The Curious Case of Francois Courvoisier

In the process of writing the post, The Genius of Jack Sheppard, back in 2011, I had to discard a section recounting a separate but interesting and somehow prevalent story.  If I had included it, the post would have wound up being way too long or I would have to have chopped out a lot of other stuff.  Therefore I decided to write a separate post for the material that I could not fit into the first.  For some reason I don't now recall, I never actually posted it.  Now, rather belatedly, hear it is.. .

Our story begins on the morning of 6 May 1840 at the London residence of retired MP Lord William Russell.  Maid-servant Sarah Manser was, as usual, the first to wake, at 6.30am.  She left the attic room she shared with the still slumbering cook and knocked on the valet’s door to wake him.   As Sarah descended the stairs to the back drawing room, all was quiet in the house.

When she got to the drawing room, she discovered Lord Russell’s writing desk in disarray, with drawers turned out and papers strew about.  Among them was a screwdriver from the butler’s pantry.  Going down to the ground floor, Sarah made a second unusual discovery; his lordship’s cloak lay a short distance from the street door.  On and around it were various items of gold and silverware from the house.  Opening the dining room door in order to go and pull back the shutters, Sarah saw the disarray in this room and knew the house must have been robbed in the night.  She went to the door of valet’s bedroom and called, ‘Courvoisier, do you know of anything being the matter last night?’

With a simple ‘No’, the door opened, revealing the 28 year old Francois Benjamin Courvoisier.  The Swiss valet-come-butler was fully dressed save for his topcoat.  No more than ten minutes had elapsed since Sarah first knocked on his door.  It had always taken Courvoisier between thirty and sixty minutes to dress.  The two servants made a brief search of the house until Manser urged that they should inform Lord Russell.  The valet entered the old man’s room first, crossing to open the shutters.  The light thrown from the large street-facing windows revealed Russell lying on his side and bloodstains on his pillow.  His throat had been cut.

On seeing this, Sarah screamed and fled the room.  She initially headed for her attic room to inform the cook, but decided instead to go rise the alarm in the street.  Servants from neighbouring households responded to the call and sent for the police, who occupied the house and began a thorough search of the property.  Over the next few days various officers found items and cash belonging to Lord Russell hidden in various places around the house, including the butler’s pantry.  They did not find any compelling evidence of a break-in, other than the debris littering the ground floor rooms.  Suspicion quickly fell on Courvoisier and he was arrested and incarcerated in Newgate Prison.

A media maelstrom quickly sprung up around the trial.  Aside from the obvious interest in such a grisly murder, Russell was uncle to the Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell.  To further complicate things, Courvoisier pleaded Not Guilty.  The trial lasted 3 days, with the defence pursuing the lack of conclusive evidence, as well as implying Manser was the guilty party.  All this was to little avail when during the trial several items from the house turned up at a French hotel where Courvoisier had previously worked.  Courvoisier refused to change his plea, but was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death.

So, you ask, where’s the connection with Jack Sheppard?  In the nineteenth century, just as in the eighteenth, there was a public fascination with condemned criminals, particularly if they had done something as shocking as murder a peer of the realm in his bed.  When Courvoisier gave his confession the papers rushed it into print.  Below is a transcript, taken from the Morning Post of 25 June 1840 and rendered as close as possible to the original printed version.

“After I had warmed his Lordship’s bed I went down stairs and waited about an hour, during which time I placed the different articles as they were found by the police.  I afterwards went to the dining room and took one of the knives from the side cupboard.  I then entered the bedroom and found him asleep.  I went to the side of the bed and drew the knife across his throat.  He appeared to die instantly.”

“FRANCOIS BENJAMIN COURVOISIER

“Prison of Newgate, June 23 1840

“This declaration was made before me this 23d of June, 1840 “William Evans, Sheriff”

This is how it appeared on broadsheets and in many newspapers.  Elsewhere, such as in the Morning Post, there was the following addendum.

The sheriff questioned [Courvoisier] a good deal on the acknowledgement that he had so long contemplated the murder as well as the robbery, and he persisted in stating the murder was premeditated, and not, as had previously been stated, the suggestion of despair at losing his character.  He declared and he wished the sheriff to let it be known to the world that the idea was first suggested to him by reading and seeing a performance of Jack Sheppard.

