A member of a group of extinct reptiles—which includes many giant specimens—whose gradual revelation has been the aspect of *palaeontology that has gripped the popular imagination more intently than any other. The term was coined in 1841 by Richard Owen to describe a new order of reptiles, whose first specimens had been identified in the 1820s and which was detailed in Geoffrey St. Hilaire’s Recherches sur de Grands Sauriens (1831). In 1887, Harry Groves Seeley divided dinosaursinto two orders, the lizardlike Saurischia and the bird-like Ornithischia. Pterosaurs, icthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs—all of which had been discovered in the decade immediately preceding the discovery of the first dinosaur—are usually accommodated to the category in popular representations. Thedinosaurs originated in the late Triassic period, some two hundred million years ago, and lived through the succeeding Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, before disappearing some sixty-five million years ago.
Dinosaurs became the most charismatic of all extinct creatures, and the unfolding narrative of their diversity became a considerable inspiration to the literary imagination. The spectacular size and forms of the most famous specimens—including the stegosaurus, the brontosaurus, the diplodocus, and the triceratops—prompted popular parlance to develop the notion that giant dinosaurs had ‘‘ruled the Earth’’ for 150 million years; the naming of Tyrannosaurus rex, which became the greatest saurian celebrity of all, added a curious official endorsement to this analogy of majesty. The popular excitement generated by dinosaurs is evident in the fact that the discovery of the first American specimens in 1855 quickly gave rise to a fervent competition between the rival ‘‘dinosaur hunters’’, Edwin Drinker Cope and his one-time associate Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor of palaeontology at Yale. Their feud is dramatised in Sharon N. Farber’s alternative history story ‘‘The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi’’ (1988).
The apparent abruptness of the dinosaurs’ ultimate demise attracted a variety of *catastrophist explanations—including I. S. Shklovskii’s suggestion that they might have been killed by ultraviolet radiation after the destruction of the ozone layer by charged particles from a supernova—before a 1980 paper in Science by Luis and Walter Alvarez, F. Asaro, and H. V. Michel argued that the presence of iridium in the boundary layer marking the end of the Cretaceous was evidence for the impact of an asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter, which might have prompted the volcanic eruptions associated with the Deccan Traps in India and blasted enough dust into the atmosphere to precipitate a worldwide ecocatastrophe. A half-submerged crater some 180 kilometers in diameter, found at Chicxulub on the coast of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, was widely hailed as the ‘‘smoking gun’’ proving the Alvarez hypothesis (although it might be more appropriately compared to an exit wound).
The gradual realisation that the long evolutionary history of the dinosaurs had been one of continual change, associated with the gradual breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea and the development of flowering plants, supplemented catastrophist accounts of their tribulations with uniformitarian accounts of a long war of attrition between lumbering exothermic reptiles and sprightly endothermic mammals, but that narrative too was subverted when Robert T. Bakker argued that many dinosaurs were, in fact, endothermic— a thesis popularised by Adrian J. Desmond’s The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs (1977). Bakker followed up his own account of The Dinosaur Heresies (1986; rev. 2001) with the documentary fiction Raptor Red (1996); his argument lent support to the notion that the group had not been wiped out at all, the bird-like Ornithischia being the ancestors of modern birds. The principal problem afflicting the fictional representation of dinosaurs is that of bridging the temporal gap that separates them from human observers. Stories that adopt dinosaur viewpoints, such as Harley S. Aldinger’s ‘‘The Way of a Dinosaur’’ (1928), Duane N. Carroll’s ‘‘When Reptiles Ruled’’ (1935), and Fredric Brown’s ‘‘Starvation’’ (1942), have limited appeal, and stories that feature extraterrestrial visitors to the Mesozoic Earth, such as Philip Barshovsky’s ‘‘One Prehistoric Night’’ (1935), are similarly esoteric. Early fiction featuring dinosaurs usually cast them as exotic survivors lurking in remote enclaves, as in Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; trans. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Robert Duncan Milne’s ‘‘The Iguanodon’s Egg’’ and ‘‘The Hatching of the Iguanodon’’ (both 1882), E. Douglas Fawcett’s Swallowed by an Earthquake (1894), Wardon Allan Curtis’ ‘‘The Monster of Lake La Mettrie’’ (1899), Charles Derennes’ Le peuple du poˆle (1907), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912).
Although the Verne and Doyle classics became significant models for imitation in boys’ books and pulp adventure fiction, including numerous fantasies by Edgar Rice Burroughs, this tradition grew thinner as the twentieth century progressed, eventually receiving nostalgic treatment in Greg Bear’s sequel to The Lost World, Dinosaur Summer (1998). Such survivals were, however, extensively featured in the ‘‘fringe science’’ of cryptozoology, marine species akin to dinosaurs being routinely cited as hypothetical explanations of mythical lake creatures like the Loch Ness monster, but the possibility that dinosaur numbers might one day increase again is rarely entertained; Terence Roberts’ Report on the Status Quo (1955) treats the notion satirically. An enclave of Cretaceous dinosaurs in the Palaeolithic era is featured in Piers Anthony’s Orn (1971).
