The Rest Is History - 109. Dinosaurs

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

How did the existence of dinosaurs come to be discovered, & what role have they played in the popular imagination over the past 200 years? And what can humanity learn from the extinction of dinosaurs - if indeed they ARE extinct? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook explore the constantly evolving after-life of dinosaurs. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Joey McCarthy Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time 130 million years our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old true the dinosaurs are extinct but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind who can say that the human system will last another thousand years let alone a. Now, that was the American paleontologist Robert T. Baca, a man of whom Tom Holland knows a great deal. Because Tom, you are a massive dinosaur enthusiast,

aren't you? You were interested in dinosaurs before you were interested in history. So dinosaurs is actually your real interest. Is that right? Yeah, dinosaurs is my number one passion, like lots of children. It was kind of my introduction to a world that was unlike the contemporary. So I would always kind of go up the lane behind a house and there'd be sheep or something. And I'd wish that they were tyrannosaurs or triceratops or whatever.

And I think that the kind of glamour and the terror and the dread of the Mesozoic world is what kind of set me then up for the glamour and the dread and the terror of the Roman world. I kind of moved seamlessly along from, you know, Saurian apex predators to the Roman army as a kind of apex predator. And I must say that it's great on a history podcast. You know, we've been doing a lot of contemporary history recently, so it's absolutely brilliant. Yeah.

To be going back millions and millions of years. Although we should point out, we're not doing that, are we? This is not about dinosaurs. Well, it's about dinosaurs in history, I suppose, isn't it? Yes, it's about historical. We're not suddenly turning into a paleontology podcast. This is about the process by which people came to realize that dinosaurs had existed and the role that they've played in the imagination

since their discovery which i think is a completely fascinating topic it's a brilliant topic so let's um we have quite a few questions uh to kick off with so uh a good one from Drop Dead Gormless, Steve. He says, what's the earliest written record of the discovery of a fossil? Perhaps we can widen that out a tiny bit. What is the earliest point that we know that people are even aware of dinosaurs? It's a great question. And there's a wonderful book by Adrienne Mayer, who's a kind of she's in the intersection point between classicist and paleontologist and and she's looked at uh the records from ancient Greece from Rome uh and more recently um the legends that Native Americans have told about thunder beasts and kind of

creatures like that and her argument is that say in North America the stories are told about thunderbirds correspond to the discovery perhaps of pterosaurs in the kind of incredibly fossil rich bone yards of the wild west. I think that in a way the best problem is that lots of the bones that the Greeks and the Romans talk about are not dinosaurs because the Mediterranean does not play host to a dinosaur bearing fossil beds. But I think my favorite thesis that she has actually does relate to dinosaurs. And it also relates to Herodotus, who is my great hero as historian who I've translated. So I was particularly thrilled by Adrienne's thesis on this, which is that Herodotus reports that in a kind of distant land, there's mountains and deserts, and there are creatures called griffins that lay on eggs. And Adrian

Mayer's argument is that this is, well, literally a Chinese whisper, because this is, she says, perhaps a kind of garbled traveler's report from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, just north of China, of the discovery of what in effect is a dinosaur called Protoceratops, which is a beaked dinosaur. So you think of Triceratops, this is a Triceratops without any horns. And its eggs are kind of scattered all around, just waiting to be found. These were the first ever fossilized dinosaur eggs that anyone discovered in the 1920s. And so she says, perhaps this legend of the griffin is a kind of report about the fossils of the skulls

of Protoceratops weathering out of rock or whatever. It's a wonderful, I mean, it's kind of unprovable, but it is a great idea. That then raises a big question there, an obvious question in which I'm sure listeners will have thought of. What about dragons? I i mean dragons are a brilliant subject in and of themselves but is there are quite a few listeners asked about this um on twitter are dragons basically some sort of weird memory of dinosaurs not called john and many others say our notes

asked about dinosaurs and dragons what do you think I don't want to go too deeply into dragons because I think we're going to do an episode specifically on them. But there is. So, for instance, there is a report of a Roman who travels to what's now the Lebanon. And this is where Perseus with the Gorgon's head is supposed to have turned the sea monster that was about to devour Andromeda into stone. And he brings back what is thought and claimed to be this petrified monster that's risen up from the sea. And that is pretty clearly assumed that that is some fossilized beast that's being brought back and it's being associated with dragons or sea monsters or whatever. I mean, I guess so, perhaps. I mean, there are, I think it's telling that the dragon is particularly associated with China and

China has incredibly rich fossil bearing rocks. So yes, probably. Actually, interestingly, the first known attempt to model something based on a fossil that we know is a statue of a dragon. It's in an Austrian town called Klagenfurt. And there was a there was supposedly a dragon there that was kind of preying on virgins and eating cattle and doing all the kind of stuff that a dragon does. And a brave knight comes along and kills it. And the dragon to this day is on the coat of arms of Klagenfurt. And I think in the 16th century, I think it was, they commissioned a statue of it. They had found what they thought was the skull of the dragon in the cave and so the head of the dragon on this sculpture in clagenford corresponds to um the contours of this skull that was found um the only problem is is it's not a dinosaur skull it's actually a skull of a woolly rhinoceros oh that

was only yeah later so that reminds me of a story that i read in a brilliant essay written by a leading historian in the guardian, I think it was, of all newspapers, about five or six years ago. The historian was you, and you were talking about Tiberius. Oh. Well, don't pretend to be surprised, because you emailed it to me yesterday. This, by the way, is how Tom Holland behaves.

