When considering dinosaurs as they are depicted in popular culture, the first, and likely the only thing that comes to mind is the Jurassic Park franchise. And that is with good reason, as despite the outdated portrayals of dinosaurs, Spielberg’s timeless masterpiece was single handedly responsible for reviving interest in paleontology for generations since its release.
However, dinosaurs have been speculated about in all forms of fiction for centuries before the first Jurassic Park, as people were enraptured by the existence of monsters that died out millions of years ago.
Though these creatures existed hundreds of millions of years ago, humans were not aware of their existence until very recently. Even after the start of what would become the paleontological movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, the concept of large land roaming lizards wouldn’t be discovered until 1824, when a bone of a Megalosaurus was uncovered. Soon after, other, similar large land lizard bones were found of the Iguanodon and Hylaesaurus, and a classification for them was coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1841, Dinosaur, meaning great lizard.
One of the most important events in cementing how dinosaurs are seen by people, was set to motion by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who under the direction of Sir Richard Owen, built a series of sculptures depicting dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace in 1854.
Now called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the portrayals are wildly inaccurate by modern standards, but were the first true visualizations of what dinosaurs might look like, and this would be the case for decades after. Sir Richard Owen imagined dinosaurs to simply be larger versions of lizards today, hence dinosaur meaning ‘great lizard’, and as per his vision, the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs all looked like massive iguanas and crocodiles.
Accurate reconstruction
Most were quadrupedal and their tails dragged along the ground, and while these are easily recognized to be wrong now, were scientifically accurate with the information they had at the time.
Though the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs would become outdated just years after its opening, thanks to more accurate reconstructions of fossils, they weren’t displayed to the public, so for most people, the inaccurate depictions were all they had.
But more accurate depictions would soon come, and the 20th century would see a huge boom in popularity for dinosaurs.
Charles Knight, a paleoartist, who’s artworks depicted dinosaurs as lively animals that lived and interacted with each other, became one of the most widely seen versions of the creatures, and while still inaccurate and based on incomplete information, was hugely influential in popularizing dinosaurs.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), thought to be the first animated film, showed a friendly dinosaur, a far cry from the violent monsters that would soon become the popular interpretation of dinosaurs. Starting with Brute Force (1914), a silent short film and the first live action film about dinosaurs.
The film was about cavemen, and shows a dinosaur terrorizing them, starting a trend of depicting dinosaurs as less than animals and more like bloodthirsty monsters, further popularized by the Lost World (1912), King Kong (1933), and continues to this very day.
A lot of films in this era of dinosaur fiction had a variety of ways in portraying their dinosaurs on screen. While the most successful used stop motion animation or rubber suits like other monster movies, the cheapest and by far the most popular method was to use real animals, known in the industry as a “Slurpasaur”.
Big lizards
As the most popular view at the time was that dinosaurs were just big lizards, most dinosaur depictions were simply a reptile, usually an iguana, shot in a way that made it look massive and with decorations on it to look exotic.
These depictions were quite inhumane, and were during a time before animal rights protections were able to prevent it. Thanks to those laws, and the rise in the use of special effects and CGI, the Slurpasaur would go extinct.
Around the 80s, a new age media about dinosaurs came about, showing a wide range of angles far beyond that of the movie monster they were for decades before. There was a massive rise in dinosaur encyclopedias and educational videos that painted dinosaurs in a more paleontological view, as did documentary channels like the National Geographic.
A lot of kids’ media featuring dinosaurs was also popular around this time, like the Barney & Friends educational kids show starring Barney the Dinosaur. The Land Before Time franchise which started in 1988, did not have much in the way of paleontological accuracy, but was vital in popularizing dinosaurs for children. And then in 1993, Jurassic Park, an adaptation of the 1990 novel, hit theaters and cemented dinosaurs in the mainstream of pop culture forever.