The reign of the dinosaurs came to a cataclysmic halt 65m years ago, but as any parent knows, it’s another story altogether among the under 10s. Pirates and unicorns may come and go in popularity, but the likes of T-rex and diplodocus rule eternal, adorning backpacks and wellies, lunch boxes and pencil cases. In our house, it began with a dinosaur-themed painting smock. Next came books, models, sparkly dino hair clips. Before I knew it, my daughter and I were holidaying on the Jurassic Coast.
On Charmouth Beach, where Mary Anning once hunted fossils, the weather this August was cool and damp. Elsewhere in the world, however, the heavens unleashed flash floods, fires blazed and the mercury rocketed to life-endangering highs. And pestilence, needless to say, was everywhere. Against such a tattoo of planetary crisis, devotion to long-gone titans seemed freshly melancholic—all the more so because it took the form of haphazardly whacking rocks that had been minding their own business for millennia.
We are still drawn to dinosaurs as adults—they’ve been a cultural touchstone since dinomania first gripped the Victorians. Their remains attract the language of the epic, inspiring tales of giant warriors and “thunderbirds” long before scientists began to assemble towering skeletons. But how does their meaning change as we gaze down the barrel of a sixth mass extinction, one in which the future of our species looks challenged? At this dicey moment in our history, there are new reasons to be captivated by awesome creatures that failed to withstand their own existential threat.
The word dinosaur, which combines the Greek words for “terrible” and “lizard,” was coined by Richard Owen in 1840, just as industrialisation—a kind of war on nature, it now seems—began picking up its pace, and appetite was quickening not just for fossils but for fossil fuels. We’ve gone heavy on the “terrible” bit ever since. Despite the current boom in paleontology, our understanding of all things Mesozoic is incomplete. How telling, then, that we’ve chosen to depict dinosaurs as so relentlessly violent, celebrating less the lumbering herbivores than the swift, carnivorous killers.
The recent addition of feathers or new evidence of a maternal side, like the nest of an oviraptor (mistakenly maligned by its name as an egg thief, it turns out) whose fossilised brood were found arranged in a tidy circle—hasn’t done much to soften their image. Predictably, a teaser for Jurassic World: Dominion is all teeth, earth-juddering footfall and head-smashing battle. Is there a cathartic element to the spectacle? Perhaps, by making these colossi nature’s enemies when our own footprint is causing far worse devastation, we can enjoy the release of the scapegoating ritual.
Another strand of our obsession is the idea that we might flesh out the bones we dig up and bring these beasts back to life, conquering that final frontier: extinction. At once hubristic and yet rueful, it promises a cosmic do-over, in which recently done-for species like the splendid poison frog or the golden bamboo lemur might be “resurrected” alongside dinosaurs. And if we pull off that trick, mightn’t we be able to escape our own doom and attain species immortality?
Aside from cinema’s roaring furies, the afterlife conferred by commercialised childhood attachment is the closest we’ve come to resurrecting these reptilian monsters. It’s easy to understand the appeal they hold for small kids. They elicit a breathless mix of wonderment and awe, provoking more than a frisson of fear for having once been real, no matter how cartoonishly they’re rendered.
According to paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that pretty much sums up their traditional appeal among adults, too. Dinosaurs are “big, fierce, extinct—in other words, alluringly scary, but sufficiently safe.” But what made them feel safe in 1995, when those words were written, is also what makes them so poignant today. The largest of these animals were the size of aeroplanes; the longevity of their dominance reduces the entirety of human history to a blink of a triceratops’s eye. And yet more than anything, they’re becoming emblematic of the innate fragility of life on earth.
Of course, they didn’t all die out. You might have trouble convincing a five-year-old of it but birds, technically, are living dinosaurs. Next year, perhaps we’ll leave the Jurassic rockhounds to it and spend our summer holiday twitching instead. I’m sure I can find some dino-covered kids’ binoculars.