When he goes on holiday to Greece, where he now is, he spends his time emailing me his own old essays um so so Tiberius Tiberius Tiberius came across a tooth or was sent a tooth after an earthquake is that right something like this that's right in what's now Turkey um and it's uh yeah you can tell it you've heard my essay I'm not going to read your essay for you. That would be absolutely shaming. So there's an earthquake. Pliny the Elder says it's the worst earthquake in human memory.

And Tiberius has a tooth and he gets a mathematician. Is that right? To build a statue based on the tooth? Yeah. And it's absolutely huge. And the tooth is probably a mastodon. How do you know?

How does anyone know? Prehistoric elephant. Because there were a lot of elephants, prehistoric elephants there and actually an interesting example of, so they assumed that this tooth was human. I mean, it couldn't have been human because obviously they weren't giant humans. But on the neighbouring island of Samos,

just across from the A um the aegean coast the asian asian aegean coast so one of the greek islands they found all kinds of of bones and they worked out that these were elephant bones and so they they said that these were elephants that had been brought by dionysus when he came with a giant army from india to conquer greece so as far as i know that is the earliest correct identification of a prehistoric fossil and its identification with the kind of animal it really was yeah so obviously the the woolly rhinoceros skull at clagenfurt they got it completely wrong it wasn't a dragon yeah but it's an ancient greek story about um elephants coming from india yeah they did get

it right they did get it right and then obviously a moment that will excite you the coming of christianity um there are no dinosaurs in the bible there's no there are no dinosaurs in the kind of mid there's a beast called behemoth right you could i mean it sounds a bit like a kind of uh a brachiosaur or something it's it's it's a colossal land animal that makes the earth shake and there's another there's a there's a marine one called leviathan but there's no there's no mesozoic era in the book of genesis though is there i mean no there isn't and obviously then in the christian kind of sense of time you know all these people bishops and saints kind of people trying to work out when god created the earth and all when abraham lived and all stuff. They have no sense of dinosaurs then. So for generations, people live in complete and utter ignorance of a prehistoric dinosaur era.

Am I right? They assume that creation happened. Well, I mean, the notorious example of that is in the 17th century, 1650, James Usher, who was the archbishop of Armagh. Yes. He tries to work out when the creation happened, and he goes through all the ancient texts, the classical texts, and so on. But of course, ultimately, his prime authority is the Bible, which takes him back to the creation.

And he works out notoriously that it was 4004 BC. And this is always kind of cited as a hilarious example of gullibility of Christians. But actually, it's a pioneering attempt to work out just how far back you can push the beginnings of time. And I think that from the point of view of discovering the existence of dinosaurs, you need to have a sense that the earth is old and that it had a beginning. And actually, and it probably won't surprise you to hear me say this, Christianity is quite important in this. Because what Christianity, like Judaism or Islam or before that Zoroastrianism, from which it gets the idea, it posits that there's a beginning and an end. And so time, rather than being cyclical, it starts. That origin point just gets pushed back further and further and further. And I think it's telling that the people who often who do that are themselves kind of Christian priests, of whom the most interesting is a guy who we've already come across yes uh and he came i mentioned him in the

the french revolution episode because he's the guy who ate the heart of louis the 14th so he's william buckland yeah william buckland so william buckland was operating just down the road from where i am now because i'm in chipping norton and there's stuff about him in churchill the next village just down the road so he's a clergyman, isn't he? He's a professor of geology at Oxford University. And he ends up being at Westminster. I mean, he's extraordinarily big. And so he's basically the founding father of dinosaur studies.

Am I right? He coins the word megalosaurus. He comes up with that word. Yes, a great lizard. He does. megalosaurus he comes up with that word yes so great lizard he he does and megalosaurus is the first creature to be to get a kind of proper scientific linnaean name so you know the the means of of um uh defining living organisms coined by the the swedish um naturalist linnaeus carlinas yeah but there is there is a brilliant complication to this story.

