🦕 Listen to this episode and find out more about the dinos therein at theallusionist.org/dino 🦖
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, use DNA technology to bring to life some long-extinct language, and let it roam in a big safari-esque park on an island off Costa Rica, and invite some experts including paleontologist Dr Alan Grant and paleobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler to take a look at it and confirm to the park’s investors that everything is fine and it is definitely not dangerous, no no, this language is definitely not going to run amok and definitely not going to eviscerate some humans with its jaws and claws…
Replace ‘language’ with ‘dinosaurs’ and me with a rich business dude named John Hammond, and you’ve got the information you need about Jurassic Park, specifically the 1993 movie adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, to comprehend today’s Four Letter Word episode which is about the word ‘dino’, and features a beloved alumsionist returning.
Before we begin: I made a piece called Souvenirs with house band Martin Austwick, and it is being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 22 July at 4pm UK time, with a rerun at quarter past midnight on Sunday night/Monday morning, and it’ll be available on the BBC website and BBC Sounds for online listening too. I’d love for you to listen to it. It’s the story of the friendship that imploded over the Doves typeface and maybe the best, most poignant and funny thing I’ve managed to write, plus Martin composed some absolutely beautiful music for it. And there’s a running Spice Girls theme. If you enjoy it, I wouldn’t stop you from sending feedback to the BBC, here’s a template:
“Dear BBC, while I was chopping cauliflower the other day, I was pleasantly surprised by that thing Souvenirs you put on - was it a documentary? An essay? A tone poem but funny? A comedy sketch but sad? A musical with a very small cast? Anyway it sent me into some kind of reverie and when a rousing ad for Gardener’s Question Time summoned me back from my emotional cocoon, my tears had perfectly seasoned the cauliflower. Cheers for that! Yours etc.”
Just a suggestion. Also, if you’d like to listen to Souvenirs in the company of me and Martin and your fellow Allusionauts, there’s a live listening party on 22 July at 4pm UK time in the Allusioverse Fiscord, which you can join via theallusionist.org/donate.
Meanwhile! This episode contains a small handful of Category A and B swears, and more than zero mentions of ‘vagina dentata’
On with the show.
HZ: Last episode, talking about parks, I mentioned my beloved Crystal Palace Park in southeast london and fleetingly referred to it containing dinosaurs. 33 life-size models of 15 species of dinosaur and other long extinct creatures are arranged around a tidal lake - originally the lake’s water levels went up and down to feed water towers for the huge fountains in front of the Crystal Palace, the palace and fountains are long gone but the dinosaurs remain. They have been there since 1854: they were in fact the world’s first sculptures of dinosaurs, appearing five years before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, so at the time it was quite a controversial idea to publicly endorse dinosaurs, or to display such a big suggestion that ancient creatures had lived before humans. The 350 million years of evolution these dinosaurs depict didn't fit in with the Bible, and the Victorians struggled to reconcile that with their enthusiasm for developing scientific knowledge and their love of wacky stuff, and paleontology was hot wacky stuff in the 1850s.
It was also a time when a lot of new paleontological discoveries were being made, so even within a few years a lot of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were ridiculed for their inaccuracies - although I do think it was smart of sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to hedge what one particular dinosaur’s body would have looked like by just making it a head peeking out of the lake. The megalosaurus is often derided - “Durr, it’s not quadrupedal, it would have been bipedal!” - but it’s hard to know that when all you have to go on is a few ribs and a femur, and you have to turn that into a spectacular life-like beast. Megalosaurus, by the way, was the first dinosaur to receive an official name, coined in 1824 by William Buckland, and it means ‘big lizard’.
The trailblazing paleontologist and anatomist Richard Owen, who advised Hawkins on the dinosaur sculptures, took that ‘saurus’ element and ran with it: he is the one who in 1841 coined the word ‘dinosaur’.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Oh, hi, I'm Hannah McGregor. I am a podcaster and a writer and an associate professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University.
HZ: And you're the author of, amongst other books:
HANNAH McGREGOR: Clever Girl: Jurassic Park. Because it's my favourite movie. And I think dinosaurs are rad.
HZ: They are rad, aren't they?
HANNAH McGREGOR: They really are.
