E S SAY

DINOSAURDRE~L\MSReading the bones of

America's psychic mascotBy Jack Hitt

Sixty_five million years ,",0, conserv-atively speaking, the last dinosaurs lay down and died-on the ground, be-side rivers, in tar pits. Then, about a hundred years ago, they got back up andhave been pretty busy ever since. Hardly a week goes by that they don't makethe news, because of a new theory about either how they lived or how theydied. There might be word of a new prime-time TV deal, another revelry(Dinofest V is planned for next year), a new exhibit, the goings-on of pale-ontological hunk Paul Sereno, a Spielberg script, a hot toy, a legal disputeabout some bones, an egg.

In America, where dinosaurs do most of their work (and alwayshave), theyperiodically disappear from view and then resurface, like John Travolta orDemocrats, capturing and losing our cycling interest. Dinosaurs are dis-tinctly American, not only because our scholars have so often been at theforefront of fossil discoveries and paleontological theory but because thepopular dinosaur is a wholly owned projection of the nationalist psyche ofthe United States. Their periodic rebirth in pop culture neatly signals deeptectonic shifts in our sense of ourself asa country. Even glancing appearancescan be telling. After Newt Gingrich rampaged through the House of Rep-resentatives and seized power in 1994, he placed a skull ofT. rex in his of-fice. When the current resident of the White House got a new dog, he calledhim, strangely, "Barney"-a name most closely associated with a phony di-nosaur who masks his cheerful dimness with sticky compassion.

It's been almost exactly a century since the first one stood up in NewYork City amid a Miramaxian media circus, and, bookending nicely, weseem to be in the clutches of another rage. One recent estimate assertsthat there are probably more dinosaurs on the earth now than there werein the Mesozoic Era. The current rate of finding new species is one everyseven weeks. Half of all the known dinosaurs have been discovered in thelast few decades. What really marks our era are the new tools-amino-acid mapping, the CAT scan, treadmill-energetics studies-that permit usonce again to read meaning in the bones and to imagine the world thatwas when they held up flesh.

Determining the causes of America's periodic obsession with dinosaurs istricky. They have done a lot of heavy lifting, culturewise. Besides in children'snarratives (where dinosaurs still rule the world), they have served as politi-cal totems, deranged kitsch, icons of domesticated terror, cultural mules for

Jack Hitt is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.

ESSAY 33

GOING IN AND OUT OF FASHION,

DINOSAURS ARE CREATIONS OF

OUR OWN MAKING AS MUCH AS

THAT OF PALEONTOLOGISTS

Darwin's (still) troubling theory, and environmental Cassandras resurrectedto act out her famous final words, "I will endure to die."

In the pop-culture chaos that is uniquely our own and that swirls aroundpaleontology's quiet drudgery, certain dinosaurs burble up to the top of ourcelebrity-oriented mass-media-marketplace mosh pit to float about in plainview, gazed upon by everyone. And we the people elevate them out of thatfrenzy as surely and by the same circuitously collective route as we do RickyMartin, Stone Phillips, Cameron Diaz, or Tom Wolfe. Going in and out offashion, these giants are creations of our own making as much as the pale-ontologists', perhaps more so. In demanding to see them, we sculpt their mean-ing; like outsized Schrodinger's cats, their existence depends on whether ornot we have decided to look at them.

None of these gargantuans has been more gawked at than Tyrannosaurusrex, the Mick Jagger of dinosaurs. And yet he's been absent on the nation-al stage lately (as if he were off in rehab plotting his comeback tour), andthere's a reason. Controversial scholarship has turned up a new interpreta-tion of how the great meat-eater lived, and it is so at odds with T. rex's

public persona that even scholars hate totalk about him anymore. In a sense, thescientific reality of the King of the TyrantLizards has laid bare our symbolic uses ofhim. So T. is in hiding.

Developed by the self-credentialed icon-oclast jack Homer, the theory holds that T.was not the great predator who maraudedthrough primordial landscapes but rather aslow, putzy scavenger that poked aroundthe Cretaceous countryside in search ofmaggoty carrion.

