell paleontologists so much. Questions about what dinosaurs might have sounded like or how they moved or behaved have even muddier answers — and consequently more room for the writer’s or artist’s or filmmaker’s or sound designer’s imagination.
The best illustration of this comes from film history; dinosaurs have been at the forefront of not one, not two but five turning points in the history of cinema, catalyzing the development of new animation and visual effects techniques.
In 1913, years before the screen debuts of Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit or even Felix the Cat, newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay created his third animated short film, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), starring the very first dinosaur in film history. Originally part of McCay’s vaudeville act, Gertie brought animated cartoons into mainstream American culture, inspiring a generation of animators — including Walt Disney and the Fleischer Brothers — who would build an animation industry in the silent era.
One year after the release of Gertie the Dinosaur, Willis O’Brien made his first film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, using stop-motion animation: the onscreen illusion of life via frame-by-frame manipulation of models. This six minute-long short began that would soon lead to larger budgets and more ambitious projects. O’Brien’s pioneering special effects work on The Lost World (1925) and especially its follow-up King Kong (1933) set the gold standard for both cinematic dinosaurs and special effects-driven Hollywood blockbusters.
In the late 1930s, after taking animated cartoons to unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success (and laying the foundations for a global merchandising empire), Walt Disney and his army of animators embarked on their most ambitious film ever, Fantasia (1940). One segment of the film, a loose adaptation of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, features both dinosaurs in their prime and their eventual extinction, most memorably a fight to the death between a T. Rex and a Stegosaurus. While the film underperformed in theaters and continues to divide audiences, it did prove that animation could be something very different than fairy tales or slapstick.
In 1954, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, actors/stuntmen Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka donned a latex and rubber suit to play Godzilla in the giant monster’s first screen appearance. As Godzilla, Nakajima and Tezuka demolished a painstakingly built miniature Tokyo, in the process creating both a new genre of Japanese cinema and a global cultural icon.
About forty years after Godzilla’s debut, the CGI visual spectacle of Jurassic Park (1993) attracted the recording-breaking that made it the all-time box office champion before Titanic (1997). The success of its computer animation has, for better or worse, transformed Hollywood filmmaking; in the words of film critic Tom Shone, “in its way, Jurassic Park heralded a revolution in movies as profound as the coming of sound in 1927.”
The reoccurring role of dinosaurs in the history of visual effects suggests that they offer a unique and uniquely stimulating artistic challenge.
This is further illustrated by the variety of roles dinosaurs play in the aforementioned films. While some (Godzilla, velociraptors, Tyrannosaurs in King Kong, Fantasia, and Jurassic Park) are monsters, intended to terrify the audience, many are not.
Gertie, the very first movie dinosaur, is a somewhat ditzy, comedically clumsy gentle giant. The sick Triceratops in an early Jurassic Park scene is so sympathetic that the scene becomes a save the cat moment for Laura Dern’s Dr. Sattler.
Disney’s Stegosaurus has a certain pathos, as almost a reptilian equivalent of the sacrificial victim in Stravinsky’s original ballet: a frightened animal in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful fight for its life. Before that life-or-death battle, Fantasia offers what might be called a slice of dinosaur life that follows various dinosaur species in the quotidian activities of eating, drinking, digging nests, hatching from eggs and keeping a wary eye on their surroundings. The tragedy of the following extinction sequence, which depicts dinosaurs collapsing of thirst and exhaustion on a futile march through a barren landscape, makes the viewer feel a pang of sympathy even for the dying Tyrannosaurus.
And Godzilla himself transformed from a killing machine — an embodiment of the atomic bomb — into a child-friendly hero, earth’s defender against alien invaders.
Dinosaurs, then, catalyze the imagination because they lived in the distant past and because of the limits of what we can know about them. These limits create room for creativity: the challenge of creating a whole from fragments. They have inspired depictions using various filmmaking techniques (hand-drawn animation, stop-motion, men in suits, CGI) casting dinosaurs in various roles (monster, hero, tragic victim, comic relief, sympathetic animal). A dinosaur film is simply not as limited by the demands of verisimilitude as most other kinds of films, allowing animators and special effects artists to take flight like an Archaeopteryx.
To sum up, dinosaurs make at least three powerful appeals to the imagination, through their embodiment of the dragon archetype, their sublimity, and the fragmentary nature of our knowledge about them, which creates gaps for the imagination to fill.
Dinosaurs have a special, perhaps unique place in our imaginations because they offer a unique combination of what makes fact imaginatively appealing and what makes myth imaginatively appealing.
As real animals studied by scientists, dinosaurs appeal to our curiosity about the world around us and to our pure desire to simply know more information. The division of dinosaurs into two main groups (Saurischian and Ornithischian) combined with further subdivisions into various families, subfamilies, clades and species appeals to the classifying, taxonomy-creating parts of our brains, to the intellectual pleasure of mapping out the connections between distinct but related entities. The fact that dinosaurs represent some of the extremes of life on earth, such as sauropods as the largest land animals, appeals to the same fascination as the Guiness World Records. And, as animals from the earth’s distant past, dinosaurs can — to a greater extent than even the most ancient human artifact — provoke reflection on the immensity of time and on our relatively small place in the earth’s history.
On the other hand, the extinction of the dinosaurs has become fable as well as natural history — a fable about both what makes us human and about good business strategy. The gaps in our knowledge about dinosaurs gives them something of the malleability of mythical creatures — something of their openness to interpretation and reinterpretation, which catalyzes creativity. These gaps and the millions of years separating us from them give dinosaurs a somewhat otherworldly quality, an unmistakable flavor of the remote depths of time. For young J.R.R. Tolkien, “the dragon had the trademark Of Faërie written plain upon him;” for us, dinosaurs are stamped with the trademark Of Prehistory or Of Deep Time. As mythicized creatures, they can speak to our hopes and fears, including fears of nuclear warfare, climate change, and the potential extinction of our own species. And finally, as a family of creatures with very distinctive, if not archetypal appearances and behaviors, dinosaurs have the appeal not just of a taxonomy but also of a bestiary.
In short, it’s hard to imagine a creature better positioned to become an object of fascination for us. Dinosaurs died out millions of years ago but have had quite an afterlife and will likely survive as powerful symbols for many years to come.
A tad bit long, I like your style though. Since you mentioned Tolkien, it'd be interesting to delve deeper into Dinosaurs as psychosybolic archetypes (dragons?). I wonder what would happen if any earlier civilization had found some dinosaurs bones..
Great post. I only wish it was shorter.