HZ: Which is why was one of the reasons why I was sad when I learned the etymology of the word dinosaur.
HZ: From ancient Greek σαῦρος meaning lizard or reptile, and δεινός, meaning “terrible”. Why would Richard Owen saddle a dinosaur with that? He never even met one!
HANNAH McGREGOR: Okay, but let's talk about the sense of ‘terrible’. Is it terrible like how we would review a movie or is it terrible like inspiring terror?
HZ: It is the latter, although I love the idea of it being, “These lizards are just rubbish.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: These are terrible lizards.
HZ: They can't slither in a crack in the pavement.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Have you seen these things?
HZ: Way too big!
HANNAH McGREGOR: And they can't regrow their tails! Terrible.
HZ:We don't know for sure.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Actually, great point. Have we tried?
HZ: It could be the next Jurassic Park movie. Just tail-generation.
HANNAH McGREGOR: The Jurassic Park movies that I actually want are just the ones where scientists figure out stuff about the dinosaurs.
HZ: “Okay. We've got this eight year research project. We're gonna get Richard Linklater to do it in the style of Boyhood. We come back, the scientists are a bit more haggard.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. Yeah. We come back every eight years, and the major drama is always whether or not their grant's gonna be renewed. Which is also one of the major narrative sort of nodes, one of the turning points of the film itself is about grant grant funding.
HZ: Wow.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Because that's how Hammond convinces Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler to join him on the island. He agrees to fund their dig.
HZ: It's incredible, really, what a huge drama is wrought over the fragility of academic funding.
HANNAH McGREGOR: A hundred percent. Really, truly, it's a drama about academic funding. And is that part of why it's so close to my heart? Maybe.
HZ: So I think Richard Owen, who coined the term dinosaur, did mean it in the way of inspiring terribleness, because they're so big. But still, I feel like he could have chosen something a little more complimentary than ‘terrible’ to convey the enormity, the awe that such a large creature would inspire.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. It makes me think immediately of the connection between dinosaurs and the sublime, and dinosaurs as these figures of sort of monstrosity and chaos. The sublime is this this aesthetic category that I have found fascinating since I first learned about it in a second year Canadian literature course at Carleton University, where we were taught about it as a sort of threatening aesthetic experience that British writers had when they arrived in Canada and saw big mountains, you know, like the sheer hugeness as compared to, you know, the comparable alternative aesthetic category is the picturesque: things that are contained and beautiful in a managed and human intervened way.
And so the sublime is this thing, you know, like a really tall mountain or like a waterfall or a very deep canyon: things that are so huge and that often are reminiscent of deep geological time in a way that makes you as a single human feel very small and meaningless. And a lot of my favourite like Canadian poetry is like, "British man looks at mountain, goes insane,” like “Mountain too big, can't handle it." Or like Margaret Atwood's Journals of Susanna Moodie, like “British woman goes into forest, forest too big, woman crazy now” - that's a lot of Can Lit themes, is like "Nature was too big and I absolutely lost it."
And so it's this relationship to the sublime that is like: it's majestic and it's awe-inspiring and it's incredible, and also it's a threat. There is something about it that undermines your sort of perceived supremacy as a human, your perceived autonomy, your sense of yourself as this individual existing in the world and navigating it with control and intelligence, that in the face of the sublime, it like dismantles you. And dinosaurs for me are deeply sublime, right? They both evoke geological time, but they also just exist at these scales that are so sort of out of keeping with the scales of other fauna that we are sort of mostly encountering in the present day. Blue whales excepted. My hat tip to the blue whale.
HZ: A newborn blue whale is bigger than a T-rex, and a fully grown blue whale’s tongue weighs more than an elephant, or a small T-rex. Not that a T-rex isn’t impressive.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I think ‘terrible’ is actually perfect, because it's like, “This is amazing. And also, oh my God, like this dismantles me in some way.”
HZ: Given that dinosaurs were not, at the point of these people discovering all the fossils in the 19th century, a threat to them, being long dead: I just wonder if they could have made it a bit less about themselves, a bit like, “Cor, if this creature was up and running, then I would be eviscerated. I wouldn't be the sir in charge.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: “This thing could totally eat me.”
