Dinomania:  Why We Love, Fear And Are Utterly Enchanted By Dinosaurs, by Boria Sax

For a variety of reasons, most books about dinosaurs spent a lot of time talking about evolution (something this book does) but spend little time talking about the history of views about dinosaurs.  This author, on the other hand, is immensely interested (if not always approving of) the way that dinosaurs have been viewed in public culture from ancient times to contemporary times.  One can see ancient imaginary creatures that appear in some way inspired by dinosaurs, including the widespread historical interest in dragons.  The author is certainly free with his criticism about much portrayal of dinosaurs, which he calls kitsch, and he at least struggles to wrestle with the reason why the evolutionary worldview has done such a poor job at countering the native (and proper) human tendency to anthropomorphize other beings as a way of showing approval of and understanding of something.  It would appear, whatever that says about us, that in order for us to empathize with something and understand something that we must view it in our own image and likeness, which is one of the more unsettling and obvious demonstrations of imago dei that the author is disinclined to wrestle with.

This particular book is about 250 pages and contains eight chapters that are full of odd material, including a great dela of material about dinosaurs in advertising as well as sculpture parks that have dinosaur statues.  The first part of the book looks at the discovery of dragon bones all over the world and the way that dinosaurs entered into the public consciousness before dinosaurs were viewed as creatures of deep time (1).  After that the author views how dragons became dinosaurs over the course of the 19th century (2).  He looks at the earliest dinosaurs and the way that they were portrayed in Victorian art and sculpture as a way of better understanding the popular conception of dinosaurs (3) and also discusses the shift in how dinosaurs have been viewed from the Crystal Palace in the 1850’s to their appearance in Jurassic Park (4).  The author talks about the dinosaur renaissance (5), the way that dinosaurs are a totem of modernity and its fears and anxieties (6), the way that dinosaurs and their fate have led to the expression of a great deal of fears about extinction (7), and the way that our conception of the past is a dinocentric world in the same sort of way that our contemporary world is portrayed as anthrocentric.

In reading this book, it is pretty easy to understand why it is that we are so fond of dinosaurs.  In many ways, we view them as being creatures like ourselves, cute, somewhat intelligent, occasionally predatory, and deeply interested in questions of power.  The fact that there is no chance, outside of some particularly harrowing attempts at genetic engineering, that we will ever encounter dinosaurs makes it easier to project our own sense of dominance and our own fears of self-destruction onto them.  None of this is exactly new, but this book does at least manage to address the importance of dinosaurs in popular culture and the way that unlearned people who are interested in dinosaurs generally are at least as up-to-date if they want to be with the cutting edge research in the field.  The author is also interested in the question of scientific revolutions and the fragmentary nature of understanding about dinosaurs, and though the author isn’t the most sympathetic of people when it comes to popular conceptions of dinosaurs, by at least addressing popular culture and religious past, the author does a better job than most regarding the subject.