Whatever happened to kangaroo-kicking dinosaurs?

While I am waiting for a certain piece of literature to arrive in my mail so I can write part 3 of my APW trope series, I decided to bridge the time by writing something completely different and hopefully shorter. A few months ago I read Predatory Dinosaurs of the World for the first time. Apart maybe from The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, this 1988 book is probably the most famous work by paleoartist and freelance researcher Gregory S. Paul. There's a lot that can be said about it, like how the art-style has influenced mainstream paleoart, Paul's controversial theories and how much of an influence he may or may not have had on Jurassic Park-author Michael Crichton. But we will discuss none of that for now and instead focus on an image that has immediately captured my curiosity:

  Fig. 1: A Ceratosaurus attacks a pair of Allosaurus by rearing up on its tail and preparing to kick. The allosaurs with their flimsy tails look mightily impressed. I would be too if I saw a half-ton predator doing this.

This was apparently Paul's first officially published dinosaur illustration, first appearing, if I read the bibliography correctly, in a 1978 article by a certain J. L. Marx in an issue of the journal Science. What it depicts is a hypothesis by Robert T. Bakker, for whom Paul worked as an assistant and illustrator. Bakker's observation was that more primitive theropods, such as Ceratosaurus, had larger foot-claws and stouter tails than later ones such as Allosaurus, so he suggested the idea that they may have occasionally balanced on their tails and kicked with their feet during fights, much like kangaroos do today. What I find so fascinating about this is that this was the first time I ever heard of such an idea as I have never seen it addressed in any other work. I did try to do some research on it, but all I found is that this became a minor paleomeme, as some artists copied (or, if you will, plagiarized) this image in their works. This of course gives no indication about the scientific accuracy of the scene, as even today artists in a hurry do not tend to do their research and just copy whatever fits the page of a children's dino book. This leaves me incredibly curious. Has this ever been debunked or confirmed by a later study? My gut-feeling tells me that no dinosaur-tail should be able to bend this way, but I am of course not an expert on these biomechanics and the tails of ceratosaurs may have significantly differed from other theropods. Ceratosaurus' tail was apparently unusual enough that Bakker also proposed that it may have used it to swim like a crocodile, but unlike the kangaroo-kick, this idea has at least met criticism. If you know anything more about these matters, please tell me. Is this just another piece of 70s/80s Dino-Renaissance weirdness, like viviparous, trunked sauropods and frill-humped ceratopsians, or is there more to it?

Fig. 2: Robert Bakker reconstructed Stegosaurus (both times shown without the iconic back-plates for better clarity) as being capable of occasionally assuming the classic tripodal stance and interpreted it as an active high-browser. As evidence he shows that it had an anatomy better suited to this than, for example, an elephant, which is also capable of rearing up. Brontosaurus gets the same treatment.

What also makes this interesting, from an art-historic viewpoint, is that it seems to be an inversion of a classic trope in dinosaur reconstruction. Kangaroos are the only large animals around today that are bipedal and have long, muscular tails. Before it was realized that non-avian dinosaurs are close relatives of birds, they were therefore often used as reference when reconstructing the posture of bipedal dinosaurs. Until the 1970s it was the norm to reconstruct theropods and other dinosaurs like kangaroos... if they were fat, lazy lizards. The main trait that was often carried over was that kangaroos use their tail as a sort of third leg when standing upright. However, dinosaurs were not envisioned as hoppers and instead portrayed as awkwardly waddling around in this tripodal stance. They were therefore left with all the awkwardness of a kangaroo and with none of the dynamicity or gracility. What Paul and Bakker did here seems to be an inversion of this trend, giving Ceratosaurus one of the most dynamic and characteristic movements of a kangaroo and none of the awkwardness. This type of "rebellion" is sort of typical of the Dinosaur Renaissance, as we often see old, orthodox ideas of dinosaurs being subverted or inverted. In 1986's The Dinosaur Heresies, Robert T. Bakker did perhaps something similar with another dinosaur. Contrary to the view up to that time, which saw Stegosaurus as a lardy, slow and tortoise-like low-browser, Bakker instead chose to reconstruct it as a high-browser that could occasionally rear up onto its hind-legs and use its tail as a third leg to reach higher tree-branches. Here the ability to stand in a kangaroo-like tripodal posture is utilized to paint a dinosaur, otherwise portrayed as lethargic, as an active, dynamic animal. Bakker's reconstruction made sense in the 80s, as Stegosaurus was reconstructed with significantly longer hind-legs than fore-legs. Thanks to new fossil finds we now know that its hind-legs were somewhat shorter than thought, but also that its neck was longer, making it more similar to other stegosaur species. I therefore wonder how much Bakker's reconstruction still holds up, although I suspect it is still largely salvageable. 

Fig. 3: The jerboa-like pterosaur-relative Scleromochlus, as illustrated by Mark Witton.

There is of course more that could be said about the history of dinosaur-kangaroo comparisons. The idea that some dinosaurs may have actually hopped like kangaroos has come up on occasion. Edward Drinker Cope originally thought Trachodon and Laelaps moved in such a way, though this was later abandoned in favour of a more awkward reptilian shuffle. An infamous example comes from 1984, when Bernier et al. identified a trace-fossil, which they named Saurosaltopus (literally "lizard-jump-foot"), as footprints left behind by a small dinosaur that hopped similar to a wallaby. It later turned out that Saurosaltopus was not made by a dinosaur at all, but was actually produced by the flippers of a sea turtle dragging itself along a beach. To my knowledge there is currently no evidence of any member of the clade Dinosauria having moved primarily in a hopping motion. The feet of kangaroos, which enable them to locomote in this fashion, are plantigrade, meaning they primarily stand on the soles (or metatarsals if you want to be technical) of their feet, just like us. The feet of most bipedal non-avian dinosaurs were digitigrade like those of avian dinosaurs (birds), meaning they walked on their elongated toes (I say most, because some noasaurids seem to have walked on just a single toe, somewhat similar to horses). While small birds do hop on occasion, this is of course not comparable to the movement of a kangaroo. Things become more interesting if we move outside Dinosauria and look at other Avemetarsalia (the clade that includes the last common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs and all its descendants). It has frequently been proposed that some dinosauromorphs and dinosauriforms, like Lagerpeton and Lagosuchus, and other ornithodirans like Scleromochlus, had plantigarde feet and moved similar to small, saltatorial mammals, like jerboas, wallabies or rabbits (Lagosuchus even means rabbit-crocodile). The strongest case for a saltatorial locomotion can be made for Scleromochlus, followed by Lagerpeton. It is interesting to think that dinosaurs may have evolved from a hopping archosaur similar to these, but current cladistic models show them being the closest relatives of silesaurids, which were quadrupeds. Scleromochlus however is often theorized to be a close relative to the ancestor of pterosaurs and its hopping gait may have been a pre-adaptation for their flight-capability. In 2015 Mark Witton illustrated Scleromochlus interestingly as fuzzy and hopping through a desert, very similar to a jerboa or desert-kangaroo. The fuzz is speculative, but reasonable given how we know pterosaurs had such integument, called pycnofibers. More recent studies also suggest that pycnofibers and the proto-feathers of dinosaurs are one and the same and go back to the common ancestor of both groups. Like the works of Paul and Bakker, the illustration uses kangaroo-like characteristics to portray the animal as fast and active, not slow and ungainly like would have been done in older art.

Fig. 4: As a reward for reading to the end: Bennett's wallabies (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus) being cute and doing wallaby-things at the Zoo Zürich (image taken by me). Personally I have never seen them in a fighting or aggressive mood. However, the emus that they share their walkthrough-exhibit with do seem to have fun harrassing little children. 

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Literary sources:

• Bakker, Robert Thomas: The Dinosaur Heresies. New Theories Unlocking The Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, New York 1986.
• Barrett, Paul/ Naish, Darren: Dinosaurs. How they lived and evolved, London 2016 (Second Edition). 
• Barret, Paul: Stegosaurus. An extraordinary specimen and the secrets it reveals, London 2017.
• Desmond, Adrian: The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs. A Revolution in Paleontology, London 1975.
• Paul, Gregory Scott: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. A Complete Illustrated Guide, New York 1988.
• Witton, Mark: Pterosaurs, New Jersey 2013.
• Witton, Mark: Recreating an Age of Reptiles, Marlborough 2017.
• Witton, Mark: The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art, Marlborough 2018. 