HZ: “This thing could totally eat me; it could totally rip me to bits; it could totally stamp on me - it could just sit on me and I'd die.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. “And it would be indifferent to me and all of my smart ideas about fossils and how they work.”
HZ: “Yes. It wouldn't respect my library of leather bound books.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: “It would not be impressed by my moustache.”
HZ: But a lot of dinosaur names as well are just being factual about size, like ‘mega’ - and actually a lot of the names are being factual about other things, like triceratops and pentaceratops: that's descriptive. Three horns; five horns.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Five horns. We're always telling you about the number of horns. And then a lot of them are just like, “We found this in this place.”
HZ: Yeah. The albertosaurus -
HANNAH McGREGOR: Albertosaurus!
HZ: - in Alberta. And, mastodon is meant nipple tooth, or nipple teeth.
HANNAH McGREGOR: …Sorry?
HZ: You look a little perturbed,
HANNAH McGREGOR: Perturbed and delighted. Vagina dentata is a sort of recurring theme -
HZ: It's a passion of yours.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It’s a passion of mine! Ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah, you know what? You're not wrong. It's a recurring theme in the book and my life. and so I'm really, I am intrigued by the idea of adding nipple teeth into the equation.
HZ: Yeah. It's funny because it's named after nipple-like protrusions on a mastodons molars, so it's like, let's just find the tiniest thing we can find on this very large creature and name it after that.
HZ: It's like naming it after your toenail barnacles or whatever.
HANNAH McGREGOR: You know, that’s what I am named after. That's actually what Hannah means. Don't look it up. Check it. Don't check it. Never check.
HZ: But then, tyrannosaurus is another name on the opposite end of the spectrum to like three horns or wooly mammoth - big fluffy guy (I know they're not dinosaurs, don't @ me) but tyrannosaurus is “tyrant lizard”. But they haven't done anything.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Tyrannosaurus Rex being ‘tyrant lizard king’ is incredible to me.
HZ: Yeah, it's so metal.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It's intriguing, because correct me if I'm wrong: tyrannus, Greek; rex, Latin. And tyrannus and rex - like Oedipus Rex is a Latinate translation of Oedipus Tyrannus, because ‘tyrannus’ and ‘rex’ are, in some contexts, synonyms, particularly when it comes to like a particular a specific kind of Greek political leader. This is - I am dredging this up from my undergraduate degree, so please fact check me on this.
HZ: Fact check: originally in Ancient Greece, ‘τύραννος’ or a tyrant was a leader who came to power not via being elected nor born to it - maybe by usurping the previous leader, or maybe by having a lot of support from the populace or an influential ally, but ‘tyrant’ wasn’t a particularly negatively valenced term in this context, it didn’t yet carry connotations of cruelty or oppressiveness - or huge toothy dinosauriness. The name was coined for the genus of dinosaur in 1905 by Henry Fairfield Osborn, who, as well as coining ‘tyrannosaurus’, and ‘pentaceratops’ and ‘velociraptor’, was the co-founder of the American Eugenics Society. You can barely move in the history of modern science without tripping over a eugenics enthusiast.
HANNAH McGREGOR: But I remember the tyrannosaurus rex having that name being a thing that one of our professors was using to explain to us what a tyrant meant in the context of ancient Greek civics, which is like not quite what we mean now. Anyway, so there's this funny sort of like doubling, like it's just saying the same thing twice. It's like “tyrant, lizard, tyrant.” We’ve really gotta tell you this is a freaky lizard.
HZ: And also a very particular kind of king.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes.
HZ: Not a meek one.
HANNAH McGREGOR: No.
HZ: It’s a tyrant lizard king.
HANNAH McGREGOR: No. Don't think about your sort of emaciated British child kings, no; this is a mean king who can bite your head right off.
HZ: Now that you've told me not to think about them, that's all I can think about, of course.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. You're just thinking about so many pale, meek boys -
HZ: - being sat on by dinosaurs.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Oh my God, this is becoming a real R-rated episode, I gotta say.
HZ: That's what I wanted. There was also a genus of tyrannosaur, the dynamoterror, meaning powerful terror, which again, isn't really about the dinosaur itself. It's all about the human response to the dinosaur.