When twentieth-century science fiction pressed the facilitating device of time travel into use, the age of the dinosaurs became one of the standard destinations of time machines. The prospect of hunting dinosaurs exerted a particular fascination, reflected in Eden Phillpotts’ ‘‘The Archdeacon and the Deinosaurs’’ (1901), Ray Bradbury’s ‘‘A Sound of Thunder’’ (1952), L. Sprague de Camp’s ‘‘A Gun for Dinosaur’’ (1956) and its sequels, Brian W. Aldiss’ ‘‘Poor Little Warrior!’’ (1958), and several novels by the French writer Henri Vernes, including Les chasseurs de dinosaures (1965; trans. as The Dinosaur Hunters). The imagery of the hunting party continued to crop up in such stories as David Drake’s Time Safari (1982; rev as Tyrannosaur, 1994).
Other notable expeditions to the era are described in Pauline Ashwell’s ‘‘The Wings of a Bat’’ (1966) and ‘‘Boneheads’’ (1996)—both by-lined Paul Ash— Steven Utley’s ‘‘Getting Away’’ (1976), Harry Turtledove’s ‘‘Hatching Season’’ (1985), Tim Sullivan’s ‘‘Dinosaur on a Bicycle’’ (1987), Joseph H. Delaney’s ‘‘Survival Course’’ (1989), Robert J. Sawyer’s End of an Era (1994), Stephen Dedman’s ‘‘Target of Opportunity’’ (1998), and Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth (2002). In Charles L. Harness’s time travel fantasy ‘‘A Boost in Time’’ (2000), an asteroid diverter is used in an attempt to save the dinosaurs from extinction. John *Taine’s Before the Dawn (1934) is painstakingly restrained in employing a technology that can merely see through time, while Robert Chilson’s The Shores ofKansas (1976) features parapsychological exploration.
Cinema, with its ready-made accommodation of impossibility, saw no need for such facilitating devices as time travel; the anachronistic representation of prehistoric men living alongside dinosaurs became so commonplace as to rate as a cliche´, and one of the most glaring of all ‘‘scientific errors’’ in cinematic science fiction. D. W. Griffith’s blithely absurd Man’s Genesis (1912) was remade by Hal Roach as One Million B.C. (1940; aka Man and His Mate and The Cave Dwellers) and as a straightforward drama by Britain’s Hammer films as One Million Years B.C. (1966), although the juxtaposition reverted to joke status thereafter, in such parodies as A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1991) and a sequence of TV commercials for Volvic mineral water (2004–2005). The notion of dinosaur ‘‘survivals’’ acquired a spectacular new variant when the possibility of ‘‘resurrecting’’ dinosaurs by *cloning their DNA was raised by L. Sprague de Camp in ‘‘Employment’’ (1939). An article by Charles Pellegrino prompted Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park (1990), which was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1993; other dramatisations of the notion include Gregory Benford’s ‘‘Shakers of the Earth’’ (1992). Tiny dinosaurs had previously ‘‘synthesised’’ from bone fragments in Brian W. Aldiss’ ‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart Machine’’ (1968). Other images of present-day dinosaurs include Allen Steele’s ‘‘Trembling Earth’’ (1990). The notion that dinosaur evolution might have continued had it not been for their catastrophic destruction, so that they rather than their mammal rivals became ancestral to an intelligent species, is elaborately explored in numerous exobiological fantasies and alternative prehistory stories, including Norman L. Knight’s ‘‘Saurian Valedictory’’ (1939), Anne McCaffrey’s Dinosaur Planet (1978), Damien Broderick’s The Dreaming Dragons (1980), David F. Bischoff and Thomas F. Monteleone’s series begun with Day of the Dragonstar (1983), Harry Harrison’s series begun with West of Eden (1984), Ward Hawkins’ Red Star Burning (1985), Barry B. Longyear’s The Homecoming (1989), Robert J. *Sawyer’s Quintaglio trilogy (1992–1994), James Kelly’s ‘‘Think Like a Dinosaur’’ (1995), Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep (2000), Stephen Baxter’s ‘‘The Hunters of Pangaea’’ (2002), and Kathleen Ann Goonan’s ‘‘Dinosaur Songs’’ (2004).
The notion of alternative dinosaurs, including intelligent species, was extensively developed in Dougal Dixon’s illustrated book The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution (1988). It achieved best-seller status in a similar format in James Gurney’s Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1993), in which dinosaur intelligence does not require any modification of the familiar forms. Dinotopia’s abundant spinoff included Gurney’s own sequel Dinotopia: The World Beneath (1995), Alan Dean Foster’s Dinotopia Lost (1996), and a TV miniseries (2002). In combination with a spinoff from Jurassic Park, such material constituted a significant fad, satirised in Ian McDowell’s ‘‘Bernie’’ (1994) and in Richard Chwedyk’s account of the marketing of cute miniaturised ‘‘saurs’’ in ‘‘The Measure of All Things’’ (2001) and its sequels.