Online sources:

• Scleromochlus taylori: more than just 'the early ornithodiran' by Mark Witton
• New fossil sea turtle trackway morphotypes from the Pleistocene of South Africa highlight role of ichnology in turtle paleobiology by Lockley et Arcucci
• Dinosaurian precursors from the Middle Triassic of Argentina: Lagerpeton chanarensis by Sereno et al.
• Sophie the Stegosaurus: Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong Synapisode #1 by Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

Image sources:

• Fig. 1: Paul 1988, p. 35.
• Fig. 2: Bakker 1986, p. 189-191.
• Fig. 3: Witton 2017, p. 77.

The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 2 - Dinosaurs become movie monsters

This is part two of a series. If you have not read part one yet, please do here. Last time we left off at nineteenth century advances in geology and paleontology. Before we continue there we will first take a detour and look at astronomy in the age before spacecrafts and how it may have influenced the idea of the Alien Prehistoric World.

That the planets and moons are other real, physical objects like Earth that a human could theoretically stand on is a realization that is relatively recent. From late-roman through medieval times most of astronomy in Europe followed the Aristotelian model, according to which Earth was the center of the cosmos and it and its atmosphere were encased by several layers of crystal spheres. The stars, planets and even our moon were seen as simple lights that were attached to these rotating spheres. In the late middle ages and early modern period some people, like Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were beginning to doubt this model, stating that the Earth was not the center of the universe and that humans could potentially physically visit other planets, but they ran into often severe problems with the church and theology. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Tycho Brahe could conclusively disprove the existence of the Aristotelian spheres, while his student Johannes Kepler showed that not only do the planets revolve around the sun, but they do so in elliptical orbits. This explained the movements of the planets better than the previous model of Copernicus, who assumed their orbits were circular. Kepler wrote many technical works explaining his worldview, but he also wrote one piece of fiction called Somnium or The Dream. It is a story that was only officially released after his death, but it left a big impact. In it Kepler describes how he one day fell asleep and dreamed that he met a group of demons, who offered to transport him to the Moon. He accepts and from there on describes what it is like to travel through space (he correctly predicts that it would be very cold and hard to breathe) and stand on the surface of the moon, looking down at Earth. He also describes the Moon's seasons, lengths of days, geography and climates. About half of the book is made up of references to his technical work and commentary in which Kepler scientifically explains why he describes the things he sees in the way he does. The purpose of the story is to show the reader of the time how a non-geocentric astronomy could feasibly work. What is the most interesting for us today is that Kepler also describes the inhabitants of the Moon. While speculation about extraterrestrial life can be traced back all the way to antiquity, Kepler was the first one to describe it in detail. He tells about their language ("Earth" in their tongue is called "Volva"), their cities, their survival strategies during the Moon's extremely long days and about the differences between the aliens that live on the Earth-facing side and the dark side. We unfortunately never get a detailed description of a single Lunarian species' appearance (and it seems like nobody ever tried illustrating them during the 385 years since the Somnium came out), but from the hints we are given they seem interestingly non-humanoid, which is atypical when you think of classic science fiction like Star Trek. Some have wings, others have "legs longer than a camel's", others are gigantic. In general they are described as having scales similar to pinecones and are snake-like. There actually seems to be some logical thinking behind this, as Kepler correctly describes that a day on one of the Moon's sides can last 14 to 30 Earth days (with corresponding nights), making it change from an extremely hot and dry climate to an extremely cold and wet one. He therefore likely assumes that only creatures similar to reptiles and other desert-animals could live in these conditions. Due to the combination of scientific observations with fanciful speculation, the Somnium is considered by some, namely Carl Sagan, to be the oldest work of science fiction. This is of course debatable. During the 2nd century A.D., Roman author Lucian of Samosata wrote a novel called Vera Historia or A True Story. In it the crew of a ship gets caught in a storm and catapulted to the Moon, where the protagonists witness a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. The big difference to the Somnium is that the True Story is meant to be a parody of works like the Odyssey or the Illiad (the title is meant to be taken sarcastically). One could also argue that science fiction as we know it today was really first codified and popularized with nineteenth century writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Vernes. What I think we can say with some certainty is that the Somnium may be the first major work that describes extraterrestrial lifeforms as reptile-like, a trend that still exists today in movies, stories about UFO-encounters and insane conspiracy theories. The idea that aliens might be reptile-like is probably an underlying foundation for the idea that dinosaurs are alien-like.

Fig. 1: Venus captured in 1979 by the Pioneer-Orbiter. Venus is in my opinion a somewhat underrated planet. While yes, its surface is uninhabitable for human life, its ridiculously dense atmosphere is so dynamic, complex and full of strange chemistry that it deserves further study. Notably, strange, unidentified particles have been observed in the atmosphere that absorb UV-radiation. It has been proposed that this might be a form of photosynthetic life existing in the upper atmosphere.

Kepler's thoughts and those of many others of his time led to a movement called pluralism. Pluralism was the belief that all objects in the solar system, the planets, the moons, comets and even the sun were inhabited by lifeforms and even intelligent life, a movement that was popular all the way until the age of the first spacecrafts. The problem before the invention of spacefaring-technology was that Earth-based telescopes were not advanced enough to really see those planets' surfaces in detail. This lead to a lot of observations influenced by pareidolia, which itself was influenced by pluralist biases. The most famous example of this are the waterways that Percival Lowell claims to have seen on Mars and which he thought were irrigation-canals made by a dying civilization. The idea that Mars is a planet past its prime, littered with ruins and inhabited by aliens with advanced technology, is a common trope throughout classic sci-fi, like War of the Worlds or A Princess of Mars. It actually traces its origin back to a 1796 hypothesis about planet-formation by Pierre-Simon de Laplace. According to him, the planets formed out of a dusty nebula orbiting the sun and crystallized out of it from the outside towards the center. In short: the planets get increasingly older the farther away you go from the sun (today we think the inner rocky planets formed roughly around the same time 4.5 billion years ago). Mars was therefore seen as older than Earth and therefore, it was thought, in a later evolutionary stage than us. Following the same logic, Earth must be older than our neighbour Venus. Venus' surface cannot be viewed with conventional telescopes, the entire planet is covered in a thick atmosphere of opaque clouds. It was thought that these clouds were water-clouds and this coupled with the planet's proximity to the sun lead to imagining Venus being a hot, wet, primitive world of jungles and swamps underneath its cloud-cover. This was not just a fringe idea made up by early sci-fi artists, but an almost universally accepted fact. In 1918 for example, chemist and nobel prize winner Svante Arrhenius officially declared Venus a swamp planet. In many writings Venus was explicitly compared to Earth's Carboniferous period and other prehistoric eras. This is likely the oldest and most concrete example of a prehistoric time period being compared to an alien planet. This continued well into the 1960s and throughout that time the thick cloud-cover of the planet allowed all kinds of speculations on what might be living on this prehistoric world, as seen in books like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Ray Bradbury's The Long Rain and Edgar Rice Burrough's Amtor-series, just to name a few. Speculations reached from primitive civilizations, winged humanoids and all the way to, you guessed it, dinosaurs. The oldest example of the latter I could find was Gustavus M. Pope's Journey to Venus from 1895, where the protagonists get attacked by very dinosaur-like aliens. Of course all of this fancy speculation ended with the 1960s soviet Venera program, which revealed that Venus was anything but wet and teeming with life. However, the idea of Venus as an alien dinosaur world likely left a lasting impact on how we imagine prehistory, thanks to circular reasoning. If one thinks that Venus was a tropical planet with a dense, humid atmosphere and a surface covered in swamps and if it is also an example of what a primitive planet looks like, then it is not hard to come to the conclusion that prehistoric Earth must have been like Venus, with the same climate, atmosphere and environment. 

Fig. 2: The first mount of Hadrosaurus, showing the rather awkward way in which this animal was envisioned to stand and walk. Before this there were reconstructions that, despite the long legs, showed it quadrupedally lying on its belly like a large frog.

