Since the coining of the word "dinosaur" in 1842, dinosaurs have served as a cornerstone of paleontology in popular culture. The non-avian dinosaurs featured in books, films, television programs, artwork, and various other pieces of media have been used for both education and entertainment. The depictions range from the realistic, as in the television documentaries from the 1990s into the first decades of the 21st century, to the fantastic, as in the monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s.
The growth in interest in dinosaurs since the dinosaur renaissance has been accompanied by depictions made by artists working with ideas at the forefront of dinosaur science, presenting lively dinosaurs and feathered dinosaurs as these concepts were first being considered. Cultural depictions of dinosaurs have been an important means of translating scientific discoveries to the public.
Cultural depictions have also created or reinforced misconceptions about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, such as inaccurately and anachronistically portraying a sort of "prehistoric world" where many kinds of extinct animals (from the Permian animal Dimetrodon to mammoths and cavemen) lived together, and dinosaurs lived lives of constant combat. Other misconceptions reinforced by cultural depictions came from a scientific consensus that has now been overturned, such as dinosaurs being slow and unintelligent, or the use of dinosaur to describe something that is maladapted or obsolete.
Depictions are necessarily conjectural, because petrification and other fossilization mechanisms do not preserve all details.
History of depictions
Early human history to 1900: Early depictions
The classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has proposed that the profusion of literary descriptions and imagery of the griffin in Greek and Roman literature and art beginning in the 7th century BC to the 3rd century AD were influenced by observations and travelers' accounts of fossilized beaked dinosaur skeletons found in the Turpan and Junggar basins and Gobi Desert. She noted that according to Aristeas, Sophocles, Herodotus, and other ancient writers, griffins were said to inhabit and lay eggs in nests on the ground in the lands beyond the Issedonian territory of the region surrounding the Altai Mountains. Tales of these griffins traveled from east to west along the silk routes. Mayor draws connections to Protoceratops, a frilled dinosaur and Psittacosaur fossils and dinosaur nests with eggs conspicuous in the Gobi, sharing features associated with griffins: sharp beaks, four legs, claws, similar size, large eyes (or eye sockets in the case of the fossils), and the neck frill of Protoceratops, with large open holes, argued as inspiring descriptions of the griffin's large ears or wings. The palaeontologist Mark Witton notes in his blog that Mayor's suggestion ignores pre-Mycenaean accounts, and has not found favour with archaeologists including N. Wyatt and T.F. Tartaron.Tartaron, T. F. (2014). Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Greek World: Culture Contact Issues and Theories. In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (pp. 1804–1821). Springer New York.Wyatt, N. (2009). Grasping the Griffin: Identifying and Characterizing the Griffin in Egyptian and West Semitic Tradition. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 1(1), 29–39. Many Near Eastern and Minoan artworks feature imaginary composite creatures, including quadrupeds with birds' heads but these were not called "griffins" and no writings link them to the strange beasts of Central Asia. There are no pre-Mycenaean or Minoan texts to relate bird-headed quadrupeds with classical griffins.
According to Mayor, Navajos used to hold ceremonies and make offerings to dinosaur tracks in Arizona. Tridactyl tracks were also featured as decorations on the costumes and rock art of the Hopi and Zuni, probably influenced by such dinosaur tracks.
The scientific study of dinosaurs began in 1820s England. In 1842, Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, which in his vision were elephantine reptiles. An ambitious promoter of his discoveries and theories, Owen was the driving force for the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures, the first large-scale public dinosaur reconstructions (1854). These sculptures, which can still be seen today, immortalized a very early stage in the perception of dinosaurs.Torrens, Hugh. "Politics and Paleontology". The Complete Dinosaur, 175–190.
The Crystal Palace sculptures were successful enough that Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen's collaborator, sold models of his sculptures and planned a second exhibition, Paleozoic Museum, for Central Park in Manhattan in the late 1860s; it was never completed due to the interference of local politics and "Boss" William Marcy Tweed.
In the same period, dinosaurs first appeared in popular literature, with a passing mention of an Owen-style Megalosaurus in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–1853)."London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable 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 Holborne Hill." From page 1 of Dickens, Charles J.H. (1852). Bleak House, Chapter I: In Chancery. London: Bradbury & Evans. However, depictions of dinosaurs were rare in the 19th century, possibly due to incomplete knowledge. Despite the well-publicized "Bone Wars" of the late 19th century between the American palaeontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, dinosaurs were not yet ingrained in culture. Marsh, although a pioneer of skeletal reconstructions, did not support putting mounted skeletons on display, and derided the Crystal Palace sculptures.Dodson, Peter. The Horned Dinosaurs, 74–75.