Homer can mount a great deal of tech-nical evidence to prove that T. was nohunter, and I have seen him tum an audi-ence completely around in an hour. T. haddensely muscled legswith calves the lengthofhis thighs, which are good for walking butlousyfor pouncing. T. had poor eyesight, nota great trait, since hunters typically trackprey at twilight. CAT scans of T.'S skullshave revealed massively dominant olfacto-ries; he could smell from as far away as £ifty

to seventy miles, a handy adaptation if the meat you're looking for is mal-odorously ripe.

Famous predators, like lions or velociraptors, have powerful forearms tocatch their lunch or to hold their prey while they rip fresh muscle from thebone with their backlegs.To'sarmswere thalidomidal, about as helpful as hav-ing two fussy little hands growing out of your nipples. "T. rex couldn't evenclap," Homer points out.

T. didn't walk the way every comic book and National Geographicmagazine used to show-upright, head raised, front claws poised-ram-pant, as heraldic buffs say. None of the preserved trackways showing thefootprints of theropods (To's family) have an impression of a dragging tailbetween them. Rather T. probably waddled, like the ten-ton vulture hewas, tail straight out, body parallel to the ground like a ... I believe theheraldic term is wuss.

Homer has nothing but critics, and they resist his logic with the willfulstubbornness of biblical creationists weighing the merits of evolutionarytheory. They will admit that T. ambulated like a monstrous sandpiper, butthey insist he was still a predator, dammit. Even though many museumshave reset T. in his new posture, they typically tum the head and openthe jaws, as if he were just glancing at you while racing by en route to

34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OcrOBER 2001 Photographs by David Graham

some old-fashioned predatory mavhem.' Unlike Cretaceous Era dinosaurs,twentieth-century ones do not die easily.

If you ask Homer why early curators first set T. in a predator's stance, he'lltell you it was because the "ceilings in museums were too high and they hadto fill the space." To prove his point, he'll betray an embarrassing secret: theearly curators had to smash and whittle T. rex's bones and then removevertebrae to assemble him into that fighting posture. "There was more Bar-num than science in those earliest displays," Horner says.

"The curators realized it was a spectacle for the nation, and

D that's why T. rex looked the way he did. It was what thecountry wanted to see."

inosaurs had been discovered long before modern America tookup the cause, but they were easily incorporated into nearby myth. NativeAmericans assumed the large bones belonged to the "father of buffaloes." InEngland a 1677 discovery was identified as a "human thigh bone of one ofthe giants mentioned in the Bible." A fossilized trackway in Connecticut ofa giant three-toed creature had long been thought by locals to be that of theavian god Thunderbird until more advanced colonials corrected them to un-derstand that it was the footprint of the "raven of Noah."

It was an English scientist who first announced in 1841 that these giantbone discoveries belonged to some new order of creature he decided to call"dinosauria." And the first full dinosaur, the iguanodon, was an entirelyBritish discovery. But those early dinosaurs say more about the Old World'spinched imagination than about its paleontology. Iguanodon refers to a rep-tile's tooth, and the image the English conjured from those bones was noth-ing more than an obese crocodile on four piano legs. Such are the rhinocer-ine quadrupeds that populate the first dina narrative, Sir Arthur ConanDoyle's The Lost Work!. Until Darwin, one wasn't able, intellectually, to de-scribe a world that didn't already exist. The geological Weltanschauung wasbiblical and stagnant, yet almost immediately it was clear that we had dis-covered a potent new metaphor.

The first big show of dinosaurs opened in England in 1854. To inauguratethe spectacle, the officials risibly set the dinner table inside the recon-structed body of an iguanodon. Later a famous French feast to celebrate thearrival of an American dinosaur included "hors d'oeuvres paleontologiques" and"potage bisque aux Eryonjurassiques." We eat dinosaurs and they eat us. Wepartake of their dinosaurness, they partake of our humanness. From the be-ginning there was a commingling, something vaguely divine. As with Chris-tian communion, we acknowledged our desire to become them by dining onthem while being consumed by them. Theophagy isnot a notion that casuallyerupts in a culture, even kitschily.