Back on Earth the understanding of dinosaurs was changing and advancing. Last time we left off with the quadrupedal behemoths of the Crystal Palace Park, which, as Clemens Setz put it, "look more like the bosses in a gameboy game than dinosaurs". These quickly became outdated as in 1858 in Haddonfield and 1878 in Bernissart the first nearly complete skeletons of dinosaurs were found. These showed that at least some dinosaurs were in fact bipedal animals, although instead of reconstructing them in a bird-like posture with the spine held horizontally (like we do today) they were imagined as kangaroo-like tripods (the first skeletal mounts of Iguanodon infamously had their tail-vertebrae broken to achieve this erroneous pose). This was done to reconcile the dynamicity that is associated with a two-legged animal with the then preconceived notion that reptiles should be slow and inactive. The product was an array of odd creatures with crocodile-like bodies, bird-like legs and the upright stance of a macropod, but instead of being allowed to run like a bird or jump like a kangaroo, they were forced to awkwardly waddle around and drag their seemingly useless tails on the ground. There is pretty much no animal living today that moves this way, making this image of dinosaurs quite bizarre and alien. That this also made dinosaurs look a bit like humans in suits (sometimes literally, when we consider famous movie-dinosaurs like Godzilla), additionally gave them a certain level of uncanniness. Soon after, new types of dinosaurs were also discovered, such as sauropods, coelurosaurs and Archaeopteryx (though it was not yet recognized as a dinosaur at the time by most scientists), while the focus of dinosaur-research shifted from Europe to North America. From the 1870s to the 1890s a fierce battle was fought here, which we today call the Bone Wars. This battle was the conflict between two famous paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale and Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. While they originally started out as colleagues, through differences in their personalities and scientific opinions they became bitter rivals and dedicated their careers to outcompeting the other by discovering and describing as many spectacular extinct animals as possible. For this purpose they funded and undertook several expeditions into the American west, the regions of what would one day become the states of Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska, and also employed many minor fossil collectors to work for them. Espionage was used to disrupt the expeditions of the other and sometimes fossil formations were allegedly detonated with dynamite so that their rivals could not access them. Regardless, the species discovered during this battle were to become iconic, the first ones you think of when you hear the word "dinosaur". Marsh and Cope first described dinosaurs such as Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Allosaurus, Ichthyornis, Hesperornis, Coelophysis, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Triceratops, as well as other famous prehistoric animals like Elasmosaurus, Tylosaurus, Pteranodon and Uintatherium. Only T. rex is missing from this celebrity-list, because it was discovered in 1900 by Barnum Brown. Unfortunately Marsh and Cope's eagerness to describe as many new species as possible has led them to assign almost every new bone as belonging to a separate species, even though they sometimes belonged to an already known taxon. This has led to a lot of confusion that still affects us today, the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus-controversy being the most famous one (as of a study done in 2015, Brontosaurus is recognized as different enough from Apatosaurus to be considered its own genus and therefore valid, but this may change again in the future). If you are old enough to remember names like Monoclonius or Trachodon from your childhood dinosaur-books, which you cannot find again in modern ones, it is likely their fault. 

Fig. 3: Leaping Laelaps is an exception to the rule of Charles R. Knight's dinosaur-illustrations. It is the only one that shows dinosaurs with athletic behaviour and also the only one in which Knight gives the dinosaurs accurately sized thigh-muscles. Please note again the erupting volcano in the background. Laelaps is today classified as Dryptosaurus, a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus.

Since these two paleontologists made such a huge contribution to our knowledge of dinosaurs, did they also influence our idea of the Alien Prehistoric World? Surprisingly I do not think so. Marsh and Cope's view of dinosaurs was rather progressive and similar to our modern one. They saw them as successful animals that occupied similar niches as modern mammals. Marsh, based on trace-fossils, also correctly deduced that they did not drag their tails on the ground and even supported Thomas Henry Huxley's theory that birds descend from dinosaurs (although he thought that they descended from ornithopod dinosaurs similar to Dryosaurus). Cope also recognized a significant similarity between birds and dinosaurs and was of the opinion that they, despite their size, were active and fast-paced animals. He let this idea of his be illustrated by Charles R. Knight in his description of Laelaps (today known as Dryptosaurus). The painting, called Leaping Laelaps is one of the most well-known pieces of paleoart today as it is one of the oldest known depictions of dynamic dinosaurs. Charles R. Knight, being perhaps the best-known paleoartist of all time, gets a lot of credit for being this foresighted, but, as mentioned, Leaping Laelaps was a comission done according to Cope's view. Knight's actual view of dinosaurs was very different and shines throughout almost all his other artwork. He viewed them as dumb, primitive and ugly brutes, monsters that deserved to go extinct. His 1946 book Life through the Ages is testament to that. In it we find descriptions of dinosaurs and their world like:

"All species were by now too big and too ungainly for their own good and though they didn't realize it, were doomed to pass away completely, for Nature had apparently grown weary of the great scaly cold-blooded monsters. They had been in existence too long, for they were stupid, unadaptable and unprogressive. And so the world was to grow away from these slow-moving dunces, and little warm-blooded beings, furry, alert and aggressive, were to supersede them... []. It must have been a most depressing world as we think about it now, with huge, bizarre and ungainly shapes rising and subsiding in the landscape, the earth covered in harsh and brittle scrub under tall palmettos, while both on the ground and in the trees, small, sinister bright-eyed mammals awaited the slow, but inevitable finale of the great Reptilian Era." (Knight 1946, p. 20).

"Meanwhile, in an attempt to circumvent just such killers as Tyrannosaurus, the vegetable-feeding species had branched out into all manner of grotesque and awe-inspiring shapes. In any case, the whole scaly, spiny lot have long since vanished, which perhaps is just as well, because no more sinister beings ever walked the surface of this earth." (Knight 1946, p. 22).

Knight had a view of evolution that is today better known as Orthogenesis, which was pretty much the norm of the time. He saw evolution as a march of progress, with humans as the end-goal, in which more "primitive" creatures are destined to be replaced by more "advanced", "perfected" animals. "Ancient" therefore automatically means "primitive". We will see in a future post why this came out of fashion. Knight expresses this view of prehistory again in the chapter about prehistoric birds, saying: "So far as we know there were no beautiful feathery beings in our early world", basically calling all prehistoric birds, like Archaeopteryx, Hesperornis or the Dodo, butt-ugly. The quality that Knight drew dinosaurs in was also noticeably lower than how he drew modern animals. While his drawings of modern animals are very beautiful and close to life, his dinosaurs give off an almost cartoonish vibe, making them seem unreal. Frankly I would not count them among his best work. Most notable is that despite having a very good grasp of anatomy and muscle-mass when drawing living animals, Knight seemingly failed to notice that dinosaurs had very muscular legs and instead chose to give them spindly, lizard-like limbs. Knight had been illustrating prehistoric animals since the late nineteenth century until his death in 1953, with his many paintings and murals being exhibited in museums and reprinted in books. As such they had a tremendous influence on the general public's view of prehistoric life. While the dinosaurs found in the Bone Wars became famous through Knight's artwork, Marsh and Cope's ideas about them, being written down in highly technical accounts, did not and they remained in the minority with their view of dynamic dinos. Knight is likely one of the largest causes for two of the sub-tropes that we discussed last time: That the prehistoric world was more primitive, brutish and violent than today and that things such as beauty did not exist yet. The forward thinking on dinosaurs by people like Huxley, Marsh, Cope and Henry Fairfield Osborn was being ignored or forgotten and views of past life similar to Knight's became prevalent in paleontology. Dinosaur-science entered a deep depression from roughly the 1920s onward, with very little research on them being done. The view of dinosaurs during this time, which is called the Dinosaur Doldrums by Robert T. Bakker, can be characterised by these ideas:

