by Brian Switek
For too long, we saw dinosaurs as prehistoric sideshow freaks. Dinosaurs used to be symbols of reptilian excess that deserved extinction. When scientists falsely believed that evolution followed the path of Progress—with our species sitting at the glorious apex and end of evolution—they saw dinosaurs as a weird, if charismatic, interlude in the story of life. Now we know better. Dinosaurs are not just icons of extinction and prehistoric lineages snuffed out. They are the grandest of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” prominent players on the evolutionary stage that instantly cause us to question our own place in nature and in the history of life on this planet.
Cultures all over the world discovered prehistoric bones before paleontologists began to catalog all the dinosaurs we know and love. People recognized the relics for what they were—remains of creatures that once lived—and concocted legends about the monsters, heroes, and gods. Maybe the particulars of their conclusions don’t fit neatly into what we’ve discovered since science distilled the truth from those myths, but the important fact is that dinosaurs demanded an explanation. Long before we had a word for them, dinosaurs made us question what happened in prehistory, and what those ancient skeletons might be able to tell us about how the modern world came to be.
The shadows of ancient lore have only recently given way to the real animals, which are even stranger than anything we could have imagined. This is the other great secret of the dinosaurs. Even though we might complain about the loss of “Brontosaurus,” or feel that a feathery Velociraptor is not a Velociraptor at all, fixating on these sore spots obscures just how much we’re learning about dinosaurs. If you really look at the evidence, there is no question that the dinosaurs we’re bringing to life today are far more beautiful and complex than their earlier incarnations. What is more amazing? A “Brontosaurus” forever bound to a slow-motion life wallowing in a scummy Jurassic pond, or a herd of taut, brightly colored Apatosaurus stomping across fern-covered floodplains, their sinuous tails twisting in the air as they walk in formation? Dinosaurs are better than ever. “Brontosaurus” is better left in the past—a warm reminder of dinosaurs as I once knew them, and of how far our understanding has come.
* * *
A friend once asked if I was angry at scientists for taking away my childhood dinosaurs. It’s complicated, I replied. I don’t feel any ill will toward the loss of the dumb olive-green sluggards that populated library books and flickered across the television set when I was young. The dinosaurs I first met have been torn limb from limb by visions of far more colorful, active, and, honestly, interesting dinosaurs. Maybe I was just young enough that I soaked up the contemporary dinosaur revisions without a second thought. I’m not entirely callous. Every now and then, I pull a woefully outdated dinosaur book off the shelf and spend a few minutes envisioning the goofy cold-blooded reptiles that first sparked my love for the past. I remember them fondly, but I don’t need “Brontosaurus” and other old-school dinosaurs to come back. I’m content to leave her in my childhood past. I love her from afar, and keep the sauropod safe in my memory.
But there is another reason not to forget the dinosaurs of my youth: even outdated dinosaurs can share secrets.
Of all the dinosaurs I’ve ever seen, none encapsulates my feelings better than the Apatosaurus at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. I had a chance to visit the old dame in the fall of 2010, when I skipped out on a conference to spend some time with the institution’s dinosaurs before the evening reception crowded the exhibit hall with colleagues sipping cheap wine from plastic cups. Standing in front of the gargantuan, long-necked skeleton, I felt like a kid again. The gloomy hall reminded me of my early visit to the AMNH and other dark museums populated by shadowy dinosaur frames. But I knew much more than I did when I was a kid. For one thing, I knew that the bones used to make the mount were the ones O. C. Marsh’s field workers collected from Como Bluff, Wyoming, so long ago. I knew the dinosaur’s proper name full well, but I couldn’t deny the title Marsh himself had once bestowed on these bones. This was the original “Brontosaurus.”
