Mourning for dinosaurs, 65 million years too late

In 1921, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History prepares the skeleton of a baby dinosaur found in Montana. The skeleton was thought to be 7 to 8 million years old. (LLC/Buyenlarge/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Dinosaurs have been fearsome and fascinating — but tragic?

Those prehistoric creatures who met their end around 65 million years ago are currently being memorialized online by dino-heads who mourn their mass extinction. Fans chop up animated footage of dinosaur hatchlings or long-necked herbivores in courtship (mostly taken from the recent Netflix docuseries “The Dinosaurs”) and set it to somber music. “The world was supposed to be theirs,” one viewer lamented in the comments.

Dinosaurs do not know, another TikToker opined, that “we found them and we love them with everything we have.” Others wondered how they could miss creatures they never knew.

But humans have a long habit of inserting their own feelings into the story of the dinosaurs. Our vanished gargantuan predecessors have served in the imagination as monster-movie villains, preschool companions, friends or house-sized house pets. Small children memorize big facts about them; rich people invest or squander fortunes buying their bones. They can’t stop showing up in movie theaters: This coming summer, they’ll walk among humans again in a mysterious film starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor.

When science said dinosaurs were pea-brained and cold-blooded, humans took their demise as proof of the superiority of warm, clever mammals. By the late 20th century, though, the notion that the dinosaurs died out because they were slow and stupid was falling apart on two fronts: more and more fossil evidence pointed to their having had high metabolisms and sophisticated behaviour, and geologic evidence suggested they had been wiped out in a sudden cataclysmic asteroid impact, rather than slowly undone by any evolutionary inadequacies.

If dinosaurs were strong and intelligent — if humans didn’t really deserve to inherit the Earth from them — then their death in a cosmic freak accident represents unimaginable loss. What if humans were to lose their dominion over the planet, too? What if, in our case, it does turn out to be our own fault?

In the early ‘90s, the sitcom “Dinosaurs” started as a kid-friendly program about a blue-collar family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs and ended with the characters facing certain death in a deep freeze brought about by overdevelopment. It was an unsubtle but prescient look at dinosaurs’ new role as avatars for humans living through what feels like their own creeping apocalypse — call it extinction anxiety.

“They lasted for a long time, were hugely successful and diverse, but now (apart from the birds) are gone,” said Chris Manias, historian of science at King’s College London who wrote a book about paleontology in public life. “They lend themselves to a sense that even the most powerful and dramatic creatures, and the most extraordinary worlds, have an ending.”

Why we fear, respect and mourn dinos

Humans have long loved dinosaurs because their very existence feels stranger than fiction, Manias said.

BC-era humans had an idea dinosaurs existed, even if they didn’t quite know what to make of their monstrous bones. But paleontology didn’t really get going until the 19th century, when fuller fossils were uncovered and experts started to call these massive lizard-looking things dinosaurs, said Vicky Coules, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the U.K. who studies how dinosaurs became visual icons. The idea that we shared a common planet shocked people at the time.

In the mid-1800s, the British sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built immense models of dinosaurs based on fossils and fragments, though they more closely resembled existing reptiles than the giants we now know they are. Their height and heft frightened and thrilled spectators, earning dinosaurs a permanent place in the public imagination, Coules said.

Mostly, that imagination revolved around finding ways for humans and dinosaurs to overlap. In 1864, Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” imagined explorers finding dinosaur-like creatures living underground. Just under 100 years later, the Flintstones adopted the friendly Dino as a pet. Barney taught children to share.

But the contemporary age of dinosaurs arrived with the 1993 release of the film adaptation of “Jurassic Park.” Steven Spielberg’s thriller depicted dinosaurs as “active, dynamic and social creatures,” changing the way we thought about early life on Earth, Manias said. These weren’t Waterhouse Hawkins’ lumbering, unintelligent lizards who went extinct because they failed to evolve. Spielberg’s dinosaurs were clever, quick and hunted humans for sport.

Spielberg’s vision shook up the pantheon of prehistory, elevating the once-obscure predator Velociraptor to box-office stardom and winning it a place on the NBA expansion team’s jerseys for the Toronto Raptors. It also demonstrated the power of CGI to make convincing, naturalistic dinosaur footage, bringing on the era of the synthetic dinosaur nature documentary.

The toothy T. rex once inspired terror. But the dinosaur enthusiasts posting dramatic TikTok edits seem to identify with the prehistoric predator.

“If we’re thinking about our experiences of living through a global polycrisis, then trying to have a connection with beings from untold eons ago that went through a series of great disasters throughout their history — large-scale climate change, ecological shocks, and then a catastrophic asteroid impact at the end — puts our current world into perspective,” Manias said.

The swell of sympathy for dinosaurs might also belie a “sense of regret for a lost world,” Coules said: “A sense that we know they existed for hundreds of millions of years as dominant terrestrial lifeforms, yet even they disappeared. We’ve only been around for a few thousand and it feels rather tenuous at the moment!”

Maybe comparing current world events to the demise of dinosaurs proves that humans are not the “rightful masters of the world” after all, Manias said. Dinosaurs were in a similar position, and they’re long gone — for the most part. We still share a planet with birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs, and there are billions of them, scattered across every continent on Earth. Perhaps the history of dinosaurs should make us feel hopeful, said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and consultant on the “Jurassic World” films.

“While we might think of dinosaurs as synonymous with extinction, in fact they are great survivors,” he said. “The arc of prehistory is long and bends towards survival and endurance.”