Yet the full promise of those early dinosaurs would require New World vi-sion. In 1858 a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvanianamed Joseph Leidy examined an early hadrosaurus discovered in New Jer-sey and came to the revolutionary insight that this monster didn't tread theground like some brute from the bestiary but stood up. Leidy was an early pi-oneer of the new American field "natural history"-the very phrase over-turning the biblical view of the earth as static with a rather New World ide-al of looking at nature as an unfolding story, a "history."

Dinornania's great awakening came at the end of the nineteenth century,and it ultimately took the form of a competition-the Bone Wars-betweenProfessor O. C. Marsh of Yale and Edward Cope of the Philadelphia Acade-

I In Tim Haines's best-selling book, Walking with Dinosaurs, the author tries his handat sustaining T. 's ebbing machismo by using a tactic of contemporary memoir publishing,the sexually explicit detail. In Haines's imagination, here are "fWO T.s doing the nasty:"She raises her railand he approaches quickly from behind. When he attempts to mount her,he uses his tiny forelimbs to steady himself by hooking into the thick hide of her back. Thecoupling is brief, but it is the first of many By staying close, he ... increases his chancesof fertilizing her by mating repeatedly » That's our boy.

EARLY CURATORS HAD TO

SMASH AND WHITTLE T. REX'S

BONES TO ASSEMBLE HIM INTO

THE FAMILIAR FIGHTING STANCE

ESSAY 35

GIVEN THE NATURE OF THE

FIELD, GETTING THE BONES

WRONG IS A FREQUENT CHARGE

AND ALMOST ALWAYS CORRECT

36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OcrOBER 2001

my ofNatural Sciences,They competed in getting biggergrants to mount large-scale expeditions to increasingly more remote outbacks-in order to bribe lo-cals and hire minions (and eventually spies) to find ever bigger bones and in-scribe more and more names in the permanent book of Latinate taxonyms.

These two created an inner tension in paleontology that continues today.Marsh was an establishment figurewho easily ascended into the aerie of acad-eme by becoming a professor at Yale. (His rich uncle George Peabody do-nated the nest egg for the New Haven museum that still carries his name andhouses many of the most famousdinosaur skeletons.) Cope, on the other hand,was a self-educated man who bankrupted himself to finance his excursions.A volatile, excitable, roaming character, Cope was never comfortable withthe institutional positions offered him. In the end, his suspicions of thehighly connected world in which Marsh thrived drove him to James Gor-don Bennett's New York Herald, where he initiated one of the most viciouspersonal attacks in history. He accused Marsh of destroying bones in orderto shore up his reputation, of plagiarizing Cope's intellectual work, and ofstealing and lying.

It may almost be slapstick legend at this point, but the feud was said to havebegun early on in their careers when Marsh publicly noted that Cope hadplaced the head of a plesiosaur on-is there any nice way to tell sombodythis?-the wrong end. (Given the contingent and fragmentary nature ofthe field, getting the bones wrong is naturally a frequent charge and almostalwayscorrect.) Fromthat time on, dinosaurology has been populated by bothMarshite establishmentarians, who strain to lend the discipline the donnishsolemnity of the Old World trivium, and Copean renegades, who invigorateit with the improvisational air of the American hobbyist.

Today's Marshites are institutionalists like John Ostrom of Yaleor even gen-eral paleontologists such as Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard. Copeans (oftenfeeling aggrieved and carrying their flamboyant reputations to faraway insti-tutes) range from autodidact Jack Homer (with the Museum of the Rockiesin Montana) to the now deceased ex-maintenance-man-cum-world-renownedeggshell-expertKarl Hirsch to the well-publicizedcrank Robert Bakker,a pony-tailed paleontologist with a penchant for gaudy Stetsons who was once "un-paid adjunct curator" at the University of Colorado Museum.

The Marshites and the Copeans need each other, though-the former forlegitimizing a discipline populated by weekend enthusiasts and the latter forbringing adventure and creativity to a field that could easily settle into itsown self-contented dust, These two characters are themselves deeply Amer-ican types-the fugitive genius at the frontier goddamning all tradition andthe starchy conformist trying to reconcile a voluble present with a soothingknowable past. It's what gives the stately field its inescapably puerile nature.