Enter William Harrison Ainsworth, friend of Charles Dickens and serial misreporter of English history.  Having essentially fabricated that the highwayman Dick Turpin rode from London to York in a single night in his first novel Rookwood, Ainsworth then turned his attention to John Sheppard.  When it was published in 1839, Jack Sheppard; a Romance was phenomenally successful, far outstripping Oliver Twist in terms of sales.  Among the historical alterations Ainsworth made in the book are moving much of the action from the narrow streets of central London to the new Victorian suburbs of the North West – Finchley, Willesden and Dollis Hill.  More significantly he added the brutal stabbing to death of Mrs Woods, the wife of Sheppard’s master, by one of his associates.

Biographies of Sheppard had appeared in print regularly for the past 112 years, but the implication in Courvoisier’s confession was that it was Ainsworth’s book that ‘inspired’ him, the reference to reading and seeing a performance referring to the many theatrical versions which were commissioned in 1839-40.  The stage was then set for social reformers and moralists to decry Jack Sheppard as a major cause of juvenile delinquency and crime, in an early incarnation of the debates on violence in film, comics and computer games.

Without getting into the wider debate on media influence here, let’s examine the facts relating to F.B. Courvoisier.  According to printed biographies, he had arrived in England five years previous to the murder.   At that time he was "wholly unacquainted" with the English language.  It seems unlikely he would have learnt enough in that time to devour novels, much less attend the theatre.  During this time he worked first as a waiter, then as a valet – not occupations that would have afforded much leisure time.  Also, the Morning Post article and the facts of the case indicate the murder was premeditated rather than a whim to recreate scenes from fiction.

Most significantly, nowhere in the available archival material does the mention of Jack Sheppard appear as a direct quote from Courvoisier.  In every instance it appears after the close, in the body of the article.  The only direct source for this connection is a 3 stanzas-long broadsheet poem that appeared shortly before Courvoisier’s execution.  This might indicate it was not entirely legitimate.  Ainsworth certainly went to some lengths to oppose this slur on his work, asserting in letters to a number of newspaper editors that Courvoisier had “declared he had neither read the work in question nor had made any such statement.”  It is possible that Ainsworth actually visited the condemned man in Newgate.  William Evans, the Sheriff of London and Middlesex countered this by writing his own letter supporting the original statement about the book by simply quoting said statement, which is like saying dogs can talk because I just said they can.  All this conjecture came to an end on 6 July when Lord Russell’s former butler was taken from Newgate to the Old Bailey and put to death.  The execution was reported the following day in the Morning Post, concluding

 “It appears that the work called “Jack Sheppard” has had, in the opinion of those who had the opportunity of observing the prisoner, nothing at all to do with the murder.”

However, the suggestion had caused enough concern in the right places that something had to be done.  The Lord Chamberlain, who had authority to veto the performance of any new plays, decided to refuse any performances of “Jack Sheppard”.  You might see this as an oppression of artistic and civil rights, but in practise it was one of the most lacklustre pieces of censorship in history.  For every play that was refused license, far more were overlooked or simply changed their titles and the names of key characters.  So for the next forty years, Jack Sheppard received such alias as Jack Idle, Thomas Idle, Dick Wastrell and Robert Chance whenever someone wished to dramatise the jail-breaker’s life (or at least Ainsworth’s take on it).  At one performance of a play called ‘OId London’, a member of the audience actually stood up and declared “why, if it isn’t Jack Sheppard!’  This was not, one suspects, the only time there was laughter at the censor’s expense.  By 1880 the Lord Chamberlain (probably a different individual) abandoned the policy and plays entitled "Jack Sheppard" were now permitted without any disguise.  Sheppard, the irrepressible jail-breaker was once again free.

The Genius of Jack Sheppard

 

This is John or ‘Jack’ Sheppard, born in Spitalfields, London on 4 March 1702.  Like most boys at this time, he was indentured as an apprentice to a craftsman, in this case a carpenter, named appropriately Mr. Woods.  Sheppard learnt his craft quickly and was soon idling; distracted by the various elicit enticements of London, particularly a prostitute named Elizabeth Lyon.  In order to supplement his trainee’s wages and pay for his new lifestyle, Sheppard, with help from his friends and brother, Thomas, turned to theft.

So far, this could be the story of hundreds of idle apprentices in the 1720s, but in 1723, he broke Lyon out of St Giles parish roundhouse (roughly where the Odeon Covent Garden now stands).  In February 1724 Sheppard was himself committed to the roundhouse and locked in a room on the top floor.  He cut a hole through the ceiling and climbed out onto the roof.  He got down to the ground, passed through the crowd that had gathered and got away. 