• Dinosaurs were not a natural group (as was originally thought by Richard Owen) that descend from a single ancestor, but an assemblage of unrelated groups of large archosaurs.
• Dinosaurs were all cold-blooded like modern lizards, at best being mass-homeotherms. 
• Most dinosaurs were swamp-dwellers, similar to turtles and crocodiles, with many being semi- or even fully aquatic. Sauropod dinosaurs were especially often depicted as amphibious as it was thought that they were too large to support their weight on land. Hadrosaurs were also often thought of as water-dwellers due to a superficial resemblance of their beaks to the bills of ducks and fossilized skin around their hands that was mistaken for webbing.
• Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures were inferior to modern animals in almost every way. Dinosaurs were slower and dumber than mammals. They had no social behaviour, did not move in herds or packs nor cared for their young. Pterosaurs could not actively fly like birds or bats and marine reptiles could not give life birth like whales so they had to awkwardly crawl on land like sea turtles to lay their eggs. The only reason why these creatures were able to dominate prehistoric Earth was their brute force and size.
• Quadrupedal ornithischian dinosaurs, like Stegosaurus or Triceratops had erect hind-legs, but sprawling front-limbs, forcing them to do a very awkward reptilian crawl. 
• Like mentioned above, bipedal dinosaurs walked upright similar to a man in a lizard-suit, with their tail uselessly dragging on the ground. 
• Theropod dinosaurs, the bipedal carnivores, were simply split up into two groups: Carnosaurs, which encompassed all the large theropods, and Coelurosaurs, which encompassed all the small theropods. Carnosaurs were seen as little more than mindless killing-machines, virtually brainless and doing nothing but sleep, eat and mate. Coelurosaurs were simply like lizards on two legs.
• Many of the bizarre ornamental features of dinosaurs, the characteristic head-shields, horns, crests and plates, were explained through a concept called racial senescence. According to which, as evolutionary lineages grow older, they actually age and degenerate like an individual old person would. The horns and spikes were therefore seen as useless features that grew out of control due to the advanced age of the dinosaur-lineage. 
• Dinosaurs died out without leaving descendants due to being incapable of adapting to environmental changes. Either the swamps they lived in dried out, an ice age did the cold-bloods in or they were simply usurped by the mammals. Their extinction was slow, gradual and uncatastrophic, in accord with the view of uniformitarianism. They were destined to go extinct and be replaced by mammals. The bigger mystery was not how they went extinct, but rather how they managed to dominate the Earth so long.

The exact reasons for the Dinosaur Doldrums and their character-assassination of our favorite prehistoric animals are hard to pinpoint. At least one large influence was the 1926 book The Origin of Birds by Danish amateur-ornithologist Gerhard Heilmann. In it the author concludes that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs based on the mistaken assumption that the latter did not have collarbones like birds (we now know they did). Instead he thought that they must have descended from earlier reptiles called thecodonts, while any similarity to dinosaurs was superficial. Despite lacking a formal training in paleontology or ornithology, Heilmann's book was widely successful among academic circles, perhaps thanks to its impressive artwork, and seen as the definitive work on the origin of birds. It led to the consensus that dinosaurs died out without leaving living members, making them evolutionary failures and dead-ends in the progressivist minds of the time, despite having ruled the planet for 150 million years. As such, dinosaurs moved out of the focus of evolutionary biology and paleontology, which was now more focused on prehistoric mammals and human ancestors. It should also not be understated that the world was going through major financial crises and wars during these times, with many European museums that held important fossils being destroyed in World War II. That is how we lost the original type specimen of Spinosaurus for example. The Dinosaur Doldrums would hold on almost unchanged until the 1970s.

Fig. 4: A more typical dinosaur illustration by Charles Knight. The limbs are spindly and undermuscled, the tails long and dragging on the ground, while in the brontosaur the legs are even splaying to the sides. The reconstruction is very obviously inspired by lizards. The action is also a lot more static than in Leaping Laelaps, despite being 49 years younger.

As scientists largely abandoned the study of dinosaurs, the public image that had been (literally) painted of the prehistoric world by people like Charles Knight became lucrative to another guild of people: Storytellers, especially filmmakers. While this alien world of bizarre and brutish evolutionary misfits never had humans in it, it made for good scenarios of heroes fighting monsters. So what if some of these beasts from a bygone era and parts of their world somehow managed to survive to modern day in some uncharted corner of the earth? Ideas of extinct animals surviving into modernity go as far back as the 1700s. When Georges Cuvier first proposed that animals could go extinct over geologic time, he was first met with scepticism, as it was thought unlikely that God would let his own creations go extinct. Living mammoths or dinosaurs must surely still exist in some undiscovered corners of the Earth, it was thought. While this idea gradually lost its religious connotations (at least outside young earth creationist-circles), it was ever prevalent throughout literature during colonial and imperial times as more and more of the world was being discovered. Rumors abounded about dinosaur-like animals still living in Africa, South America or even the Wild West. Most of these, like the Mokele Mbembe of the Congo Basin, were purely made up by colonials for publicity and have pretty much no tangible origin in the local folklore like is often claimed. They still left a large impression on people back in Europe and inspired literature. The codifier of what is generally known as the Lost World Genre was, of course, The Lost World, a 1912 adventure novel by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle (although he certainly was not the first one that wrote scenarios about humans meeting extinct animals, as that credit goes to Jules Vernes and his Journey to the Center of the Earth). In it a British crew of explorers finds an isolated plateau in the midst of the South American rainforest that is home to dinosaurs, ape-men and human natives. The dinosaurs are described as brutish and exceptionally dumb, deserving extinction. The general tone of the novel is that the plateau is a horrific place that needs to be subjugated by Western civilization, an overtly imperialist message that is often missing from future adaptations (the 2001 BBC mini-series actually completely inverts this by having the protagonists decide to lie about the plateau's existence in order to preserve its life from the industrialized world). The novel was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1925. While still being made in the silent era, it is was revolutionary in a lot of ways. It was the first feature length movie to use stop motion as its main special effect. The effects were made by the legend that is Willis O'Brien and were so good for the time that, contrary to the novel, the dinosaurs nearly become the main stars, with many scenes simply consisting of the explorers observing the saurians almost like in a nature documentary. Despite their design being heavily based on Charles Knight paintings, they are shown as surprisingly active. They move in herds, the brontosaurs are outside of the swamps and a Triceratops is shown caring for its child. Some like the Allosaurus also look a lot more lithe and skinnier than it would be depicted later in the 50s and 60s. On the other hand, they are often shown in mortal combat, constantly fighting and hunting each other. Notable is a scene where an Allosaurus slays an Agathaumas and while feeding on its carcass snaps a Pteranodon out of the air to also feed on it. The movie also gave birth to an entire different genre of movies: Prehistoric monsters in the big city. In a scene not present in the original novel, the explorers bring a living Brontosaurus with them to London. Of course, to the delight of the audience, the animal escapes and wreaks havoc in the city. This scene would inspire countless of other movies with similar ideas, such as The Beast from 20'000 Fathoms, Godzilla and King Kong. The ending of the second Jurassic Park movie, named The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where a T. rex attacks San Diego, is likely also somewhat of an hommage to the 1925 movie. If you are interested in watching The Lost World, the movie is in the public domain and can be watched in full on Youtube here.

Fig. 5: A Brontosaurus partially destroys London in 1925's The Lost World. While I am not from the UK myself, I can imagine this being a preferable scenario to Brexit.

King Kong, specifically the original movie from 1933, could be seen as a soft remake of Lost World. Willis O'Brien was back to do the effects and re-used many clay-models from previous movies. The big difference, apart from many technical advancements, is that the dinosaurs took a back-seat to the main star, a giant gorilla. As a primate, Kong was able to express emotions and gestures that a human viewer could relate to. Given his tragic role, somewhat of a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast, this was necessary and could not be done with just dinosaurs, as they were viewed as unsympathetic monsters by the audience. The reptiles were thus degraded to antagonists. They either chased and killed the explorers or served as adversaries for Kong. While the Brontosaurus at the end of The Lost World was a scared and confused animal in an unfamiliar environment, in this movie it becomes a Nessie-like swamp monster that, despite being a herbivore, actually grabs and eats a man. Kong heroically wrestling and killing a T. rex and a giant, bat-winged Pteranodon to save the woman Ann evokes iconic imagery of knights and heroes slaying dragons and monsters to save their princesses. It also reinforces the idea that mammals are superior to dinosaurs, the latter being abominations deserving death. King Kong is one of the most influential movies of all time and it cemented the public idea of dinosaurs as movie-monsters rather than animals. What the actual themes and symbolism of the movie mean has been hotly debated over the years. It is accused by some of holding a racist message, with Kong's tragic infatuation with Ann being allegorical for interracial marriage and the giant ape that got abducted from his home being a symbol for black people in America. The directors and writers of the movie, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, have frequently denied such accusations. According to them the movie is about the dichotomy between the civilized and the primitive world and how the former will inevitably destroy the latter. While this may also be interpreted as vaguely racist, the creators have emphasized how their sympathy actually lied with the primitive world, which is shown by the tragic portrayal of Kong's death. The movie's story is loosely based on a real incident, believe it or not. In a 1926 expedition, William Douglas Burden captured an individual of the newly discovered komodo dragon and brought it from its home island to the Bronx Zoo, where it died shortly after. In Cooper's eyes it was civilization that killed the dragon. 

