“Dinosaurs are coming back, as it turns out; not alive, but surfacing into the ecological concerns of our moment,” writes Rebecca Giggs in our Holiday Issue. “To think more deeply about what it might mean to learn about dinosaurs in this time of environmental crisis, I sat down with my eight-year-old nephew, Alex, to watch the latest season of Prehistoric Planet.” Together, aunt and nephew (who occasionally slips out to “kick a ball down the driveway”) watch the persuasively realistic BBC series, which combines CGI and live footage from remote corners of the world to present speculative renderings of how dinosaurs might have appeared in a modern nature documentary. Giggs finds herself waxing nostalgic for the hold ancient beasts can have on a child’s imagination, and “for a time before the climate change ‘debates,’ when science seemed to have greater authority and the projection of the world it offered suffered less from bargaining and predatory skepticism.”

Below, alongside Giggs’s essay, a treasury of dinosauralia.

Rebecca Giggs
The Lost World

Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.

Verlyn Klinkenborg
What Were Dinosaurs For?

“In a sense, paleontology is recovering from the sobriety of its earliest speculations. Studying its history is like watching the Iguanodon in a mid-nineteenth-century black-and-white illustration slowly assume its proper shape and dimensions and then, suddenly, pop with color and behavior.”

Tim Flannery
Dinosaur Crazy

“‘And would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill,’ Dickens mused. [In her book Terrible Lizard] Deborah Cadbury sets herself the task of explaining how this curious Victorian image of dinosaurs came to be, and along the way to reveal something of the human story behind the discoveries.”

John Terborgh
The Age of Giants

“The history of life on earth is largely driven by events of a kind scientists call nonlinearities, radical breaks from the status quo. Among them are continental mergers and breakups, drastic changes in climate, the opening and closing of corridors of intercontinental (or interoceanic) migration, and, of course, extinctions of species…. Thus the all-too-human response to the prospect of nonlinearities is denial.”

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
First Fine Careless Raptor

“Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.”

Stephen Jay Gould
Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

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