Although "paleontology" is a word of scientific distinction,

T the taxon "dinosauria" means "terrible lizard,"a phrase straightfrom the imagination of a five-year-old boy.

he first dinosaur bone ever identified was a huge double ball joint dis-covered in England in 1677. When it was illustrated in 1763, the artistRichard Brookes noted its resemblance to a monstrous pair of testicles.Brookes may have thought it belonged to a well-endowed biblical giant, buthe may just have been goofing around when he named it. Marshites don'tlike to tell this story. But, asW.J.T. Mitchell argues in The Last Dinosaur Book,since it is the first bone ever identified, "by the strictest rules of biologicalnomenclature, Scrotum humanum is the true name of the dinosaur."

Scrotum humanum. Dinosaurology has never been able to quite shake itsJim Carreyness, which may explain why the field attracts so many kids andamateurs. Dinosaur theorists don't need advanced degrees in organic chem-istry or technical prowess with superaccelerators-just a willingness to mas-ter the quite knowable bank of dinosaur findings, a chore that often beginsjust before firstgrade.The professionalwork can begin shortly thereafter. Threeyears ago, a dinosaur expert in New Mexico discovered a new creature in the

Moreno hills and wrote an award-winning book about it-Zuniceratopschristopheri,named for Christopher Wolfe, who was eight yearsold at the time.

Because just what is the intellectual task of paleontologists young and old?To take a few toylike objects-really big, really cool bones-and to imag-ine an entire world. It's a kind of intellectual play that is never troubled bycomparison with any rigorous empirical reality. The only competition issome other imagined world that seems that much more neato.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, people everywhere were hun-gry to see the first inhabitants of this world as they emerged from the myth-ic frontier of the American West. Unlike England's, America's dinosaurs wereeasy to find. The nonacidic prairie soils of the West coupled with constantwind erosions and mild rains meant that at those early dinosaur digs, like Co-mo Bluffand Bone Cabin Quarry, skeletons were often just lying exposed onthe ground. The firstdinosaur to go on tour was a plaster cast of a diplodocus,one of the long-necked sauropods that would eventually become world fa-mous by the name of brontosaurus. For thosewilling to look closely, the connection be-tween emerging American power and the vig-or extant in the skeleton was apparent. Thattraveling dinosaur and a subsequent discoverywere known, scientifically,as Diplodocuscamegiiand Apatosaurus louisae, after their patrons,Andrew and Louise Carnegie.

ew York's American Museum of NaturalHistory unveiled the first permanent display: abrontosaurus in 1905, paired in 1910 with aT.rex. Figuring out how to hold up, say, T. rex's2,000-pound pelvis was a chore. But as luckwould have it, the industrial revolution wasoutfitting every American home with the new-fangled marvel of indoor plumbing. And that'swhat the curators chose-the same L joints,sink traps, U brackets, and threaded pipes thatforged the infrastructure of America's emergingempire alsocantilevered the spines, jaws,breast-plates, and hipbones of those two great beasts.'It wascertainly as much a celebration ofour newpower as it was of the dinosaurs, and right awaythey assumed oddly familiar personalities. Thebrontosaurus wasa long-necked galoot-a cud-chewing, vegetarian, gentle giant. Then justacross the aisle, the psychic opposite: T. rex,frenzied carnivorous killer. An interesting pairthose two, and it is no coincidence that theirerection occurred just before we entered World War I, revealing to the worldthe character of a new global species-the American: A big, dumb rube, un-til provoked-then berserker rage.