So yes, so the megalosaur bones are found in the Stainesville quarries where lots of the stone for the Cotswolds, cottages that you love, come from. Actually, a thigh bone of a megalosaur was found there back in the 17th century. And it was given to a guy called Robert Plott, who was, I think, professor of chemistry. He was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. And he studies it and works out what it is. And he has no idea what it could be. So he thinks, you know, is it a Roman war elephant?

Again, does it come from a giant, one of the biblical giants? You can't really work it out. Anyway, that vanishes, but somebody makes a drawing of it. And midway through the 18th century, another guy comes across this drawing and he looks at it and he thinks it looks like a scrotum.

And so he gives it the Linnaean name scrotum humanum. And under the universally accepted laws of scientific nomenclature, it's the first name that has to apply. So Megalosaurus is actually not. It should probably be known as scrotum humanum. That's the first dinosaur, which is a brilliant story. That's a terrible indignity for that dinosaur, isn't it? And for dinosaurs in general. Yes, it really is. I think paleontologists agree that they're not going to run with that.

So Buckland kind of identifies it as this giant ancient reptile. I think in 1822, he publicly presents it in 1824. Meanwhile, there's another guy, crucial guy, a doctor called Gideon Mantel. This is the fellow in Sussex. Sussex, yeah. And again in 1822, he's paying a visit. His wife goes off to a quarry and she discovers this tooth, which Mantel, with the help of the great French anatomist, 1822, he's paying a visit. His wife goes off to a quarry and she discovers this tooth,

which Mantel, with the help of the great French anatomist, Georges Cuvier, identifies as belonging to an iguana. Perhaps it looks like an iguana, you know, kind of the lizards. Hence iguanodon. Yes, it's a tooth of an iguana. Over the course of the succeeding years, Mantel discovers kind of more and more bits of Iguanodon. He discovers the bones of another giant ancient creature that he calls Hyliosaurus.

So there are these three land-based monsters, Megalosaurus, Hyliosaurus, Iguanodon. what they are until in 1842, probably the greatest and the most unpleasant scientific figure in Victorian Britain. The most unpleasant? He's a horrible man. He's a guy called Richard Owen. He's a great man. I mean, he founds

the Natural History Museum and he coins the word dinosauria. So terrible lizards. But he's an awful man and he gets into a terrible feud with poor Mantel and basically drives him to an early grave. So Richard Owen refuses to allow Mantel kind of any credit for what he's doing. He mocks his conclusions.

He brands him a fraud. He drives Mantel basically to bankruptcy. Mantell's wife leaves him. His son runs away to Australia. Mantell, ultimate indignity, he has to move from, he gets so poor that he has to move from Sussex to Clapham Common. Oh, that is love. And at Clapham Common, he gets entangled in the reins of a runaway cab.

He gets dragged along the street. He gets scoliosis. And he ends up taking an opium overdose to control the pain and dying. And this is all the fault of the bloke who founded the Natural History Museum. That seems a bit... And the worst thing is that Richard Witt takes his body and keeps his skeleton in a jar. Okay, that's pretty weird.

He's twisted, you know, he's got the scoliosis, so his spine is twisted. So poor Gideon Mattel, being persecuted to death by Richard Owen, ends up in a jar. And then I think they threw it out in the 60s. It was in the surplus to requirements.

So this poor man. I can think of it. Wow. That's given me a whole new way of thinking about my enemies and the punishments I will visit upon them one day. So Owen kind of got his punishment because he got in a massive bust up with Darwin and opposed Darwin.

So he ended up kind of on the losing side. But, I mean, he was a huge thing. And actually, there was always a large statue of Richard Owen in the Natural History Museum, which then got moved and replaced with one of Darwin. So in a sense, the ghost of Gideon Mantell. He was laughing. He would have enjoyed that.

But the other thing that Richard Owen does is to, he teams up with a guy called Benjamin Waterhousehouse hawkins who is a sculptor in the wake of the great exhibition and the great exhibition you know the crystal palace gets moved to south london and as part of that they think that they're going to have a kind of a prehistoric diorama and so they start building models of um of of these dinosaurs that Owen has just named. And famously, they get it wrong because Owen has got it wrong. And one of the things that Owen and Mantel had been arguing over was whether, for instance, Megalosaurus and Iguanodon,

were they bipedal or were they quadrupeds? Mantel had argued correctly that Iguanodon was bipedal or were they quadrupeds and tell the dog incorrectly that iguanodon was bipedal so still on its hind feet um owen said no they're kind of massive squat tank like creatures and so that's how they are built so if you go to crystal Palace today you look at them I mean they're they're absolutely fabulous they're if you haven't been to the mirror in South London do go and see them they're're really wonderful. So they're kind of the very first dinosaur theme park. But Owen has got them very, very badly wrong. And as a famous, as part of the publicity for this, famously they have a kind of, I think it's New Year's Eve,

they have a dinner, New Year's Eve in 1853, I think it is, they have a dinner inside the Iguanodon as a kind of publicity thing. And Tom, why is this all happening in Britain? Or are similar things happening somewhere else? Is it that Britain is more, I don't know, I mean, there are other countries, France, for example, or Germany,

or becomes Germany later on, are very scientifically advanced. Why aren't they making similar strides? It's really interesting. so people are discovering them so for instance um people are finding uh pterosaurs so that's flying wing flying reptiles from um from the mesozoic say in german quarries but they're not putting and they're finding giant aquatic creatures in belgium and and holl. But they're not putting, and they're finding giant aquatic creatures in Belgium and Holland, but they're not kind of bundling it together.

