I found the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace to be incredibly fascinating because of their obvious incorrectness. The people of the mid 19th centuries were fascinated with these alien looking beings and because of the scientific revolution surrounding the idea of evolution (rhyme not intended). I think that their attempts to recreate these beings from their skeletons alone were incredible considering their lack of knowledge of these creatures. I think the idea of popularity of dinosaurs with children originates from this time period when most people were fascinated by these creatures. Eventually, this was beat into children so much (not literally of course!!) that, of course, they started to turn away towards more revolutionary things like space travel.
I personally always found dinosaurs to be very interesting (my favorite being the brontosaurus), but I always felt like dinosaurs were targeted more towards the boys in the class than the girls. This probably goes back to the idea that dinosaurs aren't "girly," so it isn't expected that girls will like them. I still find dinosaurs rather fascinating, but I'm much more interested in the much older, decidedly smaller and (sometimes) more deadly kingdom of bacteria.
You bring up a good point about how hard it must of been to recreate the dinosaurs with as little evidence as they had. It's hard for me to imagine myself being able to do the job with all the bones available to me let alone with only a small fraction. I also thought your point about dinosaurs being targeted for boys more than girls was also a good point.
ReplyDeleteScience has a certain amount of masculinity in it and I agree that dinosaurs are definitely something that is considered for boys, though I am sure many ladies and girls love them some T-rexes too. think it is important to recognize that with a basic, well thorough, understanding of animal physiology and bone structure piecing them together simply becomes a matter of comparison and reconstruction based on how we know animal bones are put together. This isn't full proof but armed with that knowledge one can make inferences in ho an animal moved, lived, and even died.
ReplyDeleteI like your reference to space travel and the "revolutionary" aspect to it. I assume you were saying that the interest in dinosaurs may have -for some kids- led to interests in other sciences, more specifically sciences that can shape the future. Whereas nothing new is really happening with dinosaurs. Some of our most revolutionary scientists could have possibly been fascinated with dinosaurs when they were young, opening their minds up to a scientific prism.
ReplyDeletei think i was most drawn to how you mention 19th c fascinations, i recently was looking over some postcard from around this time that "depicted" how we would live live in the year 2000. they were frighteningly close to accurate in some ways (one had a video call) and a little off the mark in others (travel by whale). But i swear i dont bring this up just to create small talk, there was something about this point in time that really shows how vivid human imaginations use to be. When i look at things from this time period for some reason they seem to be a little more carefree, like the CP dino's completely wrong in composition and yet awkwardly close.
ReplyDeleteat the same time i really think this was a great time period for jig saw puzzles (aka reassembly of skeletons)
I suspect if dinosaurs were considered to be targeted to girls by marketers they would emphasize dino families (moms and babies) rather than blood-curdling T rexes -- at least that's how it seems to go with other stuff!
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