Fig. 6: Gregory S. Paul is a big fan of this scene, citing it as the only good dinosaur-fight in cinema as of 1988: "There is one very good motion picture dinosaurian wrestling match, the classic match in the original King Kong between the main character and T. rex - not only because of the power and thrilling atmosphere of this cinematic tour de force, but because of its sense of humor. At one point Kong puts the tyrannosaur in a text book half-nelson." (Paul 1988, p. 411). I do not think Paul knew this, but Cooper and Schoedsack were wrestlers before they became filmmakers and actually gave visual reference when O'Brien animated the fight.

The Lost World genre, as codified by the Conan Doyle Novel, its movie adaptation and King Kong, had in my opinion a big influence on the Alien Prehistoric World trope. The dichotomy that was created in them painted prehistory as directly opposed to modern times, a separate world from our own full of danger, monsters and strangeness. It also popularized the trend of lumping together animals from all sorts of different time periods and regions all into the same place. This makes prehistoric times seem far more packed and bizarre than ours and makes it seem like there was only a single prehistoric period where everything lived together. Of course given how these stories are about presumably extinct animals surviving into modern times, these anachronisms could be explained simply through more hypothetical survivals, but at some point this just gets silly. As geologist Dougal Dixon puts it:

"These lost worlds all seem to suffer from two rather obvious faults. The first is that the isolation of the lost world is never absolute. Not only can the modern day explorers penetrate their mysteries, but other creatures appear to have broken in at various times. Thus, as well as dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs from the Mesozoic era, there are also mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. The originators of the genre are responsible for this fault. In Journey to the Center of the Earth there are mastodons as well as plesiosaurs, and amidst the flora of the subterranean world and the famous forest of giant mushrooms, are coal forest trees from the Carboniferous period. In The Lost World there are giant Irish elk and armadillo-like glyptodonts as well as stegosaurs. The newcomers have been slipped in quite comfortably and exist in ecological balance with the animals and plants already there. In the real world such an invasion would almost inevitably have lead to the extinction of the original fauna and its subsequent replacement by the newcomers." (Dixon 1988, p. 109)

The second fault Dixon talks about is the fact that all of these lost worlds (apart perhaps from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar) are far too small to support such a wide array of large sized (or rather oversized given the genre) animals. Such environments would instead lead to dwarfism, like we see with actual island-dinosaurs like Europasaurus. That, with an additional 66 million years of time, surviving dinosaurs would surely evolve further and change their form instead of staying the same as they were in the Mesozoic is something many writers seem to ignore when writing these stories. It could however be argued that this might be deliberate to show how unadaptable dinosaurs are. To at least give some credit where credit is due, the 2005 Peter Jackson remake of King Kong does attempt to address these problems by both evolving its cast of animals into new speculative species and by explaining that Skull Island used to be a lot larger before gradually sinking into the sea for the last couple of thousand years. By accident they thus made Skull Island's geologic history resemble that of New Zealand, which once used to be part of the real life lost continent Zealandia that also gradually sank beneath the ocean since the Cretaceous. Jackson is a very patriotic kiwi, even when he does not realize it.

What the Lost World genre further did is instill a fear in the public of the "primitive" world and that creatures like dinosaurs could still exist somewhere and manage to come to civilization, where they would surely create chaos. About two months after King Kong's release a man of the name George Spicer, who later admitted to have watched the film, reported seeing a large, long-necked, prehistoric animal, very similar to the movie's Brontosaurus, emerging out of the Loch Ness, giving birth to the famous myth of the Loch Ness Monster. In reality he likely just saw a deer swimming through the water and his fantasy, influenced by the movie, ran wild. The aforementioned Mokele Mbembe and many other similar cryptids likely originated from similar fears. The idea of prehistoric monsters attacking civilization may also be relevant for our topic, as not only does it monsterize extinct animals, but it seems somewhat related to the genre of alien invasions. The latter is basically the same scenario, just with an enemy that is technologically more advanced rather than more brutish than us.  A bizarre outgrowth of this are conspiracy theories that claim that cryptids such as the thunder bird (a North American cryptid often claimed to either be a living pterosaur or Argentavis) or even Nessie are actually extraterrestrial creatures or even spacecrafts, linking them to UFO-sightings. Later works of fiction like Star Trek and Doctor Who would go as far as presenting us with humanoid alien species that turn out to have actually evolved from spacefaring dinosaurs, but more on that in a future post. As another example of this interconnectedness I would like to point out the 1957 movie 20 Million Miles to Earth. In it the crew of a spaceship sent to Venus crashes back down on Earth and accidentally brings with it a Venusian alien egg. Out of it hatches a stop-motion dinosaurian beast (animated by the great Ray Harryhausen) and wreaks havoc. We have come full circle.

I promised last time that we would also get to discuss Disney's Fantasia and its dinosaur-segment, but this post is already too long and I found the topic so interesting that it deserves its own post. I hope you enjoyed this entry and that we'll see each other next time. 

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Literary sources:

• Bakker, Robert Thomas: The Dinosaur Heresies. New Theories Unlocking The Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, New York 1986.
• Barrett, Paul/ Naish, Darren: Dinosaurs. How they lived and evolved, London 2016 (Second Edition).
• Brusatte, Steve: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. A New History of a Lost World, New York 2018.
• Caspar, Max: Kepler, London 1959 (German translation by C. Doris Hellman). 
• Conway, John/Kosemen, C.M./Naish, Darren: All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, UK 2012.
• Gould, Stephen Jay: Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, New York 1989.
• Grinspoon, David Harry: Venus Revealed. A New Look below the Clouds of our Mysterious Twin Planet, Cambridge 1997.
• Dixon, Dougal: The New Dinosaurs. An Alternative Evolution, London 1988.
• Knight, Charles Robert: Life through the Ages, New York 1946 (Commemorative Edition).
• Loxton, Daniel/Prothero, Donald Ross: Abominable Science!. Origins of the Yeti, Nessie and other famous cryptids, New York 2013.
• Marsh, Othniel Charles: The Dinosaurs of North America, Washington 1896 (Hardpress reprint).
• Mcloughlin, John: Archosauria. A New Look at the Old Dinosaur, New York 1979.
• Naish, Darren: Hunting Monsters. Cryptozoology and the reality behind the myths, London 2017.
• Paul, Gregory Scott: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. A Complete Illustrated Guide, New York 1988.
• Weta Workshop: The World of Kong. A Natural History of Skull Island, London 2005.
• Witton, Mark: Recreating an Age of Reptiles, Marlborough 2017.
• Witton, Mark: The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art, Marlborough 2018. 

Online sources.

• The Lost World (1925), public domain
• The Lost World 1925 vs. 2001 by HoopsAndDinoMan
• Misreading the Mokele-Mbembe by Tetrapod Zoology (the SciAm years)
• Heilmann, Thompson, Beebe, Tetrapteryx and the Proavian by Tetrapod Zoology (ver. 4)
• A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)

Image sources:

• Fig. 1: NASA Studies CubeSat Mission to Solve Venusian Mystery
• Fig. 2: Wikimedia
• Fig. 3: Wikimedia
• Fig. 4: Knight, Charles Robert: Life through the Ages, New York 1946, page 13 (Commemorative Edition).
• Fig. 5: The Lost World (1925), public domain.
• Fig. 6: King Kong (1933), RKO Pictures.

The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 1 - Antediluvia

Hello and welcome to my blog. Since this is my very first post I should probably make some things clear: If you are a reader of Tetrapod Zoology, Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs or any similar paleontology-related blog you can expect content on similar topics. Unlike Darren Naish or Mark Witton however, I am of course not an expert in paleontology and also unlike LITC I will not primarily focus on paleoart. As a student of history (with a minor in earth system sciences) this blog will primarily focus on topics of science-history and history of knowledge, mainly the history of paleontology and related subjects like evolutionary biology and astrobiology. We will therefore not discuss the validity of taxa, anatomy or reconstructions here (although I still may talk about these things, but when I do please keep in mind that I am just giving my non-expert opinion that should not be cited), but will instead examine how humans, be they scientists, painters, filmmakers or even videogame developers, have imagined the prehistoric world over the centuries. The name of this blog is in reference to that, as Manospondylus gigas is an old name for Tyrannosaurus rex remains that fell into obscurity until it became a historic relic (how that came to be is a story for another day). The backstory behind the header- and background-images are, apart from being very amusing, in similar vein. 

Fig. 1: With this blog I can finally put my paleontology book collection to good use. You may notice that some of them have German titles. This is because I am Swiss and those are the books I had growing up as a child. The ones with English titles are those I collected in more recent years. (Image taken by me).