And I think it's something to do with, well, we were talking about the Industrial Revolution yesterday. It's the scale with which people in Britain are kind of looking at the land because it's to do with extraction of coal. It's to do with the, um, the blasting of rock increasingly in the railway,

all that kind of stuff that there's a need to understand the geology of Britain. And so therefore, when you're looking at the geology, inevitably you're starting to find all these fossils. And there's a kind of, there's just a kind of curiosity about it and a kind of range of kind of mingled amateurs and men of science who kind of just put it together. So I think that one of the things that's really interesting

about dinosaurs is the way that their discovery is kind of associated with the Industrial Revolution. So even though they are expressions of a kind of unimaginably distant past, and people find it incredibly destabilizing, of course, to realize that actually time is much, much deeper than they'd anticipated, they are also kind of cutting edge, which is why they appear at the Crystal Palace, which is this great monument to British know-how and get up and go. And it's why in Bleak House, in the opening paragraph,

Dickens fixes on, you know, he describes the mists that are kind of filling London. And he says that it wouldn't be a surprise to see a megalosaurus walking up Hoban Hill. He is, you know, that's a cutting edge reference. Yeah. Absolutely cutting edge reference. So it's sort of pushing the frontiers of science, isn't it?

I suppose, forwards and backwards, as it were. Now, I was about to say, we've got a few questions about the Victorians. So maybe this is a good place to do them. Alyssa McCarthy has a question about gentleman collectors. How much are gentleman collectors driving this sort of, the progress in paleontology? And Mark Kirk Alves has a question that I wanted to ask,

which is about Mary Anning. So Mary Anning operated Lion Regis. And basically, I think by internationally approved binding laws, all British children now have to learn about Mary Anning. And it's unthinkable that they don't. Mark Kirk Alves says, did she really play a role or were we just desperate to make the subject relatable to girls? So is it gentleman collectors?

Does Mary Anning matter? What's the story? It is gentleman collectors because William Buckland and Gillian Mantell and people like that, they're all gentlemen, essentially. And you have to be a gentleman. You have to be of gentle breeding and you have to be a man to get your papers accepted by the requisite societies,

which is why Mary Anning is marginalized through her life. Absolutely. I mean, she is an astonishing figure. It's not just... So just give us a sense of who she is, Tom, for those listeners. So the reason that I haven't mentioned Mary Anning up to now is that this is about dinosaurs and dinosaurs are land... She's fossils, right? She's absolutely fossils. Dinosaurs are land-based. Mary Anning is discovering creatures that swam in the seas.

So at the time, most of Dorset was underwater. Yeah. So that's why Mary Anning is finding ichthyosaurs, which kind of look like, you know, dolphins. She's finding plesiosaurs, which is the Loch Ness monster type, with the long neck and the flippers she is discovering pterosaurs she's identifying coprolites which are basically fossilized turds and she she's an amazing amazing pioneer and she she comes from the most kind of

grinding poverty she as a child was she was under a tree with three women and lightning struck and all the women died of the lightning strike and she survived. And the theory was, in Lyme Regis, this had kind of given her a spark of curiosity. I mean, she learned to read and write, but she had no real kind of scholarly background greater than that and yet she achieves this kind of revolution in the understanding of the past that the scale of her discoveries and her ability to understand what it is that she's finding is amazing and they get essentially they kind of get um the uh the gentleman scholars are like jackals feeding on her kills and she doesn't really get any of it. There's one hero in this, which is a guy called Henry de la Biche, who is an illustrator who illustrates what is effectively the very first illustration of a prehistoric landscape.