HANNAH McGREGOR: A hundred percent. So many of these names are ultimately about like human categorization, human location, human right, like our understanding of dinosaurs in general are inherently and always filtered through human perception because they're so far back in time. When I was doing a lot of reading about paleontology for Clever Girl, somebody pointed out that paleontology is always in part a speculative genre. That there is always this sort of dimension of speculative fiction happening because it's an imaginative reconstruction of a period about, which we still know very, very little and we're like constantly finding out new stuff.
So then you get people being like, "Well actually dinosaurs had feathers. So now all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are historically inaccurate," because we know we're like finding out new stuff as we go. But it's always a sort of representation of a deep past, profoundly filtered through human concerns, the scientific albertosauruses of the moment, the sort of political interests of the moment. Like even down to things like albertosaurus, right? What's Alberta named for? How did Alberta get the name Alberta?
HZ: Alberta is named after Queen Victoria’s sixth child Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, whose husband was Governer General of Canada from 1878 to 1883. Lake Louise in Alberta is also named after her, as is Louiseville in Quebec, but when the District of Alberta was created in 1882, she had her third name put on it, in tribute to her late father, Prince Albert. Oh, and albertosaurus was another coinage by Henry Fairfield Osborn.
HANNAH McGREGOR: How does albertosaurus then freeze in time a particular relationship between like a geographical location that existed long, long, long, millions, tens of millions of years before humans, and then this like particular colonial moment in which that place now has these colonial names? Like it's all there. The fact that dinosaurs are always a representation based on our ideas about them: anything we're seeing about dinosaurs, their names, for example, are ultimately more about us than they are about the dinosaurs themselves.
HZ: Yeah. I think scientists, if they're not already, ought to be humble about how wrong the future could prove their current selves to be, and not get too cocky that they've reached the end of the line of knowledge.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Some really are - but a lot really aren't. And I think it has a lot to do with how little of the history of science you learn when you're studying science. You know what I mean? Like you learn what is understood to be the truth right now, but I think you spend less time learning all the wrong shit that people used to think and why they thought that.
HZ: Ah, that makes sense, because when I was at school, I studied the history of medicine, which is a great document to how many ideas were the dominant idea for like a thousand years, and then, not looking so good.
HANNAH McGREGOR: No, no. You're like, “Oh, and then the Humours? Yeah. We thought that for a long time.”
HZ: “Look, I've invested a lot in elixirs made from ground-up mummies, and I'm determined to see how they go.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: “I already have all of these head-measuring devices. What am I supposed to do - stop measuring heads?”
HZ: You could measure potatoes or large onions. That'd be nice.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Okay. But I can't use that to do, er…
HZ: …people-sorting.
HANNAH McGREGOR: …to do people-sorting - how am I gonna run the world with that technology? Helen?
HZ: Maybe the dinosaur name being laced with fear and awe helps to jazz up some of the reality of paleontological work?
HANNAH McGREGOR: One of my favourite things about paleontology as a field is that I think we tend to picture it as still in terms of the sort of heroic era of fossil discovery that is like the 19th century paleontological moment, but that a lot of paleontology is happening in museum basements, as people just sort through the shit-ton of bones that have been found but that still haven't been like identified or pieced together in a way that makes sense. So people will like discover a new species of dinosaur, but all of it was in a basement somewhere; they just hadn't figured out how it fit together. I love that.
HZ: Yeah. Or like in the Victorian era where they're like, “Well, this guy found a nose, but he didn't put it together with this other guy's knee bone. Until a later generation came in and did it.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: This, the constant brontosaurus drama. Right? Brontosaurus real or not?
HZ: If I knew, I wouldn't tell.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. You are famously withholding about your brontosaurus secrets.
HZ: Brontosaurus really does have drama. It arose from the Bone Wars, the conflict between paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, major figures in the then-emerging field of paleontology. They started out as friends, when they met in 1863 and exchanged ideas and fossils and even named species after each other; but some time around 1868, things turned very sour. Maybe because Marsh went to visit Cope digging for fossils at a quarry in New Jersey, and behind his back paid the owners to send new finds to him, not Cope. Maybe it was because Marsh took the piss when Cope published a description of a newly unearthed species of plesiosaur, Elasmosaurus platyurus, having a pretty short tail but a very long wiggly neck, because he’d put the head on the wrong end.
