September 28, 2011
The Terrible Dinosaurs of the 1970s
Old dinosaurs have a way of hanging on. New discoveries are announced every week, and our understanding of how dinosaurs actually lived is constantly changing, but the public image of dinosaurs doesn’t always keep up with the pace of scientific discovery and debate. I was reminded of this tension after stumbling upon a short, 1970 documentary called Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards.
Dinosaurs regularly popped up during my early elementary school education. From preschool through third grade, at least, dinosaurs made a cameo or more during the school year, and I remember at least one field trip to see the animatronic dinosaurs at the Monmouth Museum in central New Jersey. The dinosaurs jerked and bellowed, as the robotic creatures are wont to do, but what really stuck with me was seeing Dinosaurs: The Terrible Lizards in one of the museum’s little alcoves. Animatronic dinosaurs were nice and all, but in the era before computer-generated dinosaurs were the rule, the stop-motion dinosaurs in the film were the closest thing to seeing the real animals come alive.
Created by special effects artist Wah Chang, the dinosaurs of the short film were as I had always known them. They dragged their tails, moved slowly and were generally covered in a drab palette of muted greens, browns, greys and reds. All the standard behavioral tropes were there, too: “Brontosaurus” lived near the side of the swamp, hadrosaurs escaped danger by fleeing into the water and Tyrannosaurus was such a force of destruction that not even the armor of ankylosaurs could stop it. In some cases, the film looked like the paintings of 20th century paleo artist Zdeněk Burian come to life, and since Burian’s art filled many of my dinosaur books I had no reason to think that scientists had already eviscerated this older image of slow, stupid dinosaurs.
I can’t blame the creators of the original film for portraying the 20th century image of dinosaurs as plodding, dim-witted animals. That was the general view at the time the movie was made. But the film was still playing in the museum I visited in 1990. By this time the scientific “Dinosaur Renaissance” had already been in full swing for well over a decade, but the big-time dinosaur image shift hadn’t happened yet. The dinosaurs in the 1970 video fit in perfectly with the ones I saw in museum displays, books and in the classroom. I had little understanding of just how much had changed since the time the stop-motion film was made.
Even though we’re not due for another wholesale shift in our understanding of dinosaurs, I think that we’re still suffering from the same science communication problems. Science continues, but library books and museum displays continue to present outdated information. That’s just the way things go, yet this fact is especially frustrating during a time when discovery and discussion are accelerating. How many students are initially meeting outdated dinosaurs, rather than the dinosaurs we know now?
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I’m sorry, but I don’t see a problem here. I can’t comprehend that with all the CGI dinosaurs that saturate modern media that some kid is going to see old dinosaur portrayals in museums and libraries and not find them quaint and amusing.
What’s more, I think there’s a faction of paleo people who have no little appreciation for their own history. Instead of a crusade to purge libraries and museums of historic interpretation of paleontology (and other sciences), I think these old resources should not only be preserved, but used to show how science works. The Field Museum has Charles R. Knight murals with old interpretations gracing the walls of their Evolving Planet exhibit. The very latest CGI animations and fossil reconstructions are displayed in contrast to obsolete, but beautiful visions of Earth’s past. The contrast is explained in the exhibit and it teaches that science is a process and that interpretation is necessarily the weakest part of science. Even the latest and greatest interpretations.
An example of the sad results of the modern-only mindset is the repainted Sinclair stegosaurus that has been installed next to the remodeled Dinosaur National Monument Quarry. This historic model in the old-school, tail-dragging, low-postured 1964 interpretation has been given a neo-paleo hipster paint job that is both comic and sad. Instead of respecting the original artwork and interpreting it, we get a literal surface makeover that serves neither science education nor the history of paleontology. This is no different than it would be to hire artists to retouch the old Knight murals with modern color speculation and a dash of feathers here and there.
I think a callous disregard for the history of paleontology and an insensitivity to visions past is a much bigger problem than having kids occasionally come across dinosaur visions that most will surely laugh at. Working as a volunteer in a public paleo lab, I can assure you that kids are far more advanced than you give them credit for. I’ve yet to meet one who doesn’t know more modern dinosaur names than I do.
These look an awful lot like the puppets animated on the mid-70′s cartoon Land of the Lost, I wonder if there is any connection.
ummmm, Brian, I hate to tell you this but prehistoric trackways PROVE that dinosaurs sometimes did drag their tails.
And I understand that some of the latest computer models DO conclude that T-Rex indeed had to “plod” along rather slowly.
And it probably was a good idea for some dinosaurs to have skins in muted, camouflage colors, just like MANY archosaurs living today.
And were dinosaurs really “dumber” in the 1970′s? Let’s try not to take the intellectual velociraptors of Jurassic Park too seriously.
And where do people get the idea that reptiles are so slow. I rembmer reading in books as a kid that a crocodile could outrun a man for short distances. And anyone who ever saw most liards in the wild would say that they are among the very fastest of land vertebrates.
So honestly, where do you get this stuff about the “old, slow, stupid dinosaurs”?