Dino-Mania

My 3 year old daughter loves dinosaurs. All of them. The “good” ones like Barney and the “bad” ones from Jurassic Park and Godzilla. On that topic, she’s in the exalted company of Calvin and other, regular kids world-over who too are “caught up in the raging, teeth-baring grip of full-on dinomania”, as this article by Richard Conniff calls it.

Soon after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, in 1861, the paleontologist, Hermann von Meyer, discovered a dinner plate-size fossil:

“It seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone.”

Von Meyer’s description of the fossil was that of a type of flying reptile.

In 1964, John H. Ostrom, a Yale paleontologist discovered Deinonychus, a primitive bird that he said “must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile, and very active animal”. A couple of years later, when Ostrom was looking at the limestone slabs of von Meyer closely, he could see the clear impression of feathers. Its bones also seemed to match those of Deinonychus.

It proved to be a transformational moment. Until then, dinos were thought to be “plodding, thunderous monsters, cold-blooded and stupid” and “symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency”. But with Ostrom’s twin findings, the “dinosaur renaissance” had begun. Bob Bakker, one of Ostrom’s students, was a vocal believer in the new image of the dino as being active and warm-blooded. The duo became greatly influential:

“Where John was cautious, Bob was evangelical.”

Ostrom felt that there was good evidence “that many different kinds of ancient reptiles were characterized by mammalian or avian levels of metabolism”. Despite strong resistance from the old guard, Ostrom’s view prevailed:

“It is now widely accepted that birds evolved from the group of bipedal theropod dinosaurs.”

So much so that:

“The idea that birds are in fact living dinosaurs is so commonplace that the debate has largely turned to the question of why they were the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction of 65 million years ago.”

(The final proof came in 2012, when a T.rex relative was found in Canada “covered in tufts of long, filamentous feathers”).

Maybe the next Jurassic Park movie will add feathery, bird-like dinos instead of only showing scaly, reptilian dinos. C’mon, Spielberg, even my daughter knows that!