I remember going through a “fascinated by dinosaurs” phase while I was growing up in the mid-'70s. From what I can tell, dinosaurs have become exponentially more popular among children (especially boys?) in the decades since then.
This leads me to a few questions:
Is this observation accurate? Are kids (toddler age) likely to be obsessed with dinosaurs? If so, is this an American thing, or does it cross national borders?
When did the “kids love dinosaurs” meme really take root? I assume that children in 1905 weren’t as enchanted with the big lizards as kids are in 2005, but maybe I’m wrong.
Why? Is there a reason that dinosaurs in particular are so appealing to three-year-olds?
They’re big and destructive. That makes them really cool. And it’s always more fun to pretend that you’re a dinosaur than, say, a llama. (Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame loved to imagine himself wreaking havoc as a terrible lizard on many occasions.)
And I’m sure the Godzilla movies had something do to with all of this, too, but I don’t have a cite.
As stated above, they’re big and scary. The thing that keeps them from being too scary (which is important for little kids) is that they’re all dead. This is why Jurassic Park was really, really scary at times.
They’re a cool thing to study because they’re monsters, but they’re also science. Studying ghosts and zombies and space aliens may be kind of cool, but you don’t get any credit for it at school. Study dinosaurs, and you’re gold.
They’re big, dragon like creatures with strange names that adults rarely know. They’re also, comfortably, dead.
I would hazard a guess at why they may be more popular now than when you or I got into them back in the '70s. The older idea of slow plodding animals has been replaced by quick moving predators or graceful titans that don’t simply hang out in swamps to survive. Much cooler.
Both my boys are nuts about them. Once the youngest get to be about 4 I’m dragging them down to the ROM.
I’ve read repeatedly that it’s because they are big and scary but they can’t hurt you. Pretty much what everyone else said. As for myself, it was because they had really cool weapons. The trike could be all stabby-stabby x3, and stegos had that awesome spiked tail. I saw Jurassic Park as an adult and I had a joygasm. If I’d seen it when I was 5, I simply would have exploded.
Now that it’s been mentioned, I have heard this explanation before, which makes sense.
This is the really interesting part to me. Yes, I thought dinosaurs were cool, but they weren’t as big a part of kid culture as they seem to be today. (Land of the Lost notwithstanding.) So between the ‘70s and today, it seems their popularity exploded. I wonder what events during that timeline fueled that explosion – how’d the scientific discoveries work their way to kidville? Does Jurassic Park predate or coincide with kids’ interest?
Kids? I was a senior in college just looking for a few elective credits to finish my degree…saw a class called “The Age of Dinosaurs,” had a joygasm and proceeded to earn the highest grade in the class. They are just so cool! And we keep finding out cooler and cooler stuff about them! Did you know that they had one way lungs? Neat!
Let’s put it this way. I wanted to be a dinosaur explorer when I was a kid. My 4 year old tells me he wants to be a paleontologist. The wealth of material is staggering.
He also wants to be a spaceman rock star. I mean come on, he is 4.
I think seeing dinosaurs on TV and film have helped to capture kids’ imaginations. This actually ties back to my point on the modern view of dinosaurs as likely warm blooded, cunning, fast, and graceful. Watching a circa 1975 Brontosaurus eating swamp plants is boring. Watching an 21st century Apatosaurus rear back to reach the top of a tree, or a Diplodocus use it tail as a whip again a fast moving carnivore is cool.
And watching a circa 1965 Brontosaurus eating swamp plants is near impossible. Dinos were very hard to come by in video form back then. I had to satisfy my dino lust with still drawings. Technology has brought more terrible lizards to the screen in later years. This may account for some increased popularity.
I recall from my reading that Dinosaurs were an immense hit with kids from at least the 1890’s :eek: .
In other words, as long as they have been on display, in assembled condition, in public museums.
Really? Cool. Were they appealing for the same reasons – big monsters that no longer exist? Nice to know that kids have always loved the unthreatening monsters.
