tdn writes:
> Lotta good that does for a kid in Marion, Iowa.
I don’t know. I was a kid living on a farm outside Mt. Cory, Ohio, which may be even further out in the boondocks than Marion, Iowa, and I got to go to the New York World’s Fair. Kids who lived in New York City who didn’t visit the fair didn’t see it either.
An early example of dinosaurs on film, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), one of the first animated cartoons:
Of course, humorist Dave Barry brought up another concept: The Death Comet.
Millions of years ago, the Death Comet hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.
It killed them ALL!
This is serious power here, folks.
A Death Comet dosen’t have to go to bed when mommy and daddy says so.
A Death Comet could have pizza whenever it wanted!
D’oh! :smack:
As a kid I just remember being completely and utterly fascinated with them. They were just so cool, and my favourite toy was my plastic T-rex picked up at the Royal Tyrrell Museum (I still have it too). I would sit for hours just reading anything about dinosaurs and the geography of the time, and won first place in the grade 4 science fair when I did my project on them. It started when I was about 4 and we stopped at the Natural History Museum in Vancouver. They had this obviously fake dinosaur set up, but you could play with the controls and make it wave its arms or roar.
I still want to be a Paleontologist. (I get peeved off alternately between myself and them for not quite having good enough marks and changing requirements on me… I nearly cried when I found out Dr Philip Currie is now teaching a class at the University I wanted to go to). I even managed to wrangle a job shadow of the paleontologist at the local museum! It was so great wandering around and seeing stuff that no one else sees.
It’s hard to describe it, you have to just experience it… and yeah I get chills when they first see the Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park. The same chills I got when they brought the good animatronics on tour here and I stood for 10 minutes just watching the Tyrannosaurus.
It’s been awhile since I immersed myself though, I’ve been thinking of picking up some books before my son gets a little older. That way I can keep up with him.
Curiously enough, I just got this month’s issue of Natural History in the mail. The entire issue is devoted to dinosaurs, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the introductory article is laregly about why people in general (not just kids!) are so fascinated by these creatures.
The short version is that 1) they are (or were…) real, live monsters. Not imaginary beasties living in the closet, but fearsome beasts living in Earth’s past, who may have, had things turned out a bit differently, seriously impeded our own evolution. 2) They are mysterious. We have plenty of clues about them, but there are numerous unanswered questions. And, the more we learn, the more peculiar they become. Parenting, for example, seems to be decidely un-reptilian - oftentimes seemingly mammalian - in many species. 3) They are the link between reptiles and modern birds. In a cladistic sense, of course, birds are dinosaurs. When viewed in this light, that little sparrow or hummingbird in your backyard takes on a very different aspect; these cute feathery creatures share a heritage with those fearsome monsters! Not only that, but that means dinosaurs, as a group, aren’t really extinct! 4) Their disappearance. Knowledge that an asteroid may have acted as the killing blow which resulted in their extinction (of the non-avian varieties, anyway) sheds new light on our own vulnerabilities; there but for the complexities of celestial mechanics go we. Their fate could just as easily be our fate.
I knew a 6 year old Japanese kid who was absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs, so it’d definitely not an American thing.
If it makes you feel better, growing up in Geneseo, IL (of course, this is in the mid 80’s), I visited the animatronic dinosaur exhibit at a museum in Davenport, IA.
The fascination also goes back to the ancient Greeks. I was watching a program on the Hitler or Discovery channel a couple of weeks ago, and it dealt with scientists trying to see if there was a correlation between mythical beasts and dinosaur remains. It turned out that 99% of the places in Europe and Asia where stories of mythological beasts were in great number, there were also massive amounts of dino fossils lying near the surface. In at least one ancient city, it turned out that there was an altar which had a dinosaur fossil bone on it, that was the city’s main tourist draw.
I’m a little late to this party, but I started a similar thread a while back that may or may not be of interest: Little girls and ponies.
Dinos also make your boring part of the world more interesting. I remember being bummed that Los Angeles didn’t have Lions and Tigers and Bears (or Elephants) but I felt better when I learned that T Rex and his buddies walked right there on the very spot where I lived (in the San Fernando Valley).
His buddies, maybe (though I doubt that T. Rex had very many buddies). But Rex himself was a Montana beastie, I’m proud to say.
Actually, T. rex fossils have been found in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico in the U.S, and in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.
In addition to all the other reasons cited so far, there’s also the fascination with a much younger planet, with a greater degree of vulcanism, full of lush primeval forests (cyclads and ferns, before the evolution of modern deciduous trees), and whose oceans teemed with more primitive versions of fish and sharks. And with no people or even mammals, which makes for some interesting daydreams about how long one person or a small community could last in such an environment. Speaking for myself, my fascination with dinosaurs was never just about the dinosaurs. It was really the gestalt of their era: dinos plus volcanoes plus weird exotic forests and swamps, minus all the people, cities, “friendly” critters like dogs & cats, and our own beasties.
Adding to the lure of the otherwordly is a modern combination of escapism and nostalgia, fueled by the growing realization, steadily ascendant since the Age of Colonization, that civilization has not only mapped out and settled the planet and conquered the flora-and-fauna part of nature, but has also hunted, clear-cut, mined, torched, farmed, paved, subdivisioned, polluted, and now heated the hell out of it. The story of evolution thus plays out like a Biblical fable: primitive creatures begetting evermore complex species, until man came along and dominated creation (as no other species ever could), but to the point of ruin. The dinosaurs, however, managed to dominate their Garden of Eden without despoiling it. They existed within the state of nature, of course, without any civilization or even higher consciousness, but that doesn’t prevent us from feeling a tenuous identification (even if only in kindergarten) with T. Rex and its ilk.
Another thing: since we didn’t coexist with dinosaurs, it goes without saying that they, alone of all the great beasts of our own time, escaped the predation and domination by humanity, and retain a certain dignity and mystique as a result. They were never hunted or herded, domesticated or fenced off in nature preserves, put on display in zoos, genetically typed, and mated. On the contrary; the dinosaurs were mankind’s greatest terrestrial rival, in the sense that their domination basically precluded our development and was cut short only by the advent of the asteroid. I don’t know if the evolutionary narrative I learned as a kid holds up today, but what I learned was that the dinosaurs were so well established that mammals were unable to evolve beyond the level of tiny shrew or rat-like critters (and perhaps the dolphins in the seas). Anything larger couldn’t survive against such superior predation. Today, our earth is stripped of the mysteries and perils of antiquity, and the only possible lifeforms threatening our survival as a species, aside from microbial epidemics, are the distant spectre of planetary invasion by a species of technologically-superior extraterrestrials – another subject of ongoing fascination in its own right, and for much the same reason.
Even that view has been challenged by recent fossil finds.
And dolphins evolved post-dinosaurs - the earliest fossils date from around 50 million years ago.
Interesting discovery, there, and I hope they keep finding more mammalian fossils. I don’t think it completely disproves my point, though – that link referred to scientists not being unsure if those 30-lb. mammals were at the top of their local food chain. It may be that such mammals could only thrive in ecosystems where larger predatory dinosaurs were completely absent. That might explain why similar mammalian fossils haven’t been widely found amongst dinosaur fossils everywhere else. A key question is how much diversification (and enlargement, if any) mammals underwent between the time of that fossil (130 million years ago) and the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction 65 million years ago, which was more or less due to a killer asteroid. I doubt that this discovery is, as a standalone finding, sufficient to overturn that understanding that the extinction of the dinosaurs was a key prerequisite for the subsequent rise of the mammals to the top of the food chain.
So what conclusions should we draw if they find bones of those 30 lb mammals in fossilized dino dung? 