Re: Dinofest '98

[Graham Budd <palgb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Lars Werdelin wrote:

> Henry Gee wrote:
>      
> >     I find dinosaurs, although lots of fun, 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. 
> 
> 
> Hear hear. The popular perception seems to be that an interest in dinosaurs
> is (could be) a pathway to a more general interest in paleontology. I wonder
> how true that is in practice. My experience is that dinosaurs are more of an
> infatuation with kids and not a symptom of an interest in paleontological
> things per se. It would be interesting to know what led those people into
> it, who actually made a career of paleontology. I, like Henry Gee, found
> fish (and mammals) more interesting than dinosaurs as a child,

And I found fossil invertebrates more interesting than either.
Finding a fine fossil _Micraster_ was about one of the most exciting 
things I can remember doing as a child...hmm, is
the subject you end up studying somehow genetically determined??  What I
find slightly worrying about dinosaurs is (with no offence meant to
dino-workers) that the media coverage of them may do us more harm than
good.  For a start, if you read a book like the Lost World, it gives an
almost explicit impression that all that palaeontologists study is the
Dinosauria (or perhaps humans too, if anyone has read the truly dreadful
_Neanderthal_).  Further, media coverage often gives the impression of
opinionated, egotistical prima donnas = average palaeontologist (hmm, but
perhaps...?). Overall, my impression is that the dino-coverage means:
palaeontology isn't a serious science, more of a self-indulgent hobby
that eccentrics indulge themselves in.  Now, this might be true up to a
point (and I have no wish to appear stuffy: but then, I'm not really in a
position to...), but when one thinks of all the exciting things
palaeontology actually gets up to - one thinks of the tremendous synergy
going on at the moment between palaeontology and developmental genetics
(see this week's Nature review article, for example), then the whizz-bang
dino-coverage seems to sell us a bit short, somehow.  But it's not just
the interactions with modern biology.  The real 'Lost World' is the one
that has been painstakingly reconstructed out of the dust by
palaeontologists: imagine looking in an encyclopedia for 'the history of
life' and finding blank pages: no Jurassic seas, no Cambrian explosion, no
Permian extinction.  And it is these events - inclšuding the life and time
of the dinosaurs - which palaeontologists have something of a duty to make
accessible to the wider public: after all, withoušt us, non of it would
exist.  So I personally find palaeontology in all its varied aspects much
much more interesting than the 'dig up bones' (and it is always
bones)/'argue about them afterwards' picture given in the media.  On the
other hand, I suppose I too am somewhat biased...  


Now no more waxing,

Graham Budd