#Mousterpiece podcast jurassic park full
Deinonychus in full sprint, as drawn by Robert Bakker ’67īakker’s Deinonychus became an iconic drawing. In the picture, the raptor is nearly parallel with the ground, its left leg springing forward, its right leg curled tightly against its torso, preparing for the next stride - it’s beautiful and terrifying. Bob Bakker was a skilled illustrator as well as a scientist. So when Jon Ostrom wrote his definitive paper on Deinonychus, he asked Bakker to do the illustration. To really change people’s minds, sometimes you gotta show instead of tell. They were top-of-the-line! They beat everybody!”īut convincing people that dinosaurs were actually totally different than they had been depicted for the past sixty years was going to require more than a few good academic papers. It embodied the idea that dinosaurs “weren’t evolutionary has-beens. But those ideas weren’t in the textbooks.īakker decided to publish a paper in a Yale journal, and his editor suggested he call it The Superiority of Dinosaurs. He loved that title idea. As early as the mid-19th century there had been scientists and religious thinkers who believed that dinosaurs were intelligent, active, and bird-like. He concluded that the old stereotypes about sluggish, stupid dinosaurs just didn’t hold up.īakker and Ostrom weren’t the first people to come to this conclusion. As an undergraduate, he dissected modern animals in an effort to better understand dinosaur musculature. Archaeopteryx compared to the skeleton of a modern pigeon 1916īakker was fascinated by this idea. Exhibit showing Deinonychus attacking Tenontosaurus, Academy of Natural SciencesĪfter studying the fossils back at Yale, Professor Ostrom began to argue that if you really looked at the anatomy of deinonychus and other dinosaurs they looked less like lumbering lizards and more like super athletic birds. On the dig, they dug up a new species of raptor named Deinonychus. The trip was led by one of Bob’s professors, a paleontologist named Jon Ostrom. The Superiority of Dinosaursĭuring Bakker’s freshman year at Yale, the geology department took him and some of the other students out on a dig. And that’s where we were in the early 1960s - dinosaurs were sad, cold-blooded, dead ends in the history of life.”ĭinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park (1852) (CC BY-SA 2.0)īut paleontology was about to go through a spectacular shift. “They were depicted slowly pulling themselves across the landscape or sitting neck deep in a fetid swamp. “The way brontosaurus and diplodocus (the biggest dinosaurs) were illustrated they were like giant, gray vacuum cleaners with very very short legs,” explains Bakker.
And their bodies were these hulking masses of flesh. In most paintings of dinosaurs, the creatures were not moving or interacting with each other - there was no spark of intelligent social life. And that view of dinosaurs affected how they were drawn. They were thought of as evolutionary failures destined for extinction. Dinosaurs were considered big, dumb, cold-blooded reptiles. In the middle of the 20th century, when Bakker first started college, American dinosaur science was in a bit of a rut. Bob Bakker, paleontologist and paleoartist (CC BY 2.0)īob Bakker became obsessed with dinosaurs at an early age and went on to become one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. He also happens to be a very skilled paleoartist, and over the years his writing and his illustrations have had a huge impact on how we think about and picture these prehistoric animals. There are no photos or videos, of course, which means that if we want to picture how they look someone has to draw them. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will never see how these animals lived with our own eyes. At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs.
0 kommentar(er)
