Something is going on between children and dinosaurs-a love affair that the adult world can`t quite explain. Only one thing is sure. When parents and teachers describe dinosaurs to small ones, they had better get it right.
Kids` fascination with dinosaurs is more than a yen for big dragons. This was evident recently at the Field Museum. An instructor was leading children through a tour of the dinosaur exhibits. She was going through the basics:
That ”dinosaur” is Greek for ”terrible lizard.” That some could fly. And that the last of them became extinct 65 million years ago.
”And why do you think they died off?” asked the instructor.
”A shooting star,” shouted a toddler who was probably getting impatient.
The child was restating a recent extinction theory: A few years ago, California scientists detected a layer of iridium in rocks associated with the dinosaur`s waning days-the late Cretaceous period. Iridium is rare on Earth but heavily present in asteroids. The ensuing chaos could have finished off an already weakened family of reptiles.
Inspired by the public`s fascination with dinosaurs, paleontologists increasingly have published papers on this and other theories about the creatures, which arrived 225 million years ago, by some estimates.
Interestingly, scientists have also written children`s books that are unstinting in their accuracy about dinosaurs of all kinds.
Now we have Dinosaur Days, which continues Saturday and Sunday and Nov. 21 at the Field Museum, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive. It is the seventh year of the event, impressing the socks off kids and parents with the museum`s 20-foot-high fossil skeletons and teaching them about their lives. But even as this and other dinosaur exhibits around the country attract unprecedented crowds, the peculiar popularity of dinosaurs remains a mystery, even to people who think about the beasts every day.
One explanation is that kids have always been enchanted by dinosaurs, and only now are the publishers and toymakers catching on.
”There`s plenty of schlock out there,” says Doug Rubel of Safari Ltd., a Miami company that imports and sells merchandise to museum shops. But in general, the recent dinosaur craze is selling partly because it brings with it the opportunity to learn something worthwhile. ”There`s an emphasis on educational products today,” Rubel says. ”And dinosaurs fit right into that.”
This could explain why stores such as Beckley-Cardy`s Education Station, at Woodfield Mall, stock models of balsa wood bones, which kids and adults assemble with all the authenticity of an old biplane. They also sell multiplication tables and other teaching aids with images of ptaranodon (which flies), tyrannosaurus rex (the fiercest one) and triceratops (with three horns atop). The educational aspects, however, do not fully explain the dinosaur craze.
Also taking a crack at the phenomenon is Michael Spock, vice president of public programs at the Field. He seems to get close when he says that it relates to the need to face things that are uncomfortable. ”It can be very exhilarating when you confront a fear,” he says. True enough, the fossils in the main hall of the museum-an albertasaurus towering over a recumbent lambeosaurus-have a fiercesome quality. Dinosaurs, along with mummies, are the most popular attractions at the museum.
Whatever the reason, children are serious about dinosaurs. ”You have to get it just right for the kids,” says Barbara Stuark of the Field`s museum store. She notes that they complain when images are too fanciful, or in another case, when a wooly mammoth is classed as a dinosaur-which is an error of more than 60 million years.
Whether leading-or following-the public, dinosaur scientists are more concerned than ever with scientific precision. While much new work is being done on the remote prehistoric past, curators at the Field and other museums are even involved in some catchup. In fact, it appears that earlier scientists made mistakes that are just now being corrected.
”Do you know the story of the brontosaurus?” asks Mary Carmen, a paleontologist who works as collections manager of fossils at the museum.
Paleontologists in the 1880s were faced with a sort of dino-mania of their own. It was a period when many huge fossils were being discovered, especially in the American and Canadian West. Scientists took pleasure in naming new species and postulating what missing bones must have looked like. But some leading paleontologists hurried into bad judgments. One error was an incorrect skull for apatosaurus, a relatively common, long-necked, long-tailed species that lived about 70 million years ago.
Poor apatosaurus was victim again when another scientist named a set of bones brontosaurus when they were in fact the bones of an apatosaurus. He was thinking, or hoping, that he had something new. The result was several generations of museum exhibits of apatosaurus bones being labeled
brontosaurus. