Dinosaur Time

* This is the latest installment of “Problematica.” It is written by Max Dresow…

In 1966, Hammer Films released the adventure-fantasy picture One Million Years B.C. You may remember it as the one that put Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, but at the time it was also notable for its depiction of dinosaurs. With stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen in charge, the film delivered several iconic sequences, including a nearly four-minute brawl between a Ceratosaurus and a Triceratops. (In a twist, the Triceratops won.) Audiences responded, and in spite of the meddling of American censors, the film turned a profit. Three more films followed in the “Cave Girl” series, with (it has to be said) diminishing artistic and financial returns. The second has a title that feels inevitable given the cavemen versus dinosaurs setup. It is called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970).

A scene from When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) starring Victoria Vetri

Dinosaurs have been ruling the earth for a while now. Not actual dinosaurs, mind you (though there are plenty of non-avian dinosaurs around, including some thirty billion chickens). I mean ruling it in the popular imagination. Ask yourself this. How many popular discussions of dinosaurs fail to mention that dinosaurs once “ruled the earth”? The expression is so ubiquitous that it scarcely registers anymore, or registers only by its absence. Recently, I was pleased to discover that a favorite childhood book of mine does not contain a variant of this expression. This is Dinosaur Time by Peggy Parish, with illustrations by Arnold Lobel. But why should this stand out? The book does say that, 100 million years ago, “dinosaurs were everywhere.” How ubiquitous does the language of political domination have to be before it is subversive to claim that the Mesozoic was merely “dinosaur time”?

The iconic ending of Jurassic Park (1993)

Writing in Aeon, Riley Black provides a diagnosis of our inability to think about dinosaurs in non-dynastical terms:

The entire reason we so often fixate on the supposed dominance of the dinosaurs is because we now see ourselves in that position. For more than a century, the decimation of the “ruling reptiles” has been taken as a cautionary tale of what could happen to us— not all that different from pundits who cry that the United States is set to topple like the Roman Empire. The narrative becomes one of power, influence and longevity, one group of organisms above all others deciding the course of entire ecosystems over the span of millions of years.

The story, Black continues, “says more about the way we interpret the past than what actually transpired.” “[By] creating a fairly-tale out of a distant prehistoric event, we’ve inflated our sense of importance in the world.” Her analysis recalls Ellen Goodman’s remark that perhaps “every era gets the dinosaur story it deserves.” The Victorians got a story about mammals outcompeting dinosaurs in a progressive upward sweep. Goodman’s contemporaries got a story about dinosaur extinction as nuclear Armageddon. And recently, dinosaurs have again become the victims of climate change. But whereas extinction narratives are always shifting as our “extinction imaginary” evolves, the language of dinosaur domination has remained remarkably stable (Sepkoski 2021). What is good enough for Hammer Films is evidently good enough for us. Today, we are all Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. But, like, really?

I was prompted to reflect on this recently by a book I’ve been reading. The book is Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and you probably remember it from how it was literally everywhere in 2018. I'm surprised that it’s taken me this long to read it, since I used to be tempted to buy it every time I walked by an airport book kiosk. But anyway, in 2023, I finally read the thing. And of course I was entertained. Brusatte is a lively and engaging writer with an almost manic storytelling energy. He certainly knows his dinosaurs and his enthusiasm for them practically spills off the page. All this makes for a hugely readable book, and since I am a sucker for a readable book, I polished this one off in just a few sittings. Then I read his mammal book too.

But as much as I was entertained, so much was I annoyed. This is because Brusatte really embraces the language of political domination. Like, really. It is the omnipresent connective tissue of the book. I should say that my irritation wasn’t a function of moral outrage, nor did it reflect an unrealistically strict prohibition against describing the natural world in human terms. Instead, I just found the constant political metaphors exhausting. And lazy. Surely there are ways of telling the story of dinosaur evolution that do not rely on comparing dinosaur groups to political dynasties. Such comparisons add few strokes of color to the writing and contribute nothing to the reader’s understanding of dinosaurs. So why are there so many of them?

Now here is where I disclose that I did something obnoxious. After reading the first couple chapters and noticing the prevalence of political metaphors, I started to record where it appeared. Then I spent an hour or so transcribing sentence fragments into a Word document and pasted them below. I may not have caught all the offending passages, but I got a bunch of them. So let me present them to you in the most uninspiring form imaginable: the loosely unorganized list.

Preface and Chapter 1

[Dinosaurs] rose to dominance
[The Triassic Period was] an uncolonized frontier
Lording over it all were the gorgonopsians
[Gorgonopsians] ruled at the top of the food chain
This cast of oddballs ruled the world just before the dinosaurs

Chapter 2

…thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield… It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant
… the crocodile line archosaurs, who held the throne
Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it
[At the beginning of] their long march to dominance
[The shoreline was] enemy territory
[Dinosaurs were] destined for greater things to come
For millions of years, it looked as if [dinosaurs] might remain provincial rubes
[Crocs] never rose to the top
…a handful of battle-worn stragglers
…critical to understanding how dinosaurs ascended to power
The dinosaurs had yet to mount a global revolution

Chapter 3

Dinosaurs conquered the deserts soon after they arrived
[Dinosaurs were] the ones who would eventually become dominant… and conquer the world

Chapter 4

[The mural at the Peabody museum] tells an epic tale of conquest
Dinosaurs had already become the dominant force on land
[D]inosaurs ruled every corner of the globe
[Ankylosaurs remained] marginal understudies
[Carcharodontosaurus] lorded over all of the other dinosaurs…
[Tyrannosaur’s] undisputed perch at the top of the food pyramid
[A]nother monster that reigned near the top of the food chain [Torvosaurus]
[How tyrannosaurs] rose to glory
[Deep] into the middle Cretaceous, carcharodontosaurs ruled the world
[The tyrannosaurs] would soon make their move and found a new dinosaur empire

Chapter 5

[T.] rex was a king indeed
[T. rex and its cousins were] at the top of their game
[At] the top of the food chain, the lords of a lush forest
[W]hen T. rex and its brethren reigned supreme
… utterly dominated the Early Cretaceous
Enormous tyrannosaurs reigned throughout North America
In Asia, the nearly T. rex-size Chilantaisaurus and the smaller Shaochilong were the top guns… and in South America, carcharodontosaurs like Aerosteon reigned
Timurlengia and its comrades were still living under the thumb of the real warlords of the middle Cretaceous, the carcharodontosaurs
T. rex and its breatheren really were kings of the dinosaur world
…champions in one region might not be able to conquer another for one simple reason
The world they lorded over was very different from the one…

Chapter 6

The king of the dinosaurs
The majesty that is the king
[T. rex’s] head was a killing machine, a torture chamber for its prey, and an evil mask all in one
[T. rex’s] dominion
There it lorded over a range of ecosystems
[Young Rex was] an invasive pest
… controlled an entire continent
The King went down on top, cut down at the peak of its power
Like so many monarchs, Rex was a glutton
… the rulers of their time
T. rex, the one true king

Chapter 7

[T. rex’s] dominion
The King may have been able to easily subjugate the dinosaurs of Europe
[It] gave other types of meat-eaters the opportunity to seize their own kingdoms
And the King… ruling over all of it
[R]uling for tens of millions of years before ceding their crown
…retaining their heavyweight title
Balaur bondoc was the top dog of the Late Cretaceous European islands. Less tyrant than assassin…

Chapter 8

The reign of the dinosaurs ended and a revolution followed, forcing them to cede their kingdom to other species
… the enduring legacy of over 150 million years of dinosaur domination
[A] dead empire
… able to rule the planet for so long
[C]ompetitors hoping to snatch their crown
… helped them rule the world for so long
…theropod dynasty

Chapter 9

Undisputed despots of an entire continent
[The] peak of their glory days

Chapter 10

[A] new dynasty
[A] diverse ecosystem… ruled by T. rex
… vanquished their rivals so that they ruled an entire planet
We humans now wear the crown that once belonged to the dinosaurs
The dinosaur empire