Anyway, it was ON. For the rest of their lives, they competed with each other: they deployed bribes and spies, they sabotaged each other’s funding and reputations, they named fossils as disses to each other, they blocked each other from digging in fossil-rich lands, they damaged and possibly even destroyed fossils in their urgency to out-paleontolog the other. Dig, dig faster, find the biggest fossil, find more fossils, find the most fossils - oh but then who got the most publications? But those publications were sometimes not very good, rushed out to trounce the other? They alienated their peers; they plundered Indigenous American lands and desecrated their graves; they brought shame upon the field of paleontology with their bitter and petty behaviour; the newspapers, even the US government became embroiled in their feud - by the time Cope and Marsh died in the late 1890s, their rivalry had left them both financially destitute and their reputations irrevocably besmirched.
But, because of their race to triumph over the other, the number of known dinosaurs massively increased: before, only nine species in North America had been identified, but by the end of their lives Cope had identified another 56 and Marsh 80. Even though to achieve that, they worked so fast and so indiscriminately, they were actually doing paleontology badly, not carefully documenting the fossils and where they were found and in what position relative to each other, but bundling them into trains and rushing to slap a name on a species just in case they were the first to identify it, because first to name a dinosaur is the one whose name sticks - a technique paleontologist Robert Bakker calls ‘taxonomic carpet-bombing’.
And it was Marsh who actually named brontosaurus, in 1879 - but two years earlier, he had also named the apatosaurus. In 1903, four years after Marsh’s death, the paleontologist Elmer Riggs published his theory that brontosaurus and apatosaurus were not different enough to be two separate kinds of dinosaur, and as apatosaurus was the earlier name to be coined, that was the official name of the species, and ‘brontosaurus’ was not the paleontologically valid term for the next century and more. Why is it such a well-known one, then? Henry Fairfield Osborn - yes, him again! - in his capacity as president of the American Museum of Natural History, when the apatosaurus skeleton was being put on display there, he decided to label it ‘brontosaurus’, and because it was such a popular attraction at the museum, the name ‘brontosaurus’ stuck in the public imagination. It’s the Dude Chilling Park of dinosaur names.
Anyway, for the last ten or so years, some paleontologists have been saying that brontosaurus and apatosaurus are distinct dinosaurs after all, so the brontosaurus drama still does not rest.
I do think brontosaurus has the win over apatosaurus in etymology: brontosaurus derives from the Greek for ‘thunder lizard’ - evocative, powerful - whereas apatosaurus meant ‘deceptive lizard’.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Oh, that's rude. That’s rude!
HZ: And you know why? Just because it's got a different shaped bone to other dinosaurs. But that's not deception, that's difference.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I think they're calling it ‘deceptive’ because they were wrong about it.
HZ: Well, that's on them.
HANNAH McGREGOR: And they're like, “OK, here's the dinosaur that fucking lied to us about its bones.” And it's like, listen dude, that's a lot of blaming something that's been dead for a long time.
HZ: Fibbing from beyond the grave.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Classic dinosaurs.
HZ: What was the deal with 'velociraptor' as a term in Jurassic Park?
HANNAH McGREGOR: Oh yeah. So the dinosaurs that are referred to as 'velociraptor' throughout Jurassic Park are not velociraptors, they're a dinosaur called deinonychus.
HZ: Deinonychus, again from the Greek 'δεινός' meaning terrible, and ὄνυξ meaning claw. So deinonychus meant 'terrible claw’. ‘Velociraptor’ was another dino name coined by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1924, from the Latin ‘velox’ meaning fast, and ‘raptor’ meaning robber. What did the velociraptor do to you, Henry, steal your wallet?
The first known discovery of velociraptor fossils was in 1923 in Mongolia, and velociraptors lived in central Asia around 75 million years ago, whereas deinonychus was living in what is now North America some 110 million years ago. Its fossils were first found in 1931, and it was named in 1969.