It is difficult to imagine the effect those first displays must have had on theminds of our great-grandparents. But consider: You had to make a big trip toNew York to see them. Newspaper descriptions and the occasional picture on-ly stoked the desire to go. Meanwhile, all around you, a greatness was com-ing together-electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, the plane, the car, themovie-and it wasbeing assembledaround, over, and through you into a colos-sus larger than anything since Rome. The emotion that surged when you tilt-

THE STEEL THAT FORGED THE

INFRASTRUCTURE OF AMERICA'S

EMERGING EMPIRE ALSO HELD UP

ITS FIRST DINOSAUR DISPLAYS

2 Those two dinosaurs continue to reside at the American Museum of Natural History. Ina 1995 redesign of the museum's expanded collection, the original duo were set aside in aseparate room-rhe dinosaur of dinosaur exhibits. The original armature still holds up thosebones, and that old blackened plumbing is easily as beautiful as the fossils themselves. Thegreat dinosaurs had lain d01.l1Tl 65 million years ago, and what put them once again on theirfeet? The tensile srrength of Pittsburgh steel.

ESSAY 37

WITH THE RISE OF NAZISM,

PROTECTING OUR DINOSAUR

SKELETONS WAS CONSIDERED A

MATIER OF NATIONAL SECURITY

ed back your head to look at those early dinosaurs was awe, for sure, but it wasalso a suffusedpatriotism. The skeletons gave substance and turgor to a nov-el feeling of giantness that citizens must have felt as they sensed their owninexorable participation in a new American project of pure immensity, anawareness that something dinosaurian in scope was rising up in the world:Thefirst modem superpower.

When the Roaring Twenties were in full swing, adventurer/dino hunterRoy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History (saidto be the model for Indiana Jones) set off for the Gobi Desert in search ofbones. His expedition deployed America's newest projection of twentieth-century power, a fleet of cars. It's not altogether clear that Chapman was be-ing ironic when he announced that the purpose of his trip (paid for by thenew Dodge Motor Company) was "the new conquest of Central Asia."

With the rise ofNazism,our biggestdinosaur skeletons were considered mat-ters of-and never has this phrase sounded so vulnerable-national securi-ty. As a precaution, New York's T. rex was clandestinely removed to a safe

location: Pittsburgh, a place where evenvictorious Nazis might never go.

No sooner had the boys come home in1945 than our Mesozoicdoppelganger beganshouldering a new burden, the A-bomb.American power suddenly seemed "terri-ble" in the "dino" sense-indiscriminate,Oppenheimerish, annihilating. In Japan thepure destructive power of Hiroshima arosechthonically as the incarnation ofAmericanevil. Godzilla: T. rex with a foreign policy(and big forearms). In Hollywood, though,the postwar dinosaur was a means to ex-plore science's limits. It all began with TheBeast from 20,000 Fathoms, which begatKing Dinosaur, The Beast of HoU.owMountain,The Land Unknown, Gorgo, and The LostWorld, among others.

In 20,000 Fathoms an atomic test at theNorth Pole revives a hybridized T. rex(again, big forearms) hell-bent on returningto the place of his birth, the Hudson Riv-er valley-a.k.a. New York City (a storyline more deeply true than Hollywoodwould ever know). At last the authoritiestrap the monster at Coney Island, fore-shadowing by half a century Jurassic Park'smelding of dinosaur and entertainment. Asthe monster ravages his way through the

Tilt-a- Whirl ride, a sharpshooter hits him in the heart with a bullet packedwith "radioactive isotope"-the very substance that revived him and nowdestroys him. The message of all these movies was clear: We can re-animatethe monsters or restore them to the fossilbed. Hiroshima was terrible but con-tainable. Behold, all ye who tremble, the majesty of American might and therighteousness of her restraint.

In the 1950s, as GIs took brides and settled into Levittowns everywhere,the dinosaur, too, was dramatically domesticated. How? One word, Ben-jamin: plastics. With the invention of this new pliable material, anyonecould mold a dinosaur into any imaginable position. Plastic re-animated thedinosaur by putting a kind of flesh back onto those big immobile bones andgiving each of them a smooth synthetic flexibility.This dinosaur stood up near-ly lifesizeat every Sinclair gas station, and miniatures populated the toy sec-tions of the department stores. Severing its umbilical connection to the soberconservatism of paleontology, the dinosaur now entered pop culture as a free

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2001

agent. This was one for the people, the masses-the democrasaurus. Thelate fifties saw the earliest dinosaur trading cards, the first dinosaur stamp, anexplosion of comic books, and welcomed the sixties with The Flintstones.

