May 14, 2012
A Miniature Dinosaur Celebrity
The decaying head of King Kong's Brontosaurus, as seen at The Dinosaur Museum. Photo by the author.
The Dinosaur Museum, tucked away a few blocks from Blanding, Utah’s main drag, is an unusual place. Intricately detailed sculptures stand next to casts of fossils, full-size paintings of skeletons and various bits of dinosauriana, mixed together to create rooms full of competing dinosaur images. But I didn’t expect to run into a minor dinosaur celebrity in the galleries. Displayed in a small glass case were the decaying remains of King Kong‘s “Brontosaurus.”
I had almost forgotten about the stop-motion dinosaur. In the original, 1933 King Kong, the sharp-toothed sauropod made a brief appearance as a terrifying, carnivorous swamp monster. Worst of all, the dinosaur was just as dangerous on land as in the water. After wrecking the expedition’s boats, the Brontosaurus shuffled after the fleeing humans and nabbed one crew member dumb enough to think you can escape a long-necked dinosaur by climbing a tree.
But that wasn’t the model’s only appearance. The same model was employed in Son of Kong, a hastily created sequel to the initial hit, released a scant nine months after the first film. And the Brontosaurus was made to do double duty. Not only did the Brontosaurus make a brief cameo at the end of the movie, but the film’s special effects creators refashioned the model into a gnarly sea monster.
Today, this piece of Hollywood memorabilia looks even more monstrous. Time has not been kind to the dinosaur. The fabricated flesh has decayed from around the model’s mouth, eyes and neck, making the dinosaur look even more angry than it ever appeared on film. The sauropod was always meant to be scary, but it looks even more intimidating as a tattered cinema zombie.
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I think that’s what a dinosaur zombie would look like.
Ironically, the “terrifying carnivorous swamp creature” brontosaurus of King Kong is probably more accurate than the “cowasaurus” purely vegetarian brachiosaurs of Jurassic Park who ignored the little kids feeding them branches. Every biologist knows that virtually every, mostly vegetarian bird is still ominivorous, and won’t hesistate to eat any animal, grub or insect they are able to swallow, so why wouldn’t this be the same for their archosaurian cousins? And why is it impossible for a Brontosaurus to wade in the water once in a while? Elephants get to wade even though they are not aquatic creatures, so why would any paleontologist believe a brontosaurus couldn’t? If anything, King Kong was way ahead of the scientific literature of that period, in that the brontosaurus proved to be an active land animal chasing down small creatures. If it were real, I am sure those Brachiosaurs of Jurassic Park would have loved gobbling up those soft little packets of protein that we know as ‘children’, that so temptingly dangled in front of them.
Sometimes the comments made on this blog are so ridiculous that it is hard to imagine they are supposed to be made by a serious paleontologist.
@Dan Peterson
Seriously, what’s your problem? You’re always complaining about Switek’s blog posts, either nitpicking every little insignificant detail or (in this case) putting words in his mouth: 1stly, if you actually knew what you were talking about, you’d know that Switek isn’t a paleontologist (The “About Brian Switek” page isn’t that hard to see) nor has he ever claimed to be; 2ndly, Switek didn’t say anything about KK’s accuracy nor did he say anything about JP at all. In other words, you’re just complaining for the sake of complaining & thus wasting everyone else’s time.