HANNAH McGREGOR: And the discovery of deinonychus was one of the major paleontological discoveries that then sort of birthed the dinosaur renaissance of the late 20th century when paleontology came back in a big way and we got like so many dinosaur movies for a while. And it was because deinonychus was fast and smart and hunted in packs, and so had these characteristics that sort of recast dinosaurs in the popular imagination away from the sort of big slow thunder lizard, boom, boom, boom, boom, into something sleek and modern, a sleek, modern, sexy dinosaur for the new age. Velociraptors were much smaller - they were sort of turkey-sized - they were found in Asia: they were just a different dinosaur. But I believe it was Michael Crichton himself who was like, "Deinonychus does not hit as a name, so I'm gonna call them velociraptors instead, because that does hit as a name; and this is fiction, so who actually cares?"
HZ: But it kind of makes sense within the story as well that they would rebrand the dinosaur to have a catchier name, because capitalism - they're operating a capitalist park.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Absolutely. A corner of the nerdy internet really likes to imagine how Dr. Alan Grant would've actually responded to the shit being said to him at Jurassic Park. When he's like, "What species is this?" and they're like, "it's a velociraptor," then it's like, "that's not a species. That's a genus, actually, so could we get more specific here? What kind of terrible scientists are you hiring, hammond?" But yeah, the thing that I have to swallow my skepticism around the most is how many things Dr. Alan Grant is wrong about. Because I buy the people at Jurassic Park just renaming dinosaurs willy-nilly and fudging the details because they don't actually care. They're just trying to make a cool park that will make them rich. But Dr. Grant's a dinosaur nerd. There's no way he's going along with any of this, but, you know, we must suspend our disbelief for the sake of narrative.
HZ: He might be jetlagged.
HANNAH McGREGOR: He had a really scary experience in a helicopter right before arriving. So he's not on his A game.
HZ: And also a lot of us would behave differently in the presence of a generous benefactor. We'd be like, "Uh huh. Yeah. Whatever you say. For that grant, whatever you say."
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. Which is what Hammond was counting on.
And he's very upset with Dr. Grant for expressing skepticism.
HZ: Well, there you go. That's why he is that's why he's appearing to swallow a lot of things, for financial security.
HANNAH McGREGOR: No, no, no, no world. No world in which, in which a professional dinosaur nerd would say "whatever" about accurately naming dinosaurs. That's their favourite shit. We all knew a kid in grade school who just liked memorizing dinosaur names.
HZ: Some of us are still that kid. Not me, but I know some of the people listening are that kid.
HANNAH McGREGOR: And to everybody listening who's one of those kids? I salute you, because dinosaur names are cool.
HZ: Dinosaur names are cool - but maybe they would have been even more cool if dinosaur-naming hadn’t been so dominated by a handful of 19th and early 20th century American and British gents with particular outlooks.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I mean, part of the problem here is that dinosaur, like fish, is not a real category except for within the human imagination.
HZ: I mean, that's everything isn't it? Nothing means anything. Let's just all go back to bed and stay there forever.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Some things mean more than other things do, though.
HZ: No, nothing means anything. I give up. It's like, "Oh, there's no birds really. They're all just like flappy feather bags." HANNAH McGREGOR: “They’re all just flappy feather bags!”
HZ: Sorry, sometimes semantics makes me feel nihilistic.
HANNAH McGREGOR: The kinds of things that humans tend to focus on, because we like to look at things and like see their patterns: you have to learn a different way of looking at nature to like understand taxonomies that aren't about visual categorization based on impression, and are about like the actual function of the thing itself within its own logics of functioning.
And I think that there's something to be said for saying like, okay, here's a category. Here's a way of categorizing, here's a way of describing that was of its era, that gives away a lot about how humans were thinking. And maybe we wanna find a different way of thinking about these things and a different way of describing them and a different way of categorizing them that gets at something else about them that maybe we were ignoring, like how proximate they are to thunder, for example.
HZ: I can understand why quite a lot things are boringly named, because naming things is hard, if you have to come up with a lot of names I could understand why you'd just be like freezing with the pressure, if you are like in a beetle identification laboratory and like you've got so many beetles come in.
HANNAH McGREGOR: There’s only four of them.
HZ: 🥁
HZ: But dinosaurs - there's not so many that your whole imagination is extinguished.
HANNAH McGREGOR: There's so many. Are you kidding?
