The Pre-Modern History of the Post-Modern Dinosaur: Phases and Causes in Post-Darwinian Dinosaur Art

Abstract

Our images of dinosaurs have changed greatly and repeatedly since the group was first recognized in 1842. Although these changes have frequently been noted, their causes have not been adequately investigated. The history of dinosaur iconography since the publication of the Origin of Species can be usefully divided into at least four phases. During each of these phases, images of dinosaurs have been affected as much by what scientists thought dinosaurs should look like according to their particular views of the evolutionary process, as by empirical information derived from analysis of fossils. In the late nineteenth century, when paleontological views of evolution were diverse, views of dinosaurs were highly pluralistic, with some seen as slow and ponderous and others seen as agile and active. In the early twentieth century, as paleontological opinions about evolution narrowed around progressive orthogenesis, the spectrum of images narrowed to a view of almost all dinosaurs as primitive, slow, and stupid. The advent of the modern synthetic view of evolution in the 1940s had little effect on dinosaur science, and it was not until the late 1960s that dinosaurs would be viewed as advanced in many respects, harkening back to ideas first put forward just after Darwin.

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