I’m afraid there’s not much more to this story—not nearly the issue hyped by your newspapers as the Great Stamp Flap. No argument of fact arises at all, just a question of names, settled in 1903, but never transferred to a general culture that continues to learn and favor the technically invalid name Brontosaurus. But the story does illustrate something troubling about the presentation of science in popular media. The world of USA Today is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.
This oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.
In the current dinosaur craze without context, all bits are mined for their superficial news value as items in themselves—a lamentable tendency abetted by the “trivial pursuit” one-upmanship that confers status on people who know (and flaunt) the most bits. (If you play this dangerous game in real life, remember that ignorance of context is the surest mark of a phony. If you approach me in wild lament, claiming that our postal service has mocked the deepest truth of paleontology, I will know that you have only skimmed the surface of my field.)
Consider the four items mentioned earlier in this essay. They are often presented in USA Today style as equal factoids. But with a context to sort the trivial from the profound, we may recognize some as statements about words, others as entries to the most general questions we can ask about the history of life. Apatosaurus versus Brontosaurus is a legalistic quibble about words and rules of naming. Leave the Post Office alone. They take enough flak (much justified of course) as it is. The proper head for Apatosaurus is an interesting empirical issue, but of little moment beyond the sauropods. Marsh found no skull associated with either his Apatosaurus or his Brontosaurus skeleton. He guessed wrong and mounted the head of another sauropod genus called Camarosaurus. Apatosaurus actually bore a head much more like that of the different genus Diplodocus. The head issue (Camarosaurus-like versus Diplodocus-like) and the name issue (Apatosaurus versus Brontosaurus) are entirely separate questions, although the press has confused and conflated them.
The question of warm-bloodedness (quite unresolved at the moment) is more general still, as it affects our basic concepts of dinosaur physiology and efficiency. The issue of extinction is the broadest of all—for basic patterns of life’s history are set by differential survival of groups through episodes of mass dying. We are here today, arguing about empty issues like Apatosaurus versus Brontosaurus, because mammals got through the great Cretaceous extinction, while dinosaurs did not.
I hate to be a shill for the Post Office, but I think that they made the right decision this time. Responding to the great Apatosaurus flap, Postal Bulletin Number 21744 proclaimed: “Although now recognized by the scientific community as Apatosaurus, the name Brontosaurus was used for the stamp because it is more familiar to the general population. Similarly, the term “dinosaur” has been used generically to describe all the animals, even though the Pteranodon was a flying reptile.” Touché and right on; no one bitched about Pteranodon, and that’s a real error.
The Post Office has been more right than the complainers, for Uncle Sam has worked in the spirit of the plenary powers rule. Names fixed in popular usage may be validated even if older designations have technical priority. But now…Oh Lord, why didn’t I see it before! Now I suddenly grasp the secret thread behind this overt debate! It’s a plot, a dastardly plot sponsored by the apatophiles—that covert society long dedicated to gaining support for Marsh’s original name against a potential appeal to the plenary powers. They never had a prayer before. Whatever noise they made, whatever assassinations they attempted, they could never get anyone to pay attention, never disturb the tranquillity and general acceptance of Brontosaurus. But now that the Post Office has officially adopted Brontosaurus, they have found their opening. Now enough people know about Apatosaurus for the first time. Now an appeal to the plenary powers would not lead to the validation of Brontosaurus, for Apatosaurus has gained precious currency. They have won; we brontophiles have been defeated.
Apatosaurus means “deceptive lizard” Brontosaurus means “thunder lizard”—a far, far better name (but appropriateness, alas, as we have seen, counts for nothing). They have deceived us; we brontophiles have been outmaneuvered. Oh well, graciousness in defeat before all (every bit as important as dignity, if not an aspect thereof). I retreat, not with a bang of thunder, but with a whimper of hope that rectification may someday arise from the ashes of my stamp album.
6 | The Dinosaur Rip-off
WE LOVE occasional reversals of established order, both to defuse the tension of inequity and to infuse a bit of variety into our lives. Consider the medieval feast of fools (where slaves could be masters, in jest and only for a moment), Sadie Hawkins Day, and the genre of quiz that supplies the answer and asks a contestant to reconstruct the question. I begin this essay in such a spirit by giving my answer to a question that has surpassed all others (except, perhaps, “Where is human evolution going?”) in my catalogue of inquiries from people who love natural history. My answer, unfortunately, must be: “Damned if I know”—which won’t help you much in trying to guess the question. So I’ll reveal the question without further ado: “What’s behind the great dinosaur mania that’s been sweeping the country during the past few years?”