You’re probably wondering what I hoped to accomplish with this exercise. And if I’m being honest, I’m not quite sure. As I said before, the annoyance I feel is not so much moral as it is literary. So, I suppose I would like it if the writers of trade books on dinosaurs would cut the shit. But like Black, I don't think the problem with this language is entirely literary. I think it’s sadly plausible that a good portion of the public thinks that the point of evolution is to produce big carnivores, or at least big animals. How else are you supposed to interpret the constant comparisons of apex predators to kings, conquerors, and heavyweight champions? The least strained interpretation is that the “winners” of evolution are the animals described in these terms. If tyrannosaurs really “controlled an entire continent,” “ruling over it… for ten million years before ceding their crown,” then tyrannosaurs won the evolutionary prize and all the other animals didn’t. It can hardly be otherwise if tyrannosaurus actually “lorded over” or “subjugated” the other animals in their environments. But this is basically nonsense.* It’s at least as plausible to regard large predators as a kind of evolutionary “surface film” with small populations, average evolutionary lifespans, and unenviable qualities of life. (Think of all those scrawny lionesses scrapping for food in nature documentaries.) So, while the Cretaceous can be described as “tyrannosaur time,” it is little more than propaganda to describe tyrannosaurs as the “conquerers” or “despots” of the period.

[* To be clear: I don’t mean to deny that tyrannosaurs played a large role in their ecosystems, and in some sense “dominated” them (or at least the meso- and macrocarnivore niches). I’m simply pointing out that there’s a big difference between claims like this and the claim that tyrannosaurs were the “undisputed despots of an entire continent.”]

One can hardly avoid citing Stephen Jay Gould at this juncture (as Black also does). So here he is, challenging the claim that we currently live in the “Age of Mammals,” or perhaps the “Age of Man”:

We live now in the ‘Age of Bacteria.” Our planet has always been in the “Age of Bacteria,” ever since the first fossils— bacteria, of course— were entombed in rocks more than three and a half billion years ago… On any possible, reasonable, or fair criterion, bacteria are— and always have been— the dominant forms of life on earth. (Gould 1996, 176)

As I understand it, Gould’s argument is a reductio. By any reasonable criterion, bacteria should be recognized as the lords of creation. But this is a pretty weird thing to say about bacteria, so perhaps we would do better to leave the language of political domination behind. We should admit that this language floats free of any “reasonable or fair” criteria; that it functions mainly to embellish rhetorical points in the service of non-epistemic aims. So this is our task: to come up with new ways of narrating the history of life, including the history of dinosaur evolution, that avoid drawing unwarranted connections with human political history.

A two-page spread from Dinosaur Time, featuring an admirably unvarnished description of T. rex

We should also consider that the habit of describing nature in political terms may have some untoward effects. Certainly we should be wary of naturalizing the language of dominance and hierarchy given the many ways these categories have been abused in the past. Eugenicists used the language of domination and hierarchy to evoke a traditional way of thinking in which power and prestige resided exclusively in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy. Social Darwinists used it to justify a misanthropic attitude toward the bulk of the population, which sometimes found expression in eugenic policy. For all these people, hierarchy and domination were facts of nature, and facts that drove a grotesque political logic. So, while I am not saying that trade books about dinosaurs are covertly eugenical, I am suggesting that there is value in avoiding the rhetorical practices associated with reactionary social movements.

I think I’m finished. Steve Brusatte: from a fellow fan of the other Chicago baseball team, I’m sorry to have used your fun dinosaur book to talk about eugenics. (That’s the humanities for you.) To the rest: I hope I've given you something to think about the next time you screen the Cave Girl movies. And to parents: Dinosaur Time still slaps, factual inaccuracies and all. Yes, it shows a sauropod submerged in water because it was “too fat to run from enemies.” (Yikes!) But at least it doesn’t say that dinosaurs used to rule the earth.*

[* If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, check out this old post by Derek Turner…]

References

Black, R. 2023. The dinosaurs didn’t rule. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/earths-story-is-not-about-dynasties-but-communities.

Brusatte, S. 2018. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of A Lost World. New York: Harper Collins.

Gould, S.J. 1996. Wonderful Life: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Sepkoski, D. 2021. Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.