1900 to the 1930s: New media
As study caught up to the wealth of new material from western North America, and venues for depictions proliferated, dinosaurs gained in popularity. The paintings of Charles R. Knight were the first influential representations of these finds. Knight worked extensively with the American Museum of Natural History and its director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who wanted to use dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals to promote his museum and his ideas on evolution.
Knight's work, found in museums around the United States, helped popularize dinosaurs and influenced generations of paleoartists. His early work showing fighting "Laelaps" (=Dryptosaurus) depicted dinosaurs as much more lively than they would be presented for much of the 20th century. At the same time, improvements in casting allowed dinosaur skeletons to be reproduced and shipped across the world for display in far-flung museums, bringing them to the attention of a wider audience; Diplodocus was the first such dinosaur reproduced in this way.
Dinosaurs began appearing in films soon after the introduction of cinema, the first being the good-natured animated Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914. However, lovable dinosaurs were quickly replaced as moviemakers recognized the thrill of huge frightening monsters. D. W. Griffith in 1914's Brute Force provided the first example of a threatening cinematic dinosaur, a Ceratosaurus who menaced cavemen. This film enshrined the fiction that dinosaurs and early humans lived together, and set up the cliché that dinosaurs were bloodthirsty and attacked anything that moved.
The now-common trope of dinosaurs extant in isolated locations in today's world appeared at the same time, beginning with Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Lost World crossed into the movies in 1925, setting heights for special effects and attempts at scientific accuracy. It is unusual, even today, for attempting to portray dinosaurs as something other than monsters in constant combat.
The stop-motion techniques of Willis O'Brien went on to bring dinosaurs to life in the 1933 film King Kong, which merged the tropes of dinosaur combat and dinosaurs in a lost world. His protégé Ray Harryhausen would continue to refine this method, but most later dinosaurs movies until the advent of CGI would eschew such expensive effects for cheaper methods, such as humans in dinosaur suits and modern reptiles with dinosaur decorations, enlarged by cinematography. Dinosaur depictions diversified in the 1930s, spreading to newspaper comic strips in Alley Oop and to advertising for Sinclair Oil.
The 1930s to the 1970s: Moribund dinosaurs to renaissance
The Great Depression and World War II combined to sink the study of dinosaurs into a decades-long lull. Scientists considered dinosaurs a group of unrelated animalsBakker, Robert T. The Dinosaur Heresies, 447–449. that left no descendants, and dinosaurs were presented as stupid, slow, stuck in swamps, and doomed to extinction.Bakker, Robert T. The Dinosaur Heresies, 15–16. Scientific dinosaur artwork, primarily from Rudolph F. Zallinger and Zdeněk Burian, reflected and reinforced the conception of dinosaurs as slow and static (one artistic quirk that became commonplace in representations of Mesozoic landscapes, the presence of a volcano, was a hallmark of Zallinger's). From such ideas came the alternate use of "dinosaur" as something out of date."Definition of dinosaur" Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. Accessed 26 May 2007.
Films of the time typically used dinosaurs as monsters, with the added element of atomic fears in the early Cold War. Thus, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (Japanese release 1954; American release 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters!) portray monstrous dinosaur-like prehistoric reptiles that go on rampages after being awakened by atomic bomb tests. An alternative appears in Disney's animated Fantasia (1940) in its The Rite of Spring sequence, which attempted to portray dinosaurs with some scientific accuracy (although it has the common error of showing prehistoric animals from many different time periods living at the same time) and also in Karel Zeman's Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955; Cesta do pravěku), a Czechoslovak children's science fiction movie inspired by Zdeněk Burian's work.
In 1956, Oliver Butterworth authored a children's book, The Enormous Egg. The book and a movie adaptation televised in 1968 by the NBC Children's Theatre tell the story of a boy who finds an enormous egg laid by a hen that hatches a baby Triceratops. The dinosaur, named Uncle Beazley, becomes too big, so the boy brings him to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Beazley is first kept at the National Museum of Natural History, but is eventually transferred to the National Zoo's Elephant House because there is a law against stabling large animals in the District of Columbia.(1)
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(4) In the later part of the book, Uncle Beazley must be saved from a narrow-minded Senator who wants it destroyed. (Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the peak of his career at the time of writing.)
Dinosaurs gained a home in television in the 1960s animated sitcom The Flintstones, in another example of dinosaurs shown as coexisting with humans (for comedic effect in this case). Dinosaurs also entered comic books in this period in such series as Tor and Turok, Son of Stone, where prehistoric humans fought anachronistic dinosaurs. For those wanting more scientific accounts of dinosaurs, there were the first nontechnical dinosaur books. Ned Colbert's The Dinosaur Book (1945) was the first such book, and its status as the only such book for many years made Colbert an important figure for the coming generations of paleontologists and dinosaur enthusiasts.