And in Latin, it's called Dorset as it was long long ago um and it you know it shows long-necked plesiosaurs kind of crunching on um uh pterosaurs and it shows ichthyosaurs and there's you know marianne has basically discovered that she's she's advanced his thesis that um feces can be fossilized and there's i think it's i think it's a plesiosaur who's in the process of being munched to death, literally shitting himself. And you can see these kind of turns dropping down to the bottom of the sediment, the bottom of the sea, where they in due course will be fossilized and then be discovered by Mary Anning. So she's a massive figure, but she's not discovering dinosaurs because Lyme Regis is in the Mesozoic with sea, not land. So I wanted to ask about Christianity because we're in the mid-Victorian period,

the age of Darwin, but I think we should take a break. So people have got that to look forward to, which is very exciting. We'll talk about that, then we'll get into America, and then we'll talk about 20th century dinosaurs and dinosaurs' kind of metaphorical meanings and so on,

and we'll do all that after the break, so don't go away. I'm Marina Hyde. and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking dinosaurs and the way,

the history of the ways in which they've been understood. So Tom Holland, we have reached the sort of mid-19th century um there have been tremendous breakthroughs in the understanding of dinosaurs the coining of the word dinosaur for example um exhibition of kind of recreations of dinosaurs and so on so the big question is how does this affect what is a very you know god-fearing age what's the this is the age of darwinism obviously but it's also an age of tremendous sort of interest in in christianity tremendous debates and so on do dinosaurs break people's faith or do people fit them into the christian story what do they do i don't think dinosaurs per se particularly affect people i I mean, you know, Buckland, you know, has said he's become the dean of Westminster.

It's how dinosaurs fit into Darwinism really starts to shake people's faith. Because of course, the idea that dinosaurs are, you know, which is still there in the way that we use dinosaur as a kind of pejorative to this day, this idea that there were these ancient monsters and then they became superseded because they were run out of town by evolutionary forces, which beds

in pretty quickly because the uptick in the discovery of dinosaurs, particularly in America, coincides with the explosion of Darwinism. It's that really that unsettles people. So I'll give you an example of a man whose faith does get very radically affected by it, but it's the interplay between his discovery of dinosaurs and Darwinism. And this is a guy called Edwin Drinker Cope, who was a Quaker from Pennsylvania, who's brought up with a kind of literal belief in Genesis and the flood and all that kind of stuff. But he's also obsessed by natural history. And as the Western frontier is being pushed ever further towards the Pacific,

so he goes in its wake. So along with all the buffalo hunters and prospectors and all those kind of people. Cope is riding out into the Wild West looking for dinosaurs. And he's out there in 1877 in the Bighorn Mountains when Custer gets wiped out. And it doesn't stop him. He's dodging the Sioux war bands and so on. And he ends up having these terrible nightmares in which he, dinosaurs kind of appear and jostle him and trample him down. And I think that that's kind of expressive of this anxiety he has about whether, basically whether evolution, which he's coming to accept, can be squared with a belief in a kind of loving God.

And it imposes ever greater strains on him. And he ends up essentially, he leaves the society of friends. He gives up his, his Quaker faith. And he actually kind of becomes a racist because the only way that he can justify believing in a benefit of God is if he, he, he, he argues basically that every human, every, every living organism has a kind of end endpoint that has been defined by God. And so all species are kind of inexorably moving towards it.

And if that's the case, then that must be true of human beings. And therefore, you know, people like him must be way up, further up the evolutionary train than people who don't know about about evolution so he becomes kind of scientific racist basically he becomes a scientific racist despite himself i mean he doesn't want you know he has he kind of abandons his belief that all you know this quaker yeah conviction that all human beings have a kind of fundamental dignity he ends up losing it um but but um cope is also famous for what is one of his notorious rivalries in science, which he has with another American scientist, a man called Charles Othniel Marsh. And he's also going out.

He's untroubled by Darwinism. And he discovers what is one of the classic proofs of it, the evolution of the horse. But Marsh also discovers an enormous number of dinosaurs so between them they're discovering loads of the classics kind of you know all the long-necked ones the sauropods triceratops all these kind of ones because it turns out and I think that this is a kind of wonderful way in which dinosaurs provide a brilliant metaphor for 19th and 20th century history. But as industrial supremacy is leeching from Britain to the United States,

so also does the lead in paleontology, because it stands out that in the West, these lands that are being opened up by the army, there are enormous numbers of dinosaurs, and you can dig them up. Now, why is that? Is it something to do with the soil or what's the story?

It's to do with the geology. It's to do with the fact that, you know, there aren't kind of picturesque villages everywhere. Right. You know, you can't really find. It's right the way, so all along the Rockies, right the way up to Canada,

there are just enormous, enormous numbers of dinosaurs waiting to be found. And Martian Cope, you know, there are so many that basically they, you know, I mean, it's kind of, it's a brilliant metaphor for American capitalism because they compete with each other so brutally. You know, they would rather smash bones up than need to be discovered by the other guy. And they end up kind of both of them kind of basically bankrupt. A monopolist moves in and buys up all their stuff. And that monopolist is Andrew Carnegie. Yeah, you couldn't make that up, could you? I mean, it's just a perfect metaphor. And Andrew Carnegie is interested. I mean, he's not interested in paleontology for his own sake. He's interested in massive dinosaurs that will make a huge statement. He wants a dinosaur that isontology for his own sake. He's interested in massive dinosaurs that will make a huge statement. He wants a dinosaur that is as big as his own kind of industrial ambitions.

