It’s official: humans like dinosaurs more than money. In recent months two
television series
have swept the
television ratings world by storm. The cliff hanging format of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire makes for compulsive viewing and topped the ratings in both the USA and the UK. The producers must have thought their formula of watching complete strangers win hundreds of thousands of dollars and pounds would be the television hit of the decade. But lumbering in the wings was perhaps the most unexpected hit of recent times, an animated science series about long dead creatures. The BBC’s science documentary series ‘Walking with
Dinosaurs’ has broken all television records around the globe. In Britain alone it peaked at around 19 million viewers, almost one in three of the total population. The stupendous scale of this success must have come as a great delight to the producers but for years television executives have known that dinosaurs are good box-office. It seems that all of us, children and adults alike, are obsessed with dinosaurs. Just how and why did this group of extinct reptiles get to be so popular? Dinosaurs are members of a group of around 1300 reptiles that first appeared on our planet 210 million years ago. Mysteriously they became extinct about 65 million years ago, and just one descendant, the birds, has survived to the present. The first dinosaur remains were uncovered in England in the 1820’s. It was soon realised that some of these creatures were huge, they lived on the land and many of them could walk upright on two legs.It was this last discovery that set the scene for the human imagination to run wild. It has led to all kinds of speculation about their locomotion, behaviour and physiology. Imagine if we had to share our planet with creatures that could run up to 26 miles an hour, weighed up to 100 tonnes and had a taste for human flesh. In reality many of them were probably vegetarian, but it’s the flesh eaters that have fuelled our fears. By the 1840s they were officially named the ‘Dinosauria’: meaning Greek for ‘terrible lizard’. Dinosaur footprints reveal that many of them walked erect in a fashion similar to modern birds, putting one foot in front of the other. The earliest dinosaurs were small, light carnivores and omnivores, probably extremely quick and agile to avoid any large predators. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods they evolved into many different types, some of them reaching colossal size. The largest dinosaur we have ever found is Seismosaurus in New Mexico. Its fossil bones reveal an animal that may have weighed in at 30 tonnes and was up to an incredible 170 feet long; 2 times longer than today’s largest animal, the blue whale. Sauropods like Argentinosaurus had long necks and reached giant proportions, weighing up to 100 tonnes. Their immense size kept them firmly on all four feet lumbering along like giant elephants. Wild elephant can be killers but frequent childhood visits to zoos have left us all with the belief that elephants are gentle, kind creatures capable of weeping. This anthropomorphic approach may not only be misleading about elephants it may be even more misleading about long extinct creatures like Diplocodus.They may have lived in harmonious groups and they may have been gentle giants, protected by their size rather than by their aggression. If they had met humans they may, like elephants, have become our best friends offering small children rides at the local zoo. But the truth is we simply don’t know. They may have been highly aggressive, intent on decimating anything in their path: monster gardeners with small brains.Where our imagination really runs wild is with the king of the dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus. Just their appearance - large heads, sharp claws, backward curving, doubly serrated teeth all fill us with fear. From just a few early bones Victorian palaeontologists soon built up a picture of a powerful creature with small front limbs, massive powerful rear legs, capable of grasping its prey in its jaws and casually ripping meat off in much the same way we might tackle a chicken leg. This fearsome creature has been a story teller’s dream, a monster from our worst nightmares, a beast that already lurked in the deep primeval forest of our darkest dreams. This fear is part of our genetic makeup, part of our primal instinct. Film makers and television producers have long understood the fatal attraction we have for these creatures from hell. It’s hard to imagine but perhaps Tyrannosaurus was timid and docile and that all along we have been completely wrong. We will never know, but like the lion tamer it would be a brave person that volunteered to be in the same cage as a 6 tonne reptile most scientists agree was a ferocious carnivore.