Readers will scarcely need my words to document the phenomenon, for we are all surrounded by dinosaur tote bags, lunch boxes, pens and pencils, underpants, ties, and T-shirts that say “bossosaurus” or “secretaryosaurus,” as the case may be. You can buy dinosaur-egg soap to encourage your kids to take a bath, a rocking stegosaurus for indoor recreation (a mere 800 bucks from F.A.O. Schwarz), a brontosaurus bank to encourage thrift, or a dinosaur growth chart to hang on the wall and measure your tyke’s progress toward the N.B.A. In Key West, where dinosaurs have edged out flamingos as icons of kitsch, I even saw dinosaur toilet paper with a different creature on each perforated segment—providing quite a sense of power, I suppose, when used for its customary purpose. (This reminded me of the best attempt I ever encountered for defusing the Irish situation. I once stayed in a small motel in Eire where the bathrooms had two rolls of toilet paper—one green, the other orange.)
I offer no definitive answer to the cause of this mania, but I can at least document a fact strongly relevant to the solution. Perhaps dinosaur mania is intrinsic and endemic, a necessary and permanent fact of life (once the fossils had been discovered and properly characterized); perhaps dinosaurs act as the trigger for a deep jungian archetype of the soul; perhaps they rank as incarnations of primal fears and fascinations, programmed into our brains as the dragons of Eden. But these highfalutin suggestions cannot suffice for the simple reason that dinosaurs have been well documented throughout our century, while few people granted them more than passing notice before the recent craze hit.
I can testify to the previous status of dinosaurs among the arcana of our culture, for I was a kiddie dinosaur nut in the late 1940s when nobody gave a damn. I fell in love with the great skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History and then, with all the passion of youth, sought collateral material with thoroughness and avidity. I would pounce on any reinforcement of my greatest interest—a Sinclair Oil logo or a hokey concrete tyrannosaur bestriding (like a colossus) Hole 15 at the local miniature golf course. There sure wasn’t much to find—a few overpriced brass figures and a book or two by Roy Chapman Andrews and Ned Colbert, all hard to
get anywhere outside the Museum shop. Representations in pop culture were equally scarce, ranging little beyond King Kong versus the pteranodon and Alley Oop riding a brontosaurus.
One story will indicate both the frustration of a young adept in a world of ignorance and the depth of that ignorance itself. At age nine or so, in the Catskills at one of those innumerable summer camps with an Indian name, I got into a furious argument with a bunkmate over the old issue of whether humans and dinosaurs ever inhabited the earth together. We agreed—bad, bad mistake—to abide by the judgment of the first adult claiming to know the answer, and we bet the camp currency, a chocolate bar, on the outcome. We asked all the counselors and staff, but none had ever heard of a brontosaurus. At parents’ weekend, his came and mine didn’t. We asked his father, who assured us that of course dinosaurs and people lived together; just look at Alley Oop. I paid—and seethed—and still seethe. This could not happen today. Anyone—a few “scientific creationists” excepted—would both know the answer and give you the latest rundown on theories for the extinction of dinosaurs.*
All this I tell for humor, but a part of the story isn’t so funny. Kiddie culture can be cruel and fiercely anti-intellectual. I survived because I wasn’t hopeless at punchball, and I won some respect for my knowledge of baseball stats. But any kid with a passionate interest in science was a wonk, a square, a dweeb, a doofus, or a geek (I don’t remember what word held sway at the time, but one item in that particular litany of cruelty is always in vogue). I was taunted by many classmates as peculiar. I was called “fossil face” on the playground. It hurt.
I once asked my colleague Shep White, a leading child psychologist, why kids were so interested in dinosaurs. He gave an answer both elegant and succinct: “Big, fierce, and extinct.” I love this response, but it can’t resolve the question that prompted this essay. Dinosaurs were also big, fierce, and extinct twenty years ago, but few kids or adults gave a damn about them. And so I return to the original question: What started the current dinosaur craze?
The optimistic answer for any intellectual must be that public taste follows scientific discovery. The past twenty years have been a heyday for new findings and fundamental revisions in our view of dinosaurs. The drab, lumbering, slow-witted, inefficient beasts of old interpretations have been replaced with smooth, sleek, colorful, well-oiled, and at least adequately intelligent revised versions. The changes have been most significant in three subjects: anatomy, behavior, and extinction. All three have provided a more congenial and more interesting perspective on dinosaurs. For anatomy, a herd of brontosauruses charging through the desert inspires more awe than a few behemoths so encumbered by their own weight that they must live in ponds (see the classic illustration on the dust jacket of this book). For behavior, the images of the newly christened Maiasauria, the good mother lizard, brooding her young, or a herd of migrating ornithopods, with vulnerable juveniles in the center and strong adults at the peripheries, inspire more sympathy than a dumb stegosaur laying her eggs and immediately abandoning them by instinct and ignorance. For extinction, crashing comets and global dust clouds surely inspire more attention than gradually changing sea levels or solar outputs.