Now that we got this out of the way, let us begin with our topic of the next couple of days: Dinosaurs as aliens. With that title you will probably be either confused or have PTSD-flashbacks to Dino Crisis 3, but what I mean by this is an idea which has been present in depictions of prehistory for a very long time: That the prehistoric world and its inhabitants were so utterly different and bizarre compared to our modern world that they seem extraterrestrial. In 2018 Steve Brusatte described this idea in retrospective in the prologue to his book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs:

“Zhenyuanlong is unlike the dinosaurs I learned about in elementary school, before I became a scientist. I was taught that dinosaurs were big, scaly, scary brutes so ill equipped for their environment that they just lumbered around, biding their time, waiting to go extinct. Evolutionary failures. Dead ends in the history of life. Primitive beasts that came and went, long before humans came on the scene, in a primeval world that was so different from today that it may as well have been an alien planet. Dinosaurs were curiosities to see in museums, or movie monsters that haunted our nightmares, or objects of childhood fascination, pretty much irrelevant to us today and unworthy of any serious study.”

Today dinosaurs are rarely depicted in this way. While we of course have nothing quite similar nowadays to an Apatosaurus or Tyrannosaurus, dinosaurs and other extinct animals are increasingly more often depicted in such a way that they can evoke things the viewer knows in order to make them seem more tangible. Many dinosaurs are depicted with feather-shells and coloring similar to modern birds, have lizard-lips that hide their teeth or are shown engaging in behavior that you would expect of currently living animals, like sleeping, drinking, in-fighting or even playing. A modern Deinonychus looks like a large, flightless hawk and it is not unusual to see it doze off at the edge of a conifer forest, its head tucked under its wing like a duck, while the sky is clear and blue. It is an animal that seems a bit strange, but it and its environment are still familiar enough in their characteristics that we can contextualize them. It may inspire a sense of respect, but also majesty, beauty or even cuteness in us. It is not a complete alien. Go back just one or two decades and it becomes an entirely different story. Deinonychus and its dromaeosaur relatives become the stuff of nightmares and have more in common with Ridley Scott’s xenomorph than with birds. They still are active, fast and walk like birds, but everything else is alien. Their skin is scaly and rubbery, wrapped tightly around the skull and bones to give a skeletal, almost undead, appearance. Their arms and hands are bent in awkward positions like zombies, their eyes have slit pupils like snakes or are black like in sharks and their large claws are their most important features. Most striking is their behaviour, which is monstrous rather than animalistic. Two good examples come to my mind. First there are of course the raptors from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels and the many movies, comics and games based on them. Not only do they look scary and foreign, they seem to hate humans with a passion, always trying to hunt and kill them. Either that or they are presented as sentient on a near-human level, like the raptors in Jurassic Park 3 or Blue in Jurassic World. In either case they do not come across as ordinary animals that really once existed. 

Fig. 2: This does not look like something you would encounter on Earth, does it? We will discuss Wayne Barlowe's art in a future post more specifically.

The second example is a scene from Stephen Baxter’s 2002 sci-fi novel Evolution, in which a Purgatorius observes a Deinonychus on the hunt (note that the two animals lived almost 40 million years apart). Here the creature is described as something that can neither be called a flightless bird nor a "souped-up crocodile". Apart from looking like its Jurassic Park counterparts, its mind is unfeeling and calculating and it can stand completely still, like a lizard, but then run and jump incredibly fast for short periods of time. This is because the author ascribes it a unique blood-pumping system that allows it to be agile while still technically being cold-blooded. Baxter seems to have made that up, since Deinonychus and many dinosaurs like it were in all likelihood simply warm-blooded similar to modern birds, something which was well-known consensus by the early 2000s. Why did he do this? Because, in his own words, dinosaurs were different. He repeats how dinosaurs were unlike anything ever witnessed by human eyes and frequently ascribes traits to them that make them alien from any modern animals, like all of them neither being really cold- nor warm-blooded. He also makes up speculative prehistoric creatures that seem more at home on the planet Darwin 4 than on Earth, like the Airwhale, a titanic pterosaur with a hundred meter wing-span that lives its entire life in the sky, feeding on aeroplankton and whose bones are so fragile that they never fossilized. All of this under a sky that is described like this:


“Red dawn light seeped into the eastern sky. The clouds had a bubbly texture, and the sky was tinged in a peculiar bruised-purple. In this remote time the very air was different – thick, moist, laden with oxygen – even the sky would have looked alien to human eyes.”


Baxter may be excused for exaggerating the otherness of the Mesozoic world (and at least he has the decency to give a Troodon proto-feathers), since his novel is written from the perspective of early primates. The bizarre alien dinosaur world that he describes likely exists as a contrast, to make the journey that our ancestors took seem even more adventurous. But Baxter is not the only one who describes the Mesozoic like an alien planet. Let’s go back to Crichton again. While we never get a scene in the Jurassic Park novel directly set in the Mesozoic (apart from a day-dream Alan Grant has in which a Pteranodon is eating algae for some odd reason), in a section about Procompsognathus we get a description of how Crichton imagines the Triassic world. Apart from how the continents were arranged and the climate being hotter, a statement that stands out particularly is how the air-pressure was supposedly higher, as if the Earth used to be like Venus in its past. Baxter and Crichton are far from being the only ones ascribing such peculiarities to prehistoric times. If we go back we find numerous such works, be it movies like Land before Time, Fantasia, King Kong, paleoart like that of Wayne Barlowe, Charles Knight or Rudolph Zallinger or even non-fiction works published by pseudo-scientists and actual scientists, which perpetuate a trope which I will from here on out call the Alien Prehistoric World. I characterize this trope here by several sub-tropes, some or all of which are frequently present in (especially older) works about prehistory:

• The atmosphere was radically different during prehistoric times. Either the air pressure, the oxygen-content or both were higher and this is what allowed animals like dinosaurs and pterosaurs to grow to huge sizes. The color of the sky itself may have been different. 
• Volcanism and other tectonic activity was significantly higher. Volcanoes dotted the landscape everywhere. 
• Prehistoric lifeforms were all either gigantic and/or primitive. 
• Prehistoric lifeforms might resemble life we could find on other planets. 
  
• Prehistory and its inhabitants were overall more violent than the modern world, making it an age of monsters. 
• All prehistoric animals lived roughly at the same time. 
• Beauty did not exist yet. 
• A major, often catastrophic event separates the prehistoric world from the modern one and also robbed it of most extraordinary/fantastic elements.

Of course you may say that some of these are not actually tropes, but have at least some basis in scientific fact. You would be right, but only to a degree. Of course prehistoric times were different from our modern times, but most of the works we will be discussing in this series of posts will take often minor or non-existent differences and exaggerate them to an unrealistic degree to where Earth resembles a different planet. Some of these “facts” you might have heard are also not as factual as one would like to think. The first point on the list for example, that the world of the dinosaurs was richer in oxygen and that this is why dinosaurs grew larger than modern animals, is something you might have heard of, but it has always been dubious. First and foremost, there has never been a clear consensus on Mesozoic oxygen levels. There were some studies throughout the years showing that they might have been higher than today, but also some showing that they were roughly the same and increasingly many more showing that they were even lower than today at some points. They all agree however that they never differed from modern levels more than a few percent and definitely never reached the levels present during the Carboniferous period, an age long before the dinosaurs. That the high oxygen content caused the arthropods of the Carboniferous to grow to huge sizes is also something often repeated, but has come under more scrutiny in recent years, as similarly sized arthropods have been found from other, less oxygen-rich, periods. Secondly, this hypothesis ignores that dinosaur and pterosaur anatomy was perfectly capable of supporting itself on this planet’s roughly current conditions. These animals had hollow bones and air sacs like modern birds and unlike mammals, allowing them to increase their volume without significantly increasing their mass. That dinosaurs had complex air sacs, the same ones that birds today use to breathe in high altitudes, also speaks for lower oxygen levels during the Mesozoic. It at least probably allowed them to use oxygen more efficiently than mammals do. Third and last, what this hypothesis also ignores is that the largest currently known animal is an air-breather of modern times, the blue whale. Similar claims that air pressure or even gravity itself was different or that Earth was almost completely covered in swamps or shallow oceans during dinosaur times are also based on a lack of understanding of dinosaur/pterosaur physiology and are often made by people who are not actual paleontologists or geologists (but know how to get a good publicity). Often they are even ideas that are based on already old and disproven concepts that have been forgotten for so long that they can be presented as new ideas again without too many people noticing, but we are getting ahead of ourselves here. What I ultimately want to say is that the only period (or rather eon) of Earth's history that is radically different enough in its conditions from today to be truly called alien would be the Precambrian, but that was a time during which no true animals existed yet and it is rarely depicted in popular media. Non-avian dinosaurs and their world might seem strange, but are in my opinion not different enough from what we know today to be truly called aliens. To quote Andrew H. Knoll: "Dinosaur bones are big and spectacular - they keep you awake at night. But, apart from the size of its inhabitants, the world of the dinosaurs was much like our own". 
Coming back to the point of this post: What I plan to do in this series of blogposts is try to trace back most of the Alien Prehistoric World tropes to their possible origins and follow their development through history. In this very first part I will do something I consider quite novel. I will make the argument that many of the tropes mentioned above do not originate in old paleoart, but can actually be traced back to pre-scientific times. Specifically I think that many of them originate in ancient mythological and religious motives, which then crept their way into Victorian era science, which from thereon out influenced our modern thinking. 