If they’ve always been popular with kids, it sounds like the sheer wealth of visually stimulating material in the past couple of decades may be behind the exponential growth in that popularity over the past couple of decades.
And you’re all right – Big Alice on Land of the Lost wasn’t nearly as cool as the velociraptors or T-rex in Jurassic Park.
tdn:I had to satisfy my dino lust with still drawings.
And we had plastic and metal dino statuettes, stuffed dino toys, dino books, trips to the natural history museum to see dino skeletons…and this was all back in my preschool years in the mid- to late 1960’s.
Grey: *Watching a circa 1975 Brontosaurus eating swamp plants is boring. *
I don’t recall being in any way bored with or indifferent to the idea of dinosaurs because they were, as we then thought, lumbering and slow. I still remember a scary drawing in one of my dino books of an Allosaurus killing a Brontosaurus (as we then called them). Brrrr.
I agree with Bosda: I don’t buy the idea that dinos have become more popular with kids in the last couple of decades, except perhaps to the extent that more sophisticated and ubiquitous media and marketing have made every popular craze more widespread.
Why it should be such a near-universal childhood “stage”, though, with so many kids becoming fascinated by dinosaurs and then growing out of them, I still don’t really get. Big and scary but safely remote from everyday life? Sure, but so are lots of other critters. Yet we don’t have vast hordes of kids going through a recognized “blue-whale phase” or “elephant phase”.
Maybe the dinos have just become so commercially and culturally institutionalized as a typical childhood interest, like doll outfits or tricycles, that it’s simply hard for parents or kids to avoid them even if they wanted to.
Some years ago I read an article that stated that an interest in dinosaurs is an indicator of "superior"intelligence in children. Apparently the fact that these kids are interested in something that they have never seen, or can ever see, is indicative of greater powers of imagination and abstract thinking.
Uh-huh. By that reasoning, girls are more intelligent than boys because they tend to be more fascinated by unicorns.
Props to that article writer, though—arguing that a particular craze that’s especially prevalent among kids from educated and affluent families indicates superior intelligence is a very smart PR move!
No it wasn’t. You just had to be in the right place – in 1965 you could still watch a brontosaur munching on swamp plants in the GM pavilion at the NY World’s Fair. Disney was resoponsible for the animatronic beasts. Not far away, you could look at an immopbile one at the Sinclair DinoLand, also at the Fair. There were dinosaur parks to give you the same thrill (like the still-extant Petrified Creatures in upstate NY). You could see the bones at the American Museum of Natyural History, or any of a number of other museumsd.
On TV you could watch King Kong or Dinosaurus or the cartoon Daffy and the Dinosaur or (if you were lucky) rerun of The Animal World (with an animated brontosaur by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen!) . In a couple of years you got One Million Years B.C. and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Eartyh and Journey to the Center of Time and others.
Heck, I know – I grew up dinosaur-crazy back then.
As for how far back it goes – it precedes 1890. There were dinosaur models in the Crystal Palace in London decades earlier. They’re still on exhibition in London. Jules Verne gave us, if not a brontosaur, at least a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur in A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Illustrated papers and books gave you pictures. I’m not sure how long it took for them to become common, but you got Doyle’s The Lost World by 1910 or so, with others (like Tarzan’s Pal-ul-don) following shortly thereafter.
I would think that an interest in dinosaurs would be indicative of superior intelligence in children, but not for the reasons supposedly stated in that article. Dinosaurs are products of the imagination, but are real beings that can be studied through the fossil record, etc. Curiosity in dinosaurs would indicate to me an interest in science and natural history. Dinosaurs are cool because they are big and frightening, but they are especially cool because they once roamed the Earth.
I didn’t say people were bored with the concept. I said the concept is boring compared to a huge beast rearing up to rip the top off a tree. I was a dinosaur carzy kids/adult but a modern presentation when I was 6 would’ve had me digging in North Africa today.
While they’ve always been popular with kids I think the modern visual presentation feeds the craze and so leads to more books which provides even more information. I like it, though I’m having a hard time keeping up with dino names.