After this, Sheppard and Lyon were caught again and imprisoned in Clerkenwell New Prison.  Sheppard cut his way out of the barred window of their cell.  Making a rope from Lyon’s dress and the sheets from their bed; they climbed down into the yard of Bridewell Prison, which stood next door, before climbing over the 25 ft high gate to freedom.  From this point until the end of the year, Sheppard was the top news story in London.

In 1724 London had no police force; even the Bow Street Runners wouldn’t exist for another quarter of a century.  Aside from elderly watchmen and parish constables, the primary means for controlling crime was thief-takers.   These were private businessmen who, through contacts in the criminal underworld, arranged the return of stolen property to the original owners and also arrested suspected criminals, often informing against them.  By the 1720s, a man named Jonathan Wild had such a monopoly in the business that he adopted the title Thief-taker General of Britain and Ireland.  Egotism was hardly Wild’s only sin – his monopoly on ‘policing’ came from the fact that he was secretly in charge of London’s criminal gangs and essentially fencing stolen goods back to their owners for a fee.  His position as thief-taker allowed him to impeach any criminals who didn’t work for him (such as Sheppard) and let the law dispose of them at the gallows. Any of Wild’s own gang who stepped out of line were dealt with in a similar fashion.  Did I also mention that Wild was a bigamist, ran a brothel and had his predecessor arrested for homosexuality?

The robbery that Sheppard would be condemned for was of 118 yards of cloth and other goods to the value of not quite £50.  Sheppard was arrested, tried and sentenced to execution (the theft of goods worth more than a shilling was a capital crime, as was receiving stolen goods).  He was placed in the condemned hold of Newgate Prison.  With the aid of Lyon, he cut off one of the spikes that topped the gate into the hold, climbed over and then, disguised in a dress and bonnet, walked out of the prison.  He was recaptured about a week later and placed in the strongest room, known as the Castle.  On the evening of 15 October, he began his most remarkable escape.  With a nail, he picked the locks of his handcuff and then broke one of the links of the chain that ran between his leg irons and the floor.  He then broke a hole in the chimney breast, climbed up the chimney and, making another hole, emerged into the room above.  He broke the lock on the door, went to the prison chapel and picked the lock.  He broke through four more doors and climbed onto the roof of the prison, which spanned the street.  He then returned to his cell and retrieved his blankets.  Securing them to the side of the gatehouse, he climbed down onto the roofs of Newgate Street.  Climbing into the window of one of the houses, he crept down to street level and got away.

This escape secured Sheppard’s last stint at liberty as well as his lasting fame.  He was returned to Newgate two weeks later, loaded down with 300 lbs of chains and locks.  Despite a last minute attempt at liberation with a hidden penknife, Sheppard was taken to Tyburn on Monday 16 November 1724 and executed.  He was just 22 years old.

Following this, Wild’s power in the criminal underworld began to wane.  After a knife attack from one of his own men outside the Old Bailey courthouse, Wild was bed-ridden for several weeks.  Unable to maintain the service he had provided and with the press casting him as an ogre in his pursuit of Sheppard, doubts began to be cast on Wild’s business practises.  Then, in an outrageous move, Wild attempted to break one of his accomplices out of prison.  Wild was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate, where he attempted to continue his business.  He was tried on several accounts and eventually found guilty of receiving stolen goods.  He was executed on 24 May 1725, drugged with laudanum by himself and pelted with stones, dead animals and poo by the London mob.  That’s all 100% accu-rat.

Even before Sheppard died, likenesses and retellings of his life began to appear.  The official biographies of condemned criminals, known as The Ordinary’s Accounts, for 4 September 1724 includes ‘JOHN SHEPHERD, a notorious Thief and House Breaker (whose Life should have been inserted in this Paper, had he not made his narrow Escape from Death on Monday last’.  Sheppard’s escape from the condemned cell afforded the opportunity of a second account of his life, as well as ensuring an audience for it.  Three more lives of Sheppard appeared before the end of the year.

 

During his confinement in Newgate, Sheppard was visited by Sir James Thornhill, the royal painter to George I.  Although Thornhill’s original painting has not survived, a number of sketches and engravings remain (see above).  They show a youthful, somewhat androgynous face, dominated by wide, innocent eyes.  His large hands are a prominent feature of the portrait, as though Sheppard was an artist or architect.  He worked with his hands.