Fig. 3: An 1828 painting by American artist Thomas Cole, depicting Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden into the bleak world of the antediluvian times. Take special note of the casually erupting volcano in the background, as this will be a motive we will encounter often in later depictions of dinosaurs. 

Time has been viewed differently by different cultures. Some ancient people, like those in Egypt and China, saw the flow of time as a cyclical affair that basically renewed itself with the start of each new ruling dynasty or even ruler. The Ancient Greeks and Romans were more split on the matter, although some like Aristotle or Pliny the Elder also stuck to a cyclical view of an eternal universe. The way we view time today in the Western and Islamic World was largely influenced by ancient cultures of the Middle East and their mythologies. In Mesopotamian, as well as Abrahamic religions, the universe was created once at some definite point and will end again somewhen in the future without being renewed. This creates a linear timeline with clear end-points, which is then able to be split into different sections based on major events. The one you will likely be most familiar with is the separation into a time before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and a time after his birth (B.C. and A.D.). There are also others, like a time before and after the fall of man and the End Times. One of the most important separations into “eras” that derived from ancient Mesopotamian/Abrahamic religions, and which influenced the thinking of Christians for long into the early modern period, was the distinction into a time before and after a Great Flood that a hero had to build an ark for. The time before the flood was often called the Antediluvian. The word antediluvian is to this day still sometimes used as a synonym for "prehistoric", but for what reason? And what does this have to do with our trope? 
Let us look at how people and texts in the Middle Ages and Antiquity imagined the antediluvian time to be like. The first thing that comes to mind to anyone who has heard the story of Noah is that, after the fall of man, the world was supposedly full of sin, including, presumably, excessive violence. This is of course what caused God to send the flood in order to clean the Earth (Although that is of course just the account from the Old Testament. According to the Sumerian Athrahasis Epic, humans simply became too numerous and loud, keeping the gods from falling asleep). Less well known is the observation that people seem to have lived longer. Noah is described in Genesis to have been around 950 years old, with his relatives reaching similar ages. The Sumerian King List also shows that, before the flood, individual kings could rule for tens of thousands of years. After the flood, the age of kings, and presumably humans as a whole, exponentially declined. While Gilgamesh is said to have still ruled for over 100 years, later kings barely reached 30. Humans were of course not the only inhabitants of the antediluvian world. The Bible describes that the world was inhabited by creatures called Gibborim and Nephilim. What exactly those are meant to be is a matter of debate to this day, but in the past they were often identified as some sort of half-human giants. According to some interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which tell a slightly different version of Genesis, it was actually these beasts why God had sent the flood. Other monsters also roamed the world, such as the famous sea monster Leviathan, Behemoth, in Jewish Mythology also the giant bird Ziz and the Mesopotamian Tiamat. We summarize that the antediluvian world, as imagined by people in pre-scientific times was:

• A bleak place full of violence.
• Roamed by giants and monsters. 
• Alien and separate from us today (through the long lifespans of antediluvian humans).
• Destroyed by a gigantic catastrophe that got rid of any brutes, monsters, giants and superhumans.

A lot of these look like the beginnings of the tropes listed above. “But what does this have to do with dinosaurs?”, I hear you say and to answer that we have to turn to the early days of geology. Humans have found fossils probably for as long as humans have existed. Greek philosopher Xenophanes observed that the remains of marine animals, like seashells and snails, can be found on mountains. Of course, not knowing about plate-tectonics or how mountains are built, he assumed that this meant the sea levels used to be way higher in the past. Medieval scholars observed similarly, although they came to the conclusion that such fossils were not evidence of a simple change in sea-level, but of the great flood in the Old Testament. Either that or they regarded fossils as odd stones that just happened to look like seashells, something which was disproven during the Renaissance by none other than Leonardo Da Vinci and his studies on trace fossils. The belief that fossils were the remains of creatures that had perished in the flood continued well into the early modern period. This was a time when science as we know it today was beginning to develop and scholars tried using it to prove (and unintentionally disprove) the historicity of the Bible. A famous example of this are the studies of fellow Swiss Johann Jakob Scheuchzer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He firmly believed that the existence of God can be proven through scientific means and he was fascinated with studying the world before the biblical deluge. This made him one of the first people who did not view fossils as simple curiosities, but instead tried to seriously study them. He is today perhaps best known for his biggest blunder, which is rather unfortunate. In 1726 he infamously identified a fossil of a giant Salamander (today known as Andrias scheuchzeri) as being the crushed remains of a human child that was trampled to death in a mass panic during the early stages of the deluge. Of course today it is quite easy to make fun of Scheuchzer for this, as it is obvious for us to see that the fossil in question was not a human, but one has to keep in mind that the concept of extinction had not existed yet in Scheuchzer’s time and since he had never seen a giant salamander before, he had to interpret the remains into a context he was familiar with. I say it is unfortunate that this is the most remembered thing about the man, because it overshadows many of his actual achievements. For example, apart from being the first one to use barometric instruments for altitude-measuring and being one of the founders of crystallography, did you know that Scheuchzer can also be considered one of the first paleobotanists? In his book Herbarium diluvianum he was the first to study fossil plants from the Carboniferous, Permian and Cenozoic (although of course he claimed all of them to come from the antediluvian period) and often drew them in such a detail that the individual species he studied can still be identified today. I believe that his work on fossil plants influenced later artistic representations of the antediluvian world, like those of Thomas Cole, which often show primitive, tropical plants, furthering the association between the mythical pre-flood world and actual prehistory. 

Fig. 4: On the left are sketches of fossil plants by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, who imagined these being representative of the vegetation of the pre-flood world. On the right is another Thomas Cole painting, showing an antediluvian scene with primitive vegetation, possibly inspired by early paleobotany. Take also note of the foggy atmosphere.

