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.