And so he buys one called Diplodocus that is the, at that point, the longest dinosaur that had ever been discovered. He buys it up. He names it after himself. Why do you say Diplodocus and not Diplodocus? I don't know. I just always know okay i i was just brought up as a diplodocus man and i've tried to instill that in in youngsters that i meet but um do you know i i don't know what the correct pronunciation is okay this is a sort of

cope marsh type uh feud so and then what what carnegie does is he he makes casts of it and he sends it first of all, to London. So that's the one that was in the Natural History Museum for a long time. Yeah, which we all remember, you know, yeah. But he does other casts and he sends it round. So it's a kind of wonderful illustration of the way, you know, Carnegie himself is from Scotland originally. So it's this, the industry is passing from the old world to the new and the new is now starting to export it back to the old. It's kind of a perfect illustration of it.

It's that at this point, the idea of dinosaurs as slow, lumbering, dumb, hopeless creatures that have gone extinct because they've been wiped out by mammals hasn't kicked in yet. fine for for kamegi to associate a dinosaur with his own industrial concerns as it is with with the the sinclair oil company which takes as its logo a sauropod a dinosaur and and we're about to get to the point of with t-rex aren't we the discovery of tyrannosaurus rex and this extraordinary man barnum brown who went around in long fur coats and was a great sort of a great sort of showman so what's the story with him is Is he a real paleontologist? Or the very word Barnum kind of makes me think he's just running a circus or something. Well, he's from the Dutch History Museum in New York.

Mr. Bones. Don't they call him Mr. Bones? Well, he's a showman in the way that, you know, I mean, this is still kind of the age where the mythology of the West is still incredibly current. And he makes play with it. And he is the Eastern gentleman going out West. So that's why he's wearing a fur coat.

And also, he's incredibly predatory because he discovers actually that the best fossil deposits are up in Canada. And that in no way stops him from taking all the bones and sending them to new york and you're starting to get the sense that um you know america's global ambitions are manifesting themselves through the appetite of american paleontologists for fossils so you've got you've got barnum brown kind of digging up t-rexes such like creatures all the way up the west deep into canada yeah and then in the 20s you have this guy roy chapman andrews who is the guy who discovers the protoceratops eggs so he goes on a series of kind of amazing expeditions to the flaming cliffs in the goby desert uh and he it is said i don't

know how accurately is one of the models for indiana jones he's uh you know he's got a whip and he's frightened of snakes, fights Nazis. All that kind of stuff. So it's a kind of, you know, it's still, it's something that men of action want to be associated with. But again, to pursue this idea that dinosaurs provide a metaphor for the process of capitalism and industrialisation, in the Great Crash, so in the Depression,

you increasingly start to get the sense that actually dinosaurs are a bit of a dead end that they are properly for children and that dinosaurs themselves are kind of evolutionary dead ends that that don't really matter they're ponderous and slow and lumbering and i think that that's an image of them it's still kind of just about current to this day to pick up one of our previous podcasts in golden eye m calls james bond a racist misogynist dinosaur because dinosaurs were neither racist nor misogynist were they but um well to to go from bond to something he knew a lot about the cold war there comes to be this interesting kind of thing with communist and capitalist dinosaurs

doesn't there so so in the soviet union dinosaurs or are imagined differently from how they are in the west yes so if you think the the classic image of of a mesozoic scene which has been replayed in in countless numbers of films uh the classic image perhaps is a tyrannosaur against a triceratops you always get you know the triceratops with the three horns the tyrannosaur with the giant teeth and they fight each other and in in the kind of the classic american illustrations you have a t-rex you have a triceratops and it's like a kind of shootout in some wild west town outside the saloon it's the sheriff against the bad guy who's the sheriff the triceratops yes i guess the triceratops is the sheriff he's seeing he's

seeing off the uh yeah the battle rustler um in the Soviet Union uh there was a famous artist artist called Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyerov and he in in um during operation Barbarossa as the the Nazis were laying siege to Leningrad he was in Leningrad I think or maybe he was in Moscow I can't remember anyway he's in one of them and he did a spectacular illustration of a T-Rex triceratops face-off. What he did was to have a whole number of triceratopses, and they've kind of formed a phalanx so that their horns bristle like spears. And there are three kind of predatory tyrannosaurs circling it, but they can't break in. So unlike in the American where you have triceratops as a kind of lone gun,

in the Soviet version, they're a collective. Because the Soviet army gets to see off Hitler, so the triceratops get to see off tyrannosaurs. And I think it does show how readily the prehistoric world lends itself to all kinds of metaphors like that but the the field of understanding dinosaurs i mean the history of it is as you've shown fascinating but didn't stop being fascinating did it because i'm all right thinking in the 60s and 70s or maybe maybe i'm a bit early maybe 70s and 80s there were huge kind of convulsions in the study of dinosaurs so people had thought they were cold-blooded and then they thought they were warm-blooded they had thought they're reptiles and then they basically think they're birds you must know tons about this because you're very into this dinosaurs and birds business aren't you well you you you quoted bob backer at the beginning of this episode

