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The latest four letter word of Four Letter Word season, and following suitably from the last episode about park, is dino. 'Dinosaur' is derived from Greek 'terrible lizard', and they could have called it 'whopping great lizard' or 'sublime lizard' or 'hey cool lizard', but no. TERRIBLE.

Professor Hannah McGregor of Material Girls podcast and author of the book Clever Girl: Jurassic Park explains humans' relationship with language for dinosaurs, and why 'terrible' might be a perfect choice.

Excuse me, real quick, I just have to tell you about Souvenirs

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Excuse me, real quick, I just have to tell you about Souvenirs 📢

TOMORROW, ie 22 July, at 4pm UK time, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting (and internetting) Martin’s and my piece Souvenirs, a sort of tragicomic essay/documentary/musical? about the two friends who around 1900 founded the groundbreaking Doves Press then almost immediately had a big falling out and spent more than a decade fighting over their in-house typeface. And THEN things got weird. If you like stories about history and/or petty revenge and/or Spice Girls, this is for you.

It’s some of my best work - I give it 7.8 out of 10 - and I’d love for you to listen to it, via radio or BBC website or BBC Sounds (it’ll be on there for a while after, I’m not sure how long). We're also having a live listening party during the broadcast in the Allusioverse Discord, so what a great time to join: theallusionist.org/donate. You also get behind the scenes scoops about the making of every episode, livestreams with me and my collection of dictionaries, perks at live shows, the company of your fellows in the Allusioverse Discord, and watchalongs eg currently the new season of Great British Sewing Bee. And, you're keeping this independent podcast going, which is great use of your money, SO much better than spending it on cloning dinosaurs and an island to keep them on.

MORE DINO INFO:

🦕 “The objective on the Jurassic Park cover… was to make it look like a book about dinosaurs that hopefully didn’t look like any book about dinosaurs you had ever seen. Since we were kids, we had all enjoyed ‘artists’ conceptions’ of what these animals might have looked like, but they inevitably came off as fake, because so much had to be built from the imagination. I decided to start with what was real, what we knew actually existed, and fill in just enough of the blanks to make it plausible yet unique.”
🦖 "The available evidence would suggest that none of these animals — none of the theropod dinosaurs — should have their teeth sticking out of their mouths. They look more ferocious that way but that's probably not real."
🦕 “Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) was one of the most famous comparative anatomists of his time. Not only did he instigate the separation of the British Museum and its expanding natural history collection, thus founding the Natural History Muse he also tutored the children of the royal family in science and was famed for feuding with scientific contemporaries, most notably Charles Darwin.”
🦖 Richard Owen’s 1842 Report on British Fossil Reptiles.
🦕 Today’s crop of billionaires are mostly obsessed with going up space, funding fascism and paying celebs to come to their weddings, rather than making their own Jurassic Parks; but, richos do keep funding the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences (warning: clicking that link takes you to a website that may make you feel seasick). Colossal is the one that this year announced it had brought back the dire wolf, extinct for 10,000 years, and that it aims to resurrect the woolly mammoth by 2028. Then they backtracked and said they had maybe just cloned some non-dire wolves.
🦖 The Gilded Dinosaur: the fossil war between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the rise of American science by Mark Jaffe.
🦕 Michael Crichton also wrote a novel about the Bone Wars, Dragon Teeth.
🦖 “By 1890, separated from his wife and child, Cope was living alone in a small Philadelphia apartment. His fossil collection was all he had left. Marsh then made a fatal mistake. He attempted to take Cope's fossils, claming they had been collected with federal money and thus belonged to the government. Cope fought back, producing evidence that he had paid for almost all of his collecting out of his own pocket. Then, he set out to destroy Marsh.”
🦕 The Crystal Palace dinosaurs (yep I know that most of them are not technically dinosaurs).
🦖 According to legend, Richard Owen and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins held an eight course New Year’s Eve dinner party inside the mould for the Crystal Palace iguanodon sculpture.
🦕 Tyrants.
A few years ago, Martin and I were guests on the 90 Minutes or Less Film Fest with Jurassic World reboot director Colin Trevorrow, talking about his debut film Safety Not Guaranteed. Listen here.

YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
athanor, noun, historical: a type of furnace used by alchemists.
Origin 15th century: from Arabic at-tannür,
from al- 'the' + tannür 'baker's oven'.

CREDITS:

Hannah McGregor is a professor, podcaster and author. Her book about Jurassic Park is called Clever Girl: Jurassic Park, and it’s part of the Pop Classics Series from ECW Press. Listen to her podcast Material Girls and if you sign up to their Patreon, you will at some point get to hear me feature in a live recording about the word ‘daddy’. Hannah has also appeared on this show before, in the episodes Sentiment, Bonus 2022 and Apple Fest.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The original Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch.
Find the Allusionist at youtube.com/allusionistshow, instagram.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, @allusionistshow.bsky.social… Essentially: if I’m there, I’m there as @allusionistshow.

Back in a couple of weeks with a new episode - HZ.

How about a few dino pics?

Some of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs - Victorian life-size sculptures (or replacements thereof) of dinosaurs, arranged on a tree-covered island in a small lake in Crystal Palace Park.

Two iguanodon sculptures, one posing with its front foot on a stick, the other has had a refurb so it is a much brighter green, and its toenails are dazzling white, like tooth veneers but for feet.

some of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs - plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and a couple of teleosaurs - arranged on an island in a small lake. The dinosaurs look like they are made of cement, and some have lichen and moss growing on them. Some of their living relatives are swimming in the water near them - ducks and ducklings.

Check out the long wiggly necks on these lads. Later, paleontologists realised they’d put the head on the tail end.

Dinos in the snow

A Crystal Palace dinosaur peeking out of the lake, because the sculptor didn’t want to have to figure out what its body might have looked like.

This, in the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, is the first time I saw dinosaurs represented as brightly coloured and with feathers/hair. And also...humping??

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