After Marsh’s death, when the museum set about displaying the dinosaurs for the public, they erected the sauropod according to the science of the time—as a dull, tail-dragging behemoth. An expansive mural that runs along the exhibit’s wall underscores this vision. A gorgeous fresco secco painted by artist Rudolph Zallinger in the late 1940s, the Age of Reptiles restores the monumental dinosaur in a Jurassic swamp. I had seen facsimile posters and prints before, but those reproductions did not do justice to the beauty of the original. “Brontosaurus” herself is stunning. The sun glints off her iridescent scales as she strains soft plants from the ancient pool. The mural has remained a monument to the vintage image of “Brontosaurus” all these years, even after paleontologists changed the skeleton below to fit the dinosaur’s new identity. Held high off the ground by the dinosaur’s intricate neck is the proper Apatosaurus skull—placed on the skeleton during the great dinosaur revival of the 1970s.
This skeleton, just by itself, records more than half the history of paleontology. Our ever-shifting image of dinosaurs—from the days of Marsh to the Dinosaur Renaissance—formed a historical mosaic in this one dinosaur. The Yale Apatosaurus isn’t an image of prehistoric life perfectly assembled the first time and left to stand. The Police were dead wrong about this dinosaur—there are lessons in the past of the mighty “Brontosaurus.”
The dinosaur may keep changing. Beyond the tweaks and updates to what we know of the dinosaur’s biology, rumor has it that “Brontosaurus” may be revived someday. According to fossil gossip, two special skulls show that Apatosaurus excelsus was markedly distinct from the other two Apatosaurus species. If this is true, and is confirmed by future studies, paleontologists could make the case that Brontosaurus excelsus should be revived.
The name controversy is just a footnote to the vibrant story of how paleontology has investigated the lives of dinosaurs in ever-greater detail. Since the time we first met the dinosaur, our image of Apatosaurus has evolved from a reptilian caricature to a detailed portrait of a real, spectacular animal unlike anything since the end of the Cretaceous. And that’s the aspect of the old dinosaurs I cherish most: they record how our perception of the dinosaurian essence has evolved. I am thrilled and fascinated by the new dinosaurs, and often frustrated by out-of-date skeletons and museum displays, but at the same time I feel grateful for them. Contrasted with what we know now, and placed into the context of history, the old dinosaurs can show us just how much our understanding has transformed. The Apatosaurus isn’t just a beautiful specimen. It’s a potent embodiment of how science works—the interaction of fact, theory, and imagination that lets us approach animals we will never see alive.
A Deinonychus leaps from the shadows at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. The juxtaposition of this “hot-blooded” dinosaur with the outdated mounts elsewhere in the hall illustrates just how much our understanding of dinosaurs has changed. (Photograph by the author)
What we know today will be tested and questioned by what we find tomorrow. And I am thrilled to live during a time when paleontologists are interrogating the fossil record with ever more precision. Today’s images will slowly fade as the new dinosaurs come into view, and our perception of what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur will subtly shift from one generation to the next. When I was a kid, for example, the idea that any dinosaurs had feathers was a speculative and heretical notion. Today we know that most lineages of dinosaurs may have been covered in bristles and fuzz. As scientists and artists bring this understanding to life, the next generation will grow up with fluffy dinosaurs.
* * *
If I’ve learned anything during my time in the company of dinosaurs, it’s that we desperately need to keep them in mind as we watch our world change around us. Shortly before I finished the research for this book, I took one last trip out into the field. Thanks to an unseasonable warm snap, I had the chance to go out to Grand Stair
case–Escalante National Monument in mid-March—a time when snow and chilly temperatures often hamper attempts to go fossil hunting. Two University of Utah graduate students and I were meeting up with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science field crew to search for Late Cretaceous dinosaurs.
This is an exceptionally rich fossil fantasyland. In other places, like the Triassic outcrops of Dinosaur National Monument, dinosaurs are so rare that any scrap of bone or tooth fragment is a significant find. But here, dinosaurs and their neighbors are so common that fossil hunters have the luxury of picking and choosing what to collect. The dry hills are littered with bone, which can actually prove quite frustrating. I always feel a little rush when I spy fossil scraps peeking out of a hill, but here, many of those dinosaur signs are bones that recently decayed into dozens of petrified shards from prolonged exposure to sun, wind, and rain.
