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Henry Gee wrote: > I remain puzzled why dinosaurs attract such attention. Why no > panderichthyidfest, agnostidfest, multituberculatefest, > coccolithophoroidfest, mesonychidfest, ctenocystoidfest, > seymouriamorphfest, [insert-your-favourite-group]-fest? Not that I > demand any of these things, of course. > > I find dinosaurs, although lots of fun, I think this answers most of your question. Two other factors: The popular ones are big and different (I saw 2 year old absolutely stricken with our T rex mount yesterday); and certainly the media hammer it home. When I was a kid, I loved to fish, but I made clay dinosaurs from drawings in books. Later, I gave them both up for forams???!!! conceptually less interesting > than some other extinct groups, but that's just a personal thing. As a > kid I found fossil fish much more fun, and I can't explain why -- > perhaps the displays at the Natural History Museum seemed nicer to a > five-year-old. No fishing pole? > > I suspect media interest picks up the interest in dinosaurs that > exists, thus fuelling more interest, generating a recursive positive > Fisherian runaway feedback loop out of all proportion to reason, > expectation or the dictates of common sense. True, but since they've done it, let's capture some of it. > > It would be a shame to give young minds the impression that dinosaurs > are all that paleontology has to offer. I don't buy the usual line > that kids get into dinosaurs first and branch out into less trendy > fossils once their interest is whetted. Absolutely. Non-paleo writers seem to think that's all there is. They need our help. I'm not sure they branch out into other fossils very often (and that's probably good, given the market for paleontologists), but we might teach them a little sci. reasoning. > > By the way, I finally got round to seeing the Lost World. I'm glad > that the script stayed relatively far away from Crichton's book (very > poor, I thought), and made a film which I thought was better than > Jurassic Park in many respects. Well, I'm sure glad I didn't read the book then. I thought the movie was sooo bad. A bunch of paleo cowboys with a tranquilized Bob chasing dinos around, the bad guys getting it, and finally the southern California Godzilla scenes. The original Lost World and Godzilla were better. Only purpose with this Crichton movie was to make a buck. Like one of the executives of Disney said, "If you've got a dollar, we want it".
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