As geology and paleontology evolved further, ideas such as the deluge and the six days of creation still influenced the thinking of scientists. In the early nineteenth century, French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who used fossils of marine reptiles and mammoths to prove that animals could in fact go extinct, coined what is today known as catastrophism. While, like us today, he separated Earth’s geologic history into different time periods based on its inhabitants, such as the Age of Reptiles or the Age of Mammals, he did not believe that lifeforms gradually evolved or became extinct over time (Mind you that it would still be a couple of decades until Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species). Instead he was of the opinion that each geologic age was capped off by a gigantic catastrophe that wiped out nearly all life, forcing it to start anew in the next one, and that these catastrophes are what largely shaped Earth's history and geology. While the Age of Reptiles may have been ended by a comet, he thought that the more recent mammals, such as mammoths and woolly rhinos, were wiped out by a flooding event like that described in the Bible (although he did not take the biblical account literally and instead thought it was simply inspired by a real event). This equated the Pleistocene to the Antediluvian in many people’s minds at the time. For a good part of the Victorian era, Earth’s geologic history was similarly seen through a biblical lens. Our naming and characterization of the geologic periods in part comes from those days. By the time of Sir Richard Owen and Charles Darwin, the geologic column was mainly divided into Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary strata, a scheme first laid out by Giovanni Arduino in 1759. Primary describes rocks in which no fossils are present and were thus equated to the first two days of creation, when god had created the Earth but no life yet. Today we know that these are rather rocks of a distinctive type rather than a distinctive age, as they are magmatic and metamorphic rocks, hence why the name Primary isn’t used for any period anymore. The Secondary period was equated to the third to fifth day of creation, as fossils of animals and plants can be found in it, but no humans yet. The Secondary was further divided into the Coal, Lias and Chalk ages. The Coal Age is still a name in use today for the previously mentioned Carboniferous period, as that is where most of our coal deposits come from. The Lias describes what is today better known as the Lower Jurassic, while the Chalk Age became the Cretaceous period (The name deriving from the Latin word for chalk, creta). More periods were eventually recognized and added until the Secondary became obsolete and divided into the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras of today. The Tertiary period was equated to the sixth day of creation up until Noah’s flood, making it the Antediluvian period, as fossils of modern-looking mammals as well as humans and human artifacts can be found in it. If you are old enough, you may still remember the name Tertiary being used in textbooks to describe the majority of the Cenozoic era, but today it is divided into the Paleogene and Neogene periods. Quaternary, originally used to describe the post-flood world, is still in use today to describe the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. As time marched on, the natural sciences became more and more divorced from religious ideas. Geologists soon found that there was no evidence for the deluge of the Bible ever having occurred and that many features once attributed to it could more easily be explained through the long-term processes of rivers, glaciers and slow sea-level changes over time. Cuvier’s catastrophism was soon abandoned in favor of James Hutton's and Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism, which stated that past geologic features can all be explained through slow processes that we can still see today and that the succession of geologic periods and species was a gradual, long-term development (today’s view of geologic history is a mix of the two, as Lyell’s principles of geology still generally apply, but we recognize that catastrophic events can and did sometimes happen on occasion). Catastrophism still went on to inspire many creationist authors who tried imagining mechanisms for the global flood, such as comets or vapor canopies. The latter encompasses ideas like the antediluvian Earth having icy rings like Saturn that once crashed down or that there was no rain and instead the atmosphere was constantly laden with fog. The vapor canopy theory may sound like a good precursor to some of the sub-tropes of the Alien Prehistoric World trope, but the problem here is that most of these were proposed by young earth creationists from the 1940s and I therefore consider them too recent and too niche to have had any major influence on classic paleoart. What I think is more notable is that many nineteenth century paintings of antediluvian times, like those of Thomas Cole, James Tissot or John Martin, show a very foggy atmosphere. This was likely an artistic decision to show how murky and mysterious this time was and as we will see in future posts, this fog carried over into classic paleoart. Over time the symbolic meaning of the fog was likely lost on many viewers and taken literally.

Fig 5.: Duria Antiquior, an 1830 watercolour painting by Henry De la Beche, often considered the first true attempt at reconstructing lifeforms from Deep Time. Depicted are several of the species discovered by famous fossil hunter Mary Anning at Lyme Regis. Almost all are shown as bizarre and violent.

While geology largely abandoned its religious roots, paleontology seems to have still equated the real prehistory with the mythological antediluvian times, at least in popular writing. For example the 1863 book La Terre Avant le Deluge, written by Louis Figuier, illustrated by Édouard Riou and released over 30 years after Lyell’s Principles of Geology, was the first book that extensively described and illustrated prehistoric life, but still told the story of Earth’s geologic history from a biblical perspective (as you may have noticed by the title). Before it, antediluvian tropes had already crept into paleoart as can be seen by the arguably first artistic reconstruction of prehistoric life, Duria Antiquior. The marine and flying reptiles depicted here are not only shown as quite bizarre antediluvian monsters, but are also engaging in excessive violence, seemingly only concerned with eating each other. One of the first depictions of dinosaurs, The country of the Iguanodon, also shows them in a very foggy and violent world. They are depicted as whale-sized lizards partially living in water, likely invoking descriptions of biblical monsters like the Leviathan and medieval dragons and seamonsters. In the average person of the time, these must have surely evoked associations with biblical narratives of the antediluvian world. What I found fascinating is that even Richard Owen, in his 1854 tour-guide for the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park, describes pterosaurs as dragons. Not just as “similar to dragons”, but literally as synonyms, like they are the same creature. He's even casual about it:

"Nos 2 and 3 are restorations of a flying reptile or dragon, called Pterodactyle,..." (Owen 1854, p. 11)

Given how it was in a tour-guide, the wording, while confusing, may have just been intended to help the average park-visitor better imagine these animals. However, if we consider Owen's own creationist views, it may have well been meant to be taken literally. The Crystal Palace Park and its impressive sculptures of the then current vision of dinosaurs were to the nineteenth century what Jurassic Park is today, as it introduced to a lot of general audiences a relatively wide range of prehistoric creatures in an entertaining manner, even if it was quickly outdated (also like Jurassic Park). They even sold smaller replicas of the statues as merchandise. While the sculptures were a lot more calm and animalistic than monstrous, their design still portrayed them as intimidating and bizarre brutes. While paleontology would eventually also go on to lose its connection to mythological beliefs, the cultural memory of dinosaurs and their relatives as antediluvian monsters living in a distant world would still haunt paleoart for decades to come. 

Fig. 6: The Country of the Iguanodon by John Martin from 1837. Before Jurassic Park, King Kong, the Bone Wars and even before the famous sculptures of the Crystal Palace Park, this is what dinosaurs were imagined to be like by Victorian era scientists/artists. Martin is perhaps better known for his paintings of biblical scenes and as a devout Christian he was very likely influenced by imaginations of antediluvian times and mythological monsters while painting this piece. As a side-note, only while writing this article did I notice that you can very faintly (under better resolution than here) see the outline of a mammoth and perhaps some other extinct mammals in the background. This likely means Martin imagined all these animals living at the same time, a belief which, as far as I am aware, was already outdated during this painting's making.

In the next part of this series we will explore how the Alien Prehistoric World Trope evolved into the early twentieth century through the writings of Marsh and Cope and in the art of Charles R. Knight, as well as movies like King Kong and Fantasia. We will also look how prehistoric times were linked to alien planets for the first time through early speculations about the planet Venus. Thank you very much for reading my very first blog-post and please leave your critique and suggestions in the comments below. 

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Literary sources:

• Barrett, Paul/ Naish, Darren: Dinosaurs. How they lived and evolved, London 2016 (2. Edition).
• Baxter, Stephen: Evolution, London 2002.
• Brusatte, Steve: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. A New History of a Lost World, New York 2018.
• Conway, John/Kosemen, C.M./Naish, Darren: All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, UK 2012.
• Crichton, Michael: Jurassic Park, New York 1990.
• Davidson, Jane: A History of Paleontology Illustration, Bloomington 2008.
• Davies, Paul: The Eerie Silence. Searching for ourselves in the universe, New York 2010.
• Jacobsen, Thorkild: The Sumerian King List, Chicago 1939.
• Knoll, Andrew: Life on a Young Planet. The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, New Jersey 2003 (Second Paperback Edition).
• Miller, William: Trace Fossils. Concepts, Problems, Prospects, Arcata 2007.
• Owen, Richard: Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World, London 1854 (Facsimile Edition).
• Rotziger, John: Allgemeine Geologie, Heidelberg 2008 (7. Edition).
• Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob: Herbarium Diluvianum, Zürich 1723.
• Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob: Physica Sacra, Zürich 1731.
• Witton, Mark: Pterosaurs, New Jersey 2013.
• Witton, Mark: Recreating an Age of Reptiles, Marlborough 2017.
• Witton, Mark: The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art, Marlborough 2018. 

Online sources:

• Some studies on Mesozoic oxygen levels: Oxygen and Evolution - Phanerozoic atmospheric oxygen: New results using the GEOCARBSULF model - Stable carbon isotopes of C3 plant resins and ambers record changes in atmospheric oxygen since the Triassic
• The science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, part 3: Megalosaurus, Hylaeosaurus and Iguanodon from Mark Witton's Blog
• What's the deal with the Nephilim? and What is the Leviathan by Trey the Explainer
• How Aron Ra disproves Noah's Flood and Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards by Aron Ra
• Science vs. The Ark Encounter by Stated Casually
• The Allure of Vintage Dinosaur Artwork and The Allure of Modern Dinosaur Artwork by HoopsAndDinoMan

Images:

• Fig. 2: Dodson, Peter/Barlowe, Wayne: An Alphabet of Dinosaurs, New York 1995, under the letter O (the book curiously has no numbered pages).
• Fig. 3: Wikimedia
• Fig. 4 left: Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob: Herbarium Diluvianum, Zürich 1723, page 17.
• Fig. 4 right: Wikimedia
• Fig. 5: Wikimedia
• Fig. 6: Wikimedia