Plastic wasalso the-unique innovation of postindustrial America, ultimatelyreplacing Mr. Carnegie's steel in our infrastructure and ushering in our tech-nological revolution. Today, scarcely an item on the planet doesn't contain

some. If dinosaurs ruled the earth once, plastic comes close

L to making that claim today. And what is plastic made from?The resurrection couldn't get more literal.

ike everybody else, dinosaurs turned off and dropped out in the six-ties and seventies. There were some minor shifts. It was in this era thatHomer developed his other controversial theory: that dinosaurs parented.Homer is almost single-handedly responsible for getting dinosaurs in touchwith their feminine side. He had discovered some dinosaur eggs and hatch-lings surrounded by fossilized"regurgitated food" and adult dung-the detri-tus of a mother animal caring for its helpless nest-bound offspring. Dinosaurshad come a long way from the macho "terrible lizards" that erupted ab ovo,ready to begin their rampages.One of Homer's discoveries wasMaiasaura (thefirst use of the feminine "a" ending versus the masculine "us"), meaning"good mother lizard." Around this time, in case you don't recall, the hottesttalk-show host was Phil Donahue and the president was Jimmy Carter.

Dinosaurs' next epic pop-cultural leap in the national consciousness wasthe movie}urassic Park. Like every curator before him, Spielberg sensed it wasonce again time to rearrange the Rorschachian bones. The star of that moviewas the velociraptor. The brontosaurus and the T. rex make almost cameoappearances, like Robert Mitchum in the Cape Fear remake-an insider's nodto the grizzled original. The brontosaurus has only one significant scene,sneezing a few gallons of dino snot all over the kids. Still the goofball, afterall these aeons. T. rex assumeshis familiar role as enraged killer, but he's stilla patriot, arriving at the end to save the day, like the cavalry.

And just who was the velociraptor in this 1993 movie? For a dinosaur, hewas small, human-sized, and warm-blooded. The scientist in the film notedits jugular instincts ("lethal at eight months"), cunning ("problem-solvingintelligence"), and strategic adaptability ("they remember"). At a time whenthe Japanese seemed to be taking over the world, we gazed upon a newbeast-the global-business warrior, physically downsized, entrepreneuriallyfleet, rapaciously alert, ready for the dissolution of the nation-state. If the Pa-cific Rim was poised to take over the world, then this dinosaur was our re-sponse; an image that reflected how we conceived of our enemy as much ashow we conceived of our new selves. The old-economy capitalist (T. rex)is there but sidelined, yielding to the distinctive features of the new-econ-omy capitalist-lean, mean, smart, fast, and fatal. Many of the incidental de-scriptions of Jurassic Park's velociraptor could easily be dropped into a For-tune magazine profile of Henry Kravis, "Chainsaw" Al Dunlop, or LarryEllison, without any editing. Even its Latinate name eerily foreshadowed itsfuture metaphorical role. "Velociraptor" means fast-footed thief.

After Jurassic Park's success, the American Museum of Natural Historyshook up the bones once again and then, in 1995, tossed them out into a newdisplay that received widespread praise. What the visitor sees is very much anew world, fully reimagined as a time of environmental balance. Thesedinos are shown in familial clusters, in mini-dioramas under glass. Many aresmall and seem as approachable in their outsized terrariums as gerbils in a sub-urban den. They are poised not to kill but to mate and to remind us, as theDisney movies do, of the Great Circle of Life. One display comes across likean intact family brimming with centrist heterosexual values-a mom and poppsittacosauri, plus three little hatchling psitts, gathered together, possiblyontheir way to church. A rare dinosaur fetus is also on display. The sum totalpoints toward a very Al Gore-like dinosaur-the ecosaur.

At least, I think that's what it means. In these tenuous epistemological days,

IN THE 19505 THE DINOSAUR

SEVERED ITS CONNECTION TO

SOBER PALEONTOLOGY, ENTERING

POP CULTURE AS A FREE AGENT

ESSAY 39