On the second morning of our survey, I gasped for breath trying to keep up with Ian Miller, the Denver Museum’s paleobotanist, as we hiked out to the drop-in point for the basin we had come to explore. I wasn’t dragging as badly as a few members of the team who had overindulged in cheap booze around the campfire the night before (you know it’s quality whiskey when it comes in a big plastic bottle), but all the water I carried in my pack weighed me down enough that walking while talking dinosaurs was a serious test of endurance.
As we passed twisted junipers along the dirt and cobblestone road, I asked Ian what the local environment looked like when the many-horned Kosmoceratops and the short-snouted tyrannosaur Teratophoneus roamed there. Ian explained that it was very different from what we looked out at that day. Seventy-five million years ago, during the time preserved in the Kaiparowits Formation, this swath of southern Utah was a wet, warm coastal dinosaur paradise. Instead of cracked tamarisk and sage, the land was carpeted in lush vegetation that more closely resembled a modern rain forest—tall stands of vine-draped trees stood between patches of swamp. What is now southern Utah looked like coastal Louisiana, just with dinosaurs and far bigger alligators.
North America’s shallow sea was part of what allowed Utah’s southern dinosaurs to evolve in splendid isolation, and it drained off the continent just before the curtain fell on the Age of Dinosaurs. After the cataclysm, rain forests filled with archaic primates and strange varieties of mammals covered the land, and, after another 50 million years of climate change, continental drift, erosion, and uplift, Utah’s badlands were formed. Even now, the world’s metamorphosis continues. It’s at a rate that’s practically impossible to detect with our own eyes, but it’s happening. The scale of a human life—measured by the speed of Internet updates or the crawl of a working day—is ill suited to fit the dynamic nature of our planet and the fantastic organisms that continue to evolve here.
We’re influencing those changes. As narrow-minded naysayers continue to deny the frightening weight of evidence that we are changing the global climate and hastening the extinction of untold species, the harmful effects of our industry and technology continue to build. No amount of stubborn denialism is going to alter the fact that we are transforming the world so quickly that even if we stopped pumping greenhouse gases and dumping pollutants today, the hallmark of our destructive nature would still be visible on the world for centuries to come. While we debate, the world changes.
I reflected on this while we walked from camp to the point where the fossil-rich Kaiporowits opened before us. The world is changing so drastically, so quickly, and here I am sifting through the past. A persistent and pernicious doubt wormed its way to the front of my mind: why should we care at all about dinosaurs?
As I walked down the narrow path toward the basin, I kept turning the question over in my mind. Dinosaurs really do matter, I argued back to myself. The fossil record has taught us powerful lessons that we ignore at our peril. Pick any dinosaur you like, and that ancient creature is undeniable proof that our planet has a history so deep that we can barely comprehend it, that life has changed dramatically over time, and that extinction is the ultimate fate of all species. Nothing so majestically encapsulates these simple, powerful truths of nature quite like a dinosaur.
By investigating what dinosaurs really were, we put our own history in context—especially since our history is interwoven with theirs. Our ancestors and relatives lived alongside dinosaurs from the very beginning, and the evolutionary history of our mammalian kin was irrevocably influenced by dinosaur dominance. This is the strange duality of the dinosaurs. Mammals thrived once non-avian dinosaurs left the scene, one of many evolutionary events that made our unexpected origin possible, but we probably wouldn’t be here if the dinosaurs had never existed. During all those millions of years that dinosaurs reigned, our forebears proliferated and evolved in the shadows, and these timid beasts set the foundation for the mammals that would eventually evolve—including our own primate lineage. Our history is not separate from dinosaurs. We share a deep connection with them.