Twelve days after Sheppard’s execution, the first play based on his life, Harlequin Sheppard opened.  In 1728, a far more acclaimed play opened; John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.  The play is innately aware of the expanding cultural world it inhabited, making it one of the earliest post-structural works.   The play shared this awareness with its audience through references to a diverse range of cultural phenomena, such as accounts of condemned criminals.  In the characters of the highwayman Macheath and his rivalry with thief-taker Mr Peachum, the audience would have recognised Sheppard and Wild.  It did not end there either; works of fiction based on these two men’s lives would continue to appear for nearly three centuries. 

The genius of Jack Sheppard’s story is the many ways it can be reinterpreted.  In the hands of clergymen and moral guardians it served as a cautionary tale against the evils of alcohol, prostitutes and of breaking the bonds of apprenticeship.  Ballad-writers, playwrights, authors and directors over the centuries have delighted in what is an essentially exciting, romantic (with a big or little R) story.  Historians have taken it as an important social event in itself, or as an iris through which to explore Georgian London.  Sheppard has also been viewed as a libertine and an archetypal rebellious youth – James Dean in a frockcoat.  And in opposition to rebellion, naturally, is authority.  In the personage of Jonathan Wild, this authority is rife with hypocrisy, brutality and corruption.

As recently as 2009 the art installation/ film The Last Days of Jack Sheppard juxtaposed the jail-breaker’s exploits with the bankers and speculators who caused the South Sea Bubble (the first modern economic crisis, in 1720), as a barely veiled metaphor for the current world financial meltdown.  Sheppard’s story is also part of a long line of narratives, fictional and factual, in which the criminal is less villainous/ more reliable than those who claim to be upholding society’s values. 

None of this is to say John Sheppard was an unambiguous hero.  He was not.  He engaged in house breaking and theft.  He did not, despite what we might like to believe, rob from the rich to feed the poor.  Nor was he coerced into it.  He turned to crime to pay for vices that he could have rejected.  He was a genius of applied thinking, using the skills he learnt as an apprentice to enter and exit buildings almost at will.  Yet this logic seems to have deserted him when it came to fleeing the confines of London, which he only left for a week in his whole life.  On the other hand, his crimes were not violent, he was loyal to a fault and he confessed and regretted his transgressions.  So not an angel, but maybe an honest thief is preferably to a dishonest lawman.   In the dramatis personae of London in 1724, he comes out as the best and the most interesting of a bad bunch.  His story is full of thrills – it's standing on the narrow ramparts of Newgate in the moonlight, six stories above the street and halfway to freedom.  It’s breaking your lover out of jail, or being locked in with them.  It's the crooked thief-taker brought to the gallows by his own arrogance.  But there are also underlying resonances, indelible themes which will continue to resound whenever we live in a world where youth runs amok and authority is corrupt.

Would you like to know more?

Jack Sheppard on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sheppard

Jonathon Wild on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild

Jack Sheppard in the Newgate Calendar http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng173.htm

Isn’t it about time dinosaurs learnt how to behave?

You’ve never seen a dinosaur.  More specifically, you’ve never seen one without it first being tempered by human interpretation.  The species commonly considered as dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago at the end of the Mesozoic era, a period in Earth’s history spanning 250 million years.  Since the early nineteenth century when fossils of extinct marine and land reptiles began to be unearthed and studied, every image of them has been a reconstruction based on the physical evidence – fossilized bones, teeth, claws and feathers.  This process of reconstructing extinct animals from somewhat limited evidence inevitably requires a lot of input from the human imagination.  This raises some important questions of what these animals really looked like and what they really did.

In the mid nineteenth century artists rushed to illustrate the newly conceptualised dinosaur world for a public gripped by the original dino-mania.  The results, produced by the likes of John Martin (1789 – 1854) and Henry de la Beche (1796 – 1855) are certainly dramatic, but do not fare well in the light of hindsight.  Working from descriptions of incomplete fossil skeletons and with little knowledge of comparative anatomy, (applying the rules of how the bodies work and fit together in living animals to extinct ones), the images are embarrassingly inaccurate.  Famously, the first reconstructions of the herbivore Iguanodon produced an elephantine quadruped with a prominent nasal horn.  More significant however is that, with a typically Victorian sense of melodrama, the pictures show a nightmare world in which every animal is both eating and being eaten by another animal, like some murderous game of Twister.  There was no real attempt to represent realistic behaviour, just the desire to show these extinct creatures in the most sensational light.  The dinosaur world was portrayed as nature at its most ‘red in tooth and claw’.