and he he wrote a famous book called the dinosaur heresies in which absolutely you say he argued that dinosaurs were warm-blooded that they were mobile that they were incredibly successful um at the back of this was a discovery made in the 60s of a dinosaur called dynonychus actually dynonychus has been discovered earlier but it's it's a guy called john ostrom argues that dynonychus means terrible claw and these were very mobile they they seemed to attack in packs they could they could run they could jump so they were the opposite of Ponderous. And he extrapolated from this an argument that dinosaurs were just kind of basically terrifying. And it's Deinonychus that is Velociraptor in Jurassic Park, because Velociraptor sounds more frightening. And also, obviously, Deinonyanaicus bears a very strong resemblance to

birds and this was something that that wasn't original to ostrom actually thomas huxley who was darwin's bulldog yes a good titanic figure of late victorian science he had argued that the birds were basically dinosaurs but that was that was an argument that got parked but it gets revived in the 60s and essentially now people would say so that backer passage you know he says dinosaurs are extinct i think most people now most scientists and i speak completely as a non-scientist would say that dinosaurs aren't extinct because birds are dinosaurs so they're still around so they're all the old stuff about about the death of the dinosaurs is overheated. And so that is the other thing that happened,

was that the great mystery for a century and more was what happened to the dinosaurs. Where did they go? Why did they become extinct? And so you had all the Gary Larson, the famous Gary Larson cartoon, terrible news guys, we've got brains the size of a walnut and there are loads of mammals taking over um that that was that was basically why people thought

that they were kind of hopeless in the dead end but but it was in in the 80s so in 81 a brother and father team of geologists in alvarez pair a feast identified identified this kind of strain in the sediment at the end of the Cretaceous period when the dinosaurs go extinct of iridium, which seemed to imply that there'd been a kind of an asteroid hit. And they argued that this perhaps was what had killed the dinosaurs. And this was a theory that got kind of stress tested and stress tested and stress tested. And ultimately, I mean, pretty quickly came to be almost universally accepted. that got kind of stress tested and stress tested and stress tested and and ultimately i mean pretty quickly came to be almost universally accepted and the impact point got discovered it's it's um in

in mexico and essentially the dinosaurs went extinct due to bad luck but they didn't go extinct if they're still around flying around the non-avian dinosaurs right went extinct due to bad luck. So you have this combination of the realisation that dinosaurs have been mobile, lots of them perhaps have been warm-blooded, that they were basically birds, combined with the sense that the fact they'd gone extinct wasn't really their fault, which was all of which fused just in time for Spielberg's film Jurassic Park. So Michael Crichton's novel novel which predates it obviously um a seismically important film because it portrayed dinosaurs in a way that was as true to how the kind of cutting-edge understanding of paleontology

as as was possible so they move in herds, they are clever, they're ingenious. But they're all studded. I don't know if you remember, there's a bit where the children that you always get in Spielberg film, they're hiding in, I think, in a kitchen or something. Yeah, very famous.

And the Velociraptor blows on the glass and it steams up. So you know that you're doing something very frightening. And then they work out how to open the door. And there's kind of another amazing scene where they break into the lab where they've been extracting the DNA

and the kind of computer code is luminous and green and it kind of spills over the head of Velociraptor. And again, it's doing what has happened back with the uh the crystal palace it's it's casting dinosaurs as cutting edge you know these are creatures that you can link with computing and with dna and with yeah absolutely cutting edge theme parks so so jurassic park is kind of absolutely the heir to the crystal palace although Although Jurassic Park, it's interesting you say that because Jurassic Park kind of cuts against

much of what we've been talking about, which is the advance of science, fantastic potential of science and human curiosity to find out about what went before. I mean, Jurassic Park is all about the dangers of science, isn't it? Rather than so much specifically the dangers of dinosaurs, it's that kind of, you know, Frankenstein's kind of science run amok, isn't it?

Yes, it is. I mean, it is the Frankenstein story. And if you go to a theme park, I mean, you know that everything's going to go wrong. I mean, the same is true as you go to a cowboy theme park. Yeah, Westworld. You know the gunslingers are going to come after you. I did not take away from watching Jurassic Park, ooh, we shouldn't try and bring dinosaurs back.