HZ: Well, not usually like coming into like one desk at once.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. It's one of the tricky things, right? Because they were discovered via fossils. Like you literally don't know how many there are; you just have all of these bones. So it's not like: here's a beetle, here's a beetle, here's a beetle. It's like: here's a jumble of bones, because this was like a huge number of dinosaurs who all got caught in a peat bog or something, and all died at the same time, so we have to figure out whose bone is whose, we don't know in the first place how many there there are, or how to even think about their categorical relationship to each other. So the naming conventions are bonkers because the discovery process was bonkers, like slow and messy and full of redactions and discoveries of new frameworks.
So you get have these like wild, like: well this one's tyrannosaurus rex and this one's like three horns found in South Asia, and it's like, okay, well these don't match up, do they? It's like, well, of course not, because they were named 150 years apart from each other in wildly different scientific contexts.
HZ: Similar situation as with the names of different varietals of apple, as we learned in the Apple episode! If you go down your podfeed listen to the version called Apple Fest, it includes a trip to an apple festival with Hannah McGregor. But back to Jurassic Park, which is not really concerned with taxonomy, and has other priorities than paleontology.
HANNAH McGREGOR: The park is also, of course, drawing on traditions of zoos and safaris. And so that's the other subtext there: tension between the role of the zoo as a spectacle and the role of the zoo as a place for care for animals or like, quote unquote “necessary” human intervention, via rehabilitation for example, like animals that maybe can't live in the wild or are being protected because they're endangered. And a very real question that people have to grapple with who work in that industry, of like, “Well, we need people to come and look at this 'cause that's how we get money. We need a spectacle, because spectacle makes people pay; and the spectacle can then fund the thing that is the thing that we want to do, but that isn't sexy or glamorous or interesting. So, how do you balance this need for the spectacular?” And then that becomes like a recurring theme through the rest of the increasingly bad movies. Decreasingly good movies? Increasingly bad movies.
HZ: It can be both.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. Yeah. Where they're like, “We actually keep having to engineer new and worse dinosaurs because people are getting bored with the ones that we already have.” And it's like, yeah, that's the nature of spectacle, is that like you have to constantly increase the intensity of it because it's rooted in novelty. And science isn't all about novelty.
HZ: No, because you need it not to be novel, because you need reproducible effects.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah, yeah. Ideally, science is quite boring.
HZ: I mean, that's my dream, for things to be more boring - just we get a bit of peace.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Wouldn't it be great for just everything to get really boring for like a decade?
HZ: Oh, what a relief! But it does seem very in line with the idea, in the Victorian era particularly, of exploration, discovery - for them and their culture - and rather than understanding something, looking at it from afar and then leaving it alone, it's like, gotta conquer it, you know? Get the head of an exotic animal, taxidermy it, keep it on your wall.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Exploration, extraction, display: this paradigm of like, “We can't go to this beautiful ancient city and study it, we have to go remove the entirety of it stone by stone and reproduce it in a museum in Berlin.” Rooted in that is a lot of white supremacist and imperial ideas about who is responsible enough to be a caretaker of the past. And that same sort of paternalism we can see in a lot of animal conservation ideas, a lot of neo-colonial ideas about self-governance. But yeah, you see it in like big game hunting, zoos, safaris: the exotic animal is often sort of a stand-in for the experience of otherness that is part of the thrill-seeking nature of this spectacle-based culture. “I wanna go look at something, but ideally we'll take it out of its original setting and put it somewhere where I can see it every day and it's mine.”
The central foyer in Jurassic Park, like the main building, which is where the very final climactic scene occurs: it's full of dinosaur fossils. That's still the central spectacle around which the image of the park is constructed. In part it is an allusion to that tradition of spectacle and this tradition of - people want to go and look at dinosaur bones.
HZ: Yeah. Fair.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Even the logo is a fossil of a T-Rex head. It's not a living T-Rex head. So the fossil as the thing you look at continues to be really, really central.
HZ: To be fair, the logo in the film is a version of the original cover of Michael Crichton’s novel, which depicts a silhouetted T-rex skeleton. Chip Kidd who designed the book’s cover explained: “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.”