Since this time the rate of discovery in the field of palaeontology has maintained a rapid pace, with the exception the period of the world wars.  New fossils constantly add to or over haul our understanding of dinosaurs.  In 1882, the first complete skeletons of Iguanodon were restored from finds in Bernissart, Belgium.  Unfortunately these reconstructions portrayed the animal as strictly bipedal, like a sort of reptilian kangaroo.  The horn was moved to its correct position on the forelimbs, but the arms were held in a permanent thumbs-up position, like a prehistoric Henry Winkler.

An even more significant find had been made twenty-one years earlier.  Discovered in a limestone quarry in 1860, Archaeopteryx was seized upon as clear evidence to support the theory of evolution.  With its mixture of dinosaur and bird characteristics, its smoking gun evidence that birds evolved from bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs could now be understood, not as a biological anomaly, but as part of the ongoing process of evolution leading to the modern world.  The idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds or that birds are dinosaurs or however you want to put it has only fairly recently established itself in popular culture, due in part to being rejected in 1926 by Danish palaeontologist Gerhard Heilmann.  As the bone beds of Africa and North America began to be excavated, the dinosaurs found seemed to illustrate how unlike these creatures were to living animals in their sheer size and arrays of horns and crests.  The popular image of dinosaurs became that of impossibly huge sluggish reptiles that dragged their heavy tails behind them and had tiny brains.  This view was applied to all well-known species of dinosaurs, forming a picture of a world in slow motion, whose inhabitants had probably succumbed to extinction through stupidity - if not stupidity, then definitely due to being inferior to warm-blooded mammals.

 In 1914, the animated Gertie the Dinosaur became the first film to introduce dinosaurs to cinema.   Never intended as science, the comical Gertie is a Diplodocus (or maybe Apatosaurus) who waddles towards camera, hoovering up whole trees and even throwing a woolly mammoth into the sea with a flick of her long neck.   For nearly 80 years movies would reinforce the view of dinosaurs as waddling, dim-witted giants and particularly violent ones at that, with carnivorous dinosaurs always there to fight humans, other dinosaurs and giant gorillas.  The stories and the limit of special effects meant that, generally speaking dinosaurs appeared in small numbers and with a preference for menacing, (i.e. eating) their human co-stars.  Once again the view is of dinosaurs as monsters, not animals acting out natural behaviours.

It was the late 1960s by the time this view was challenged.  In what has come to be known as the dinosaur renaissance, scientists began to reassess every aspect of dinosaurs, including anatomy, evolution and behaviour.  Perhaps the most significant new specie in this renaissance was a three metre long, lightly built carnivore with a sickle-shaped claw on the second toe of each foot.  First discovered in 1964, Deinonychus firmly re-established that birds originated from dinosaurs and showed that small carnivorous dinosaurs, (dromeosaurs), shared many features with birds, such as hollow bones and similar shaped bones in the pelvis and wrists.  It also implied that dinosaurs might have metabolisms closer to warm-blooded birds and mammals than cold-blooded reptiles.

The other remarkable thing about Deinonychus was that the evidence suggested it may have hunted in packs.  While herbivores like Stegosaurus or Diplodocus can get by with low intelligence, hunting in packs requires the ability to learn strategies, communicate and understand the pecking order.  It requires intelligence.  This meant that at least some dinosaurs were reasonably intelligent and therefore would have been behaviourally complex.

This sea change in thinking about dinosaurs inevitably took some time to reach popular cultural depictions of dinosaurs.  The film that made that breakthrough was of course Jurassic Park in 1993.  The film has plenty of scientific inaccuracies, some imported from the original Michael Crichton novel and some of its own doing.  Nonetheless, in general terms the dinosaurs are accurate and they look like real animals, due to the ground breaking computer-generated effects.  Less obvious, but equally important is the fact they sound like real animals.  Rather than a simplistic “pre-recorded roar#1”, the dinosaurs make distinct and varied noises, particularly the Velociraptors.  Jurassic Park also introduced into the mainstream the concept that it wasn’t just the giant dinosaurs that were exciting, smaller ones were could be as fascinating, arguably paving the way for more holistic depictions of Mesozoic wildlife.