I took away, it would be amazing. You're the Richard Attenborough figure. I'm Geoff Goldblum. So the kind of, the stop-start technology that they used in, you know, Millennials BC, those kind of films, was appropriate to the kind of dinosaur people understood then,

slow, ponderous, sluggish. The fact that you had CGI and that Jurassic Park was the first film to use CGI to bring dinosaurs to life, I mean, you remember the scene where they, Samuel and Laura Dern are going along in the jeep

and then they turn around and they kind of take their shades off and their hats and gaze in wonder, and then you look and there's the brachios all coming out and i i mean i i felt i felt that just seeing it in cgi and i never imagined i'd see a dinosaur that brilliantly brought to life and it kind of turbo charged for lots and lots of people study of dinosaurs and ironically one of the things that it did so at the end of jurassic park they're flying out in the helicopter they've had a terrible time and sam neill says to richard attenborough he's not going to approve the park and then they look out and they see a flock of

birds going across the sea and the implication is obviously that that birds are dinosaurs and at the point that was still not a universally accepted thesis. But in the years that followed, I mean, actually almost immediately, a series of incredible finds began to be made in China. And these were finds that showed conclusively that lots of dinosaurs had been feathered and that basically, you know, there was a whole line of dinosaurs that had become birds. The effect of that was that for the first time, you know, in over 100 years, the most interesting center of dinosaur discoveries and finds and research was no longer the United States, but China. There's another metaphor.

Absolutely. There's another amazing metaphor. It's kind of very odd that if you think of, you know, the lead passes from Britain to America and then to China, the same thing happens with dinosaur discoveries. And the degree to which that is just a metaphor, whether there's something deeper. Yeah. And what about, obviously, we are living in an age where we're so much more conscious of geological time,

of the Earth, the changing climate, all those kinds of things. So where does that leave dinosaurs? I mean, obviously they're no longer these kind of, well, for children, they still are, aren't they? They're mythical monsters, Tyrannosaurus Rex, you know. But I think for adults and for people who are interested in dinosaurs, they now have a very different role in our imagination than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Is that right? Well, you still get dinosaurs being used as a pejorative. Yeah.

That is still kind of current. So when I make a reference to Jordan, the reality TV show star on our podcast, you mock me as a dinosaur you probably i think you call me granddad but i felt the dinosaurs hanging in the hanging in the air i would never have used that i hope i did because i know better because actually and i think i think i think it's an understanding of dinosaurs that has percolated through because i think that a crucial part of anxiety about climate change and about mass extinction that is going on at the moment has been hugely hugely sharpened by the sense that the mesozoic ended in a kind of

catastrophic with a catastrophic ball of fire that the seas boiled the flesh fell off the bones that um whatever the 94 95 of all living organisms were wiped out from the blink of an eye because it it has brought home i suppose the um you know how vulnerable earth is so it's almost a story about it's a story about hubris to some extent is it it's a story about inevitable disaster looming it's the apocalypse is coming the end of the world is nigh don't you think that's that's shot the dinosaur story shot through with that? I do. So I think that, you know, to go back to Christianity, if there's a beginning, then there's an end. And I think that the dinosaur, you know, the kind of so many illustrations of the asteroid

hitting and a kind of pterosaur looking or a tyrannosaur glancing around and there's a plume of light. It gives us a kind of scientifically updated vision of Apocalypse, of the end of the world. Except of course it's not the end of the world because then life covers, you know, life has a way. There's a Jurassic Park. I think the complication for us is that it forces us to ask now, are we the asteroid? Are we the asteroid? Yes. Are we the asteroid? It's Is Homo sapiens the asteroid? And it's the process of industrialisation brought to life, you know, facilitating the discovery of dinosaurs, that is now perhaps leading to global catastrophe.

That's a lovely, cheerful note on which to end. Everything has a beginning, everything has an end. But we should end with one last question, very much in the spirit of the podcast. Martin Perry, who would win in a fight

between a Tyrannosaurus and a Stegosaurus? Well, neither would because they didn't coexist. That's like Mary Beard being evasive about Alexander the Great versus Julius Caesar.

Tyrannosaurs are closer to us than Stegosaurs were to Tyrannosaurs. That's a fascinating, that's a fantastic fact, isn't it? That's like Cleopatra was closer to us than she was to the building of the Great Pyramid.

One of those amazing... So... I imagine a tyrannosaur would win. Would it? So was a tyrannosaur... The general sense now is that the tyrannosaur was actually completely useless. Is that right?

Or was that just overstated? Yeah, massively overstated. No, not useless. I'm glad we're clear. You would not want to be bitten by a tyrannosaur. Well, since we don't coexist, I'm pretty confident that's not want to be bitten by a dinosaur well since we don't co-exist I'm pretty confident that's not going to happen right on that bombshell

I think we shall thank you Tom for that tour de force I did all so much talking in Watergate it was nice to have a rest this time and it is a fascinating it's a fascinating subject we have coming up remind me what we have coming up on

thursday we have a history of india in 10 buildings and then we will be back next week with golden ages when was the golden age and is there such a thing right we'll see you next time goodbye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.