Despite being the silhouette of some bones, the Jurassic Park T-rex looks eager, in motion, huge toothy mouth wide open. And actually, T-rexes - T-reges? - are pretty much always depicted with their mouths open.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Mm, yeah. Yeah. One of the most fascinating things about the T-Rex, I think, within the human imaginary, is the size of the enormous mouth. Right? It's got this huge maw.
HZ: It's got a gob on it, for sure.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It’s got a gob on it. It's gaping - it such a powerful jaw, that's a thing that we can measure based on bones, so it's like a thing people know, like how hard this jaw is, how forcefully it would close, we can see how big the teeth are. Like the size of that mouth really holds in the fossil record. And that comes through in like the way that it is displayed all the time. It's also historically inaccurate. In one of my favourite recent paleontological discoveries, they now suspect that T-Rex had lips that primarily covered its teeth, more like a Komodo dragon. They've got big teeth, but you don't see them because they've got like mouths that close over their teeth.
HZ: The first time I went to a museum that had like dinosaur fossils and a depiction of the dinosaurs as being feathery and brightly coloured, that was a real shock to the system, not just seeing them as collections of bones.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It's like when you find out that Greek statuary was painted.
HZ: Yeah. And bright, real bright.
HANNAH McGREGOR: In bright, bright colours, and it's like, oh yeah. Wow. We get a lot of stuff wrong.
HZ: Yeah. Well, like when you realize that your grandparents didn't live a time when everything was sepia.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I will never believe it. If there was a colour before 1950, I will not hear of it.
HZ: I think a lot of people could watch Jurassic Park and come away with just this idea of like, “Oh, isn't it scary when angry dinosaurs are coming to get you?” and not have the more subtle and sophisticated reading of: a rich guy did this, didn't really think it through, and the dinosaurs are just being dino. They didn't really do anything wrong. They didn't ask to be born, and kept captive.
HANNAH McGREGOR: They really didn't. That reading is is really there and available in the first movie. The dinosaurs themselves are not monstrous. They are animals and they are doing what animals will do. Part of the monstrosity of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park is rooted in their femininity: the fact that they were engineered to all be female because that was supposed to make them more controllable, but instead it ultimately makes them more monstrous and more violent - which, correct.
In a situation like this, the true monstrosity lays in the hands of the humans; and that really gets lost in the later movies, when the humans are engineering monstrous dinosaurs that are intelligent and like to murder people on purpose, literally to sell them to like political leaders and terrorists and warlords and stuff. There’s kind of a total reversal of what the original movie was trying to do. The majority of the later movies is like: this dinosaur is a sociopath and it loves murdering kids for fun.
HZ: Well, you can't let the humans be the baddies.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. Yeah. That would be uncomfortable.
HZ: Well, I think a lot of people are not willing to feel uncomfortable. And the avoidance of uncomfortableness is often a very damaging pursuit.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Or they wanna feel uncomfortable in extremely contained and managed spaces. So you want to go and have an experience of the sublime by looking at a terrible lizard, and then leave, knowing that that experience is contained and managed and labeled and parsed for you; and you can have sort of a glimpse of the deep history of geological time and the fact that you've only been here for like a fraction of a fraction of a second in the history of the Earth, but then you get to walk out and put that aside, and that's contained somewhere through an institution, through names and labels and systems of knowledge, and you don't have to bring it with you.
HZ: 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, which are very enjoyable books - I also recommend the one by podfriend Andrea Warner, The Time of My Life, about Dirty Dancing, which really enhances the film as kind of a radical one, about abortion.
You should also listen to Hannah’s podcast Material Girls if you are not already a devotee - 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’ - and she has appeared on this show before, in three episodes: Sentiment, Bonus 2022 and Apple Fest. I’ll link to all of that, and more dino information, at theallusionist.org/dino.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
athanor, noun, historical: a type of furnace used by alchemists.
Try using ‘athanor’ in an email today.
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. Music and editorial assistance were provided by the singer and composer Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
As I mentioned way up at the start of the show, together Martin and I made a beautiful combo of words and music, history and ever-current emotions, called Souvenirs, listen to it live on BBC Radio 4 at 4pm UK time on July 22nd or middle of the night the following Sunday, or online via the Radio 4 website or BBC Sounds, or at the live listening party we’re going to have in the Allusioverse during the radio broadcast.
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