I wish that I could locate the current craze in these exciting intellectual developments. But a moment’s thought must convince anyone that this good reason cannot provide the right answer. Dinosaurs might not have been quite so jazzy and sexy twenty years ago, but the brontosaurs weren’t any smaller back then, the tyrannosaurs were just as fierce, and the whole clan was every bit as extinct (my camp friend’s father notwithstanding). You may accept or reject Shep White’s three categories, but choose any alternate criteria and dinosaurs surely had the capacity to inspire a craze at any time—twenty years ago as well as today. (At least two mini-crazes of earlier years—in England after Waterhouse Hawkins displayed his life-sized models at the Crystal Palace in the 1850s, and in America after Sinclair promoted a dinosaur exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939—illustrate this permanent potential.) We must conclude, I think, that dinosaurs have never lacked the seeds of appeal, that the missing ingredient must be adequate publicity, and that the key to “why now?” resides in promotion, not new knowledge.
I must therefore assume that the solution lies in that great and dubious driving force of American society—marketing. At some definable point, some smart entrepreneur recognized an enormous and largely unexploited potential for profit. What craze is any different? Did goldfish reach an optimal size and tastiness for swallowing in the early 1940s? Did a breakthrough in yo-yo technology spawn the great passion that swept the streets of New York in my youth? Did hula hoops fit some particular social niche and need uniquely confined to a few months during the 1950s?
I don’t doubt that a few more general factors may form part of the story. Perhaps the initial entrepreneurs developed their own interest and insight by reading about new discoveries. Perhaps the vast expansion of museum gift shops—a dubious trend (in my view), with more to lament in skewed priorities than to praise in heightened availability of worthy paraphernalia—gave an essential boost in providing an initial arena for sales. Still, most crazes get started for odd and unpredictable reasons and then propagate by a kind of mass intoxication and social conformity. If I am right in arguing that the current dinosaur craze could have occurred long ago and owes both its origin and initial spread to a marketing opportunity seized by a few diligent entrepreneurs (with later diffusion by odd mechanisms of crowd psychology that engender chain reactions beyond a critical mass), then the source of this phenomenon may not be a social trend or a new discovery, but the cleverness of a person or persons unknown (with a product or products unrecognized). As this craze is no minor item in twentieth-century American cultural history, I would love to identify the instigators and the insights. If anyone knows, please tell me.
I do confess to some cynical dubiety about the inundation of kiddie culture with dinosaurs in every cute, furry, and profitable venue that any marketing agent can devise. I don’t, of course, advocate a return to the ignorance and unavailability of information during my youth, but a dinosaur on every T-shirt and milk carton does foreclose any sense of mystery or joy of discovery—and certain forms of marketing do inexorably lead to trivialization. Interest in dinosaurs becomes one of those ephemeral episodes—somewhere between policeman and fireman—in the canonical sequence of childhood interests. Something to burn brightly in its appointed season and then, all too often, to die—utterly and without memory.
As intellectuals, we acknowledge and accept a minority status in our culture (since hope, virtue, and reality rarely coincide). We therefore know that we must seize our advantages by noting popular trends and trying to divert some of their energy into rivulets that might benefit learning and education. The dinosaur craze should be a blessing for us, since the source material is a rip-off of our efforts—the labor of paleontologists, the great skeletons mounted in our museums. Indeed, we have done well—damned well, as things go. Lurking in and around the book covers and shopping bags are a pretty fair number of mighty good books, films, puzzles, games, and other items of—dare I say it—decent intellectual and educational content.
It is now time to segue, via a respectable transition, into the second part of this essay. (But before we do, and while I’m throwing out requests for enlightenment, can anyone tell me how this fairly obscure Italian term from my musical education managed its recent entry into trendy American speech?*)
We all acknowledge the sorry state of primary and secondary education in America, both by contrast with the successes of other nations and by any absolute standard of educational need in an increasingly complex world. We also recognize that the crisis is particularly acute for the teaching of science. Well, being of an optimistic nature, I survey the dinosaur craze and wonder why science suffers so badly within our schools. The dinosaur craze has generated, amidst a supersaurus-sized pile of kitsch and crap, a remarkable range of worthy material that kids seem to
like and use. Kids love science so long as fine teaching and good material grace the presentation. If the dinosaur craze of pop culture has been adequately subverted for educational ends, why can’t we capitalize on this benevolent spin-off? Why can’t we sustain the interest, rather than letting it wither like the flower of grass, as soon as a child moves on to his next stage? Why can’t we infuse some of this excitement into our schools and use it to boost and expand interest in all of science? Think of the aggregate mental power vested in 10 million five-year-olds, each with an average of twenty monstrous Latin dinosaur names committed to memory with the effortless joy and awesome talent of human beings at the height of their powers for rote learning. Can’t we transfer this skill to all the other domains—arithmetic, spelling, and foreign languages, in particular—that benefit so greatly from rote learning in primary school years? (Let no adult disparage the value of rote because we lose both the ability and the joy in later years.)
Why is the teaching of science in such trouble in our nation’s public schools? Why is the shortage of science teachers so desperate that hundreds of high schools have dropped physics entirely, while about half of all science courses still on the books are now being taught by people without formal training in science? To understand this lamentable situation, we must first dispel the silly and hurtful myth that science is simply too hard for pre-adults. (Supporters of this excuse argue that we succeeded in the past only because science was much simpler before the great explosion of modern knowledge.)
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