The CGI used in Jurassic Park and in every effects movie since meant it was much easier to portray groups of dinosaurs – as Sam Neill intones, “They do move in herds.”  Unfortunately, from a behavioural standpoint, the film still errs on the side of monstrosity.   Fair enough, in a film with a remit of pure adventure.  Still, the predatory dinosaurs pursue the people with a murderous relentlessness, ignoring boundaries of territory and the abundance of dinosaur prey available.  Another trait common to carnivore dinosaurs, it would appear, was the habit of issuing a roar or snarl to warn their intended prey that they’re about to attack, thus increasing the quarry’s chances of survival.

In 1999, the logical next step in popular culture dino-mania occurred.  The BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs ambitiously attempted to make a wildlife documentary showing the lives of dinosaurs, focusing on them as living animals rather than extinct fossils.  This six part series, spanning the whole Mesozoic era showcased a range of species, including dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs and marine reptiles.  It may have been highly conjectural, but it examined a range of behaviour never seen before in dinosaurs, with them giving birth, eating, marking territory, pooing, farting and mating all over the show.  Walking with Dinosaurs remains a high-water mark in dinosaur documentaries.  Yet there is one small niggle, aside from Kenny Branagh’s “wooorld of the DIIINOOOSAAURS!” narration style.  The final episode, ‘Death of a Dynasty’ focuses on a female Tyrannosaurus rex and at times the mask of science seems to slip.  The T.rex spends a large portion of the time stomping around, knocking things over with its tail, roaring and spraying phlegm at the camera.  It’s as if the programme makers felt obliged to have this most famous of dinosaurs showboat for the audience.

In the wake of Walking with Dinosaurs has come a raft of imitations, often using bargain bucket effects.  These documentaries tend to focus on predatory dinosaurs and present them in the most melodramatic terms.  Particularly in the case of recent discoveries, there tends to be the assertion that this dinosaur was the most terrifying ever, as if amount of terror induced is a quantifiable attribute, (it isn’t).  Although these documentaries are based on actual paleontological research, often in conjunction with academic centres, it is the most dramatic, violent interpretation of the evidence that is presented.  Along with reconstructions that give the dinosaurs garish coloration and needle sharp teeth and claws, the preoccupation with hunting and fighting results in a CGI version of the early artworks of Martin and de le Beche – based on current thinking but designed to make the dinosaurs seem as terrible, strange and blood-thirsty as possible.

In the last couple of decades, museums got in on the act, using life-size animatronic puppetry to reconstruct dinosaurs in galleries where mounted skeletons and miniatures were once the closest visitors could come to ‘real’ dinosaurs.  While they may pull in the crowds, animatronics are rather ineffective in their ability to address issues of behaviour.  They can’t walk and so they tend to be limited to roaring and trashing about on the spot for hours on end.  Honestly, if a lion was seen doing that in a zoo, it would raise some pretty serious questions about its well-being.

We now know more about dinosaurs than at any time in history.  Fossil-hunting in previously untapped locations is turning up new species and new information on dinosaurs as a whole.  New technology is extracting new information from old finds.  Dinosaurs have an indelible prominence in popular culture, particularly with children.  Yet, in regards to what we expect dinosaurs to do, we haven’t moved so very far from those early depictions and those conga lines of biting, clawing, writhing reptiles.

There appears to be an underlying desire to view dinosaurs as terrifying, as monsters and there may be a cultural explanation.  If, in the thrashing animatronic T.rex and poorly rendered dromeosaurs we can still detect the dragons and sea monsters of legend, it is because they have had those qualities projected on to them.  If dinosaur remains inspired the stories of mythical beasts, as has been argued, then perhaps they have become stand-ins for creatures we generally accept did not exist.  They perform the cultural function of the monsters that excite and frighten, but are conveniently separated from use by a vast gulf of time.  Yet this is a potential cul-de-sac to our understanding dinosaurs as living animals.  Hunting and combat are always going to be the most immediately exciting elements of behaviour, but they make up quite a small proportion of an animal’s lifetime.  A lion spends 22 hours a day resting.  Admittedly sleeping dinosaurs aren’t going to make great viewing, (although there are could be some interesting scientific questions relating to it) but if all the roaring and biting can be tempered with other behaviour, if we can hang onto the fact they were animals and not monsters, then we might even learn something.