I was left with plenty of time to think about dinosaurs as I spent the rest of the day scouring the remote basin. I have loved dinosaurs for as long as I can remember. They have always been there, lurking in the background if not more prominently striding through my mind as they do now. I started off imbibing the imagery, using skeletons and illustrations as launching points for my own dreams. But now, as I scuffed over hills covered in crumbling bones and tried to pick out the tantalizing glint of dinosaurs just barely poking out of the rock, I got the rare opportunity to experience something beyond what I imagined. I was searching for the rare, beautiful remnants of a lost world that could tell us just a little bit more about the rise and fall of the these astonishing creatures. If I could find a dinosaur, and rescue it from the rock, who knows what secrets it might eventually unlock?
To many, dinosaurs may seem to be childhood kitsch and fantastic monsters. But without them, we would not be what we are. Dinosaurs are instantly recognizable icons of evolution and extinction—triumphant and ultimately tragic creatures that beautifully illustrate the duality of life’s contingent thread. They are guideposts to the past and harbingers of what the future might bring. We need dinosaurs.
Notes
1. Dragons of the Prime
This open, airy vibe: Lowell Dingus, Next of Kin: Great Fossils at the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Rizzoli, 1996).
The story started: Keith M. Parsons, Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1–21.
As the AMNH paleontologist: William Diller Matthew, “The Mounted Skeleton of Brontosaurus,” American Museum Journal 5, no. 2 (1905): 63–70.
The protected excavation: Brian Switek, “America’s Monumental Dinosaur Site,” Smithsonian.com, May 31, 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Americas-Monumental-Dinosaur-Site.html.
In September of 1909: Parsons, Drawing Out Leviathan, 1–21.
In 1975, a physicist: John S. McIntosh and David S. Berman, “Description of the Palate and Lower Jaw of the Sauropod Dinosaur Diplodocus (Reptilia: Saurischia) with Remarks on the Nature of the Skull of Apatosaurus,” Journal of Paleontology 49, no. 1 (1975): 187–99.
Yale’s Peabody Museum exchanged skulls: “Yale Brontosaurus Gets Head On Right at Last,” New York Times, October 26, 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/10/26/nyregion/yale-brontosaurus-gets-head-on-right-at-last.html.
a previously unknown sauropod, Brontomerus: Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, and Richard L. Cifelli, “A New Sauropod Dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA,” Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56, no. 1 (2011): 75–98, doi: dx.doi.org/10.4202/app.2010.0073.
Just look at Google’s Ngram Viewer: Google books Ngram Viewer, accessed July 13, 2012, books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Brontosaurus%2C+Apatosaurus&year_start=1800&year_end=2012&corpus=0&smoothing=3.
As the astronomer: Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), xii.
The dyspeptic Victorian anatomist
: H. G. Seeley, “On the Classification of the Fossil Animals Commonly Named Dinosauria,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 43 (1887–1888): 165–71.
As the journalist John Noble Wilford: John Noble Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaur (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 168.
NASA even shot: Brian Switek, “Dinosaurs in Space!,” Dinosaur Tracking, Blogs, Smithsonian.com, December 12, 2011, blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/12/dinosaurs-in-space/.
From the Greeks to Native Americans: See Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
As George Gaylord Simpson: See George Gaylord Simpson, Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal (New York: Macmillan, 1934; Time-Life Books, 1965, 1982), 82.
“My dinosaur is bigger than yours” contest: See Paul D. Brinkman, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
2. The Secret of Dinosaur Success
Revueltosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur at all: William G. Parker, Randall B. Irmis, and Sterling J. Nesbitt, “Review of the Late Triassic Dinosaur Record from Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona,” in A Century of Research at Petrified Forest National Park: Geology and Paleontology, ed. William G. Parker, S. R. Ash, and Randall B. Irmis, Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin no. 62 (Flagstaff, Arizona: Museum of Northern Arizona, 2006), 160.
The paleontologist Alan Charig: Alan J. Charig, “The Evolution of the Archosaur Pelvis and Hind-Limb: An Explanation in Functional Terms,” in Studies in Vertebrate Evolution: Essays Presented to F. R. Parrington, eds. Kenneth A. Joysey and Thomas S. Kemp (New York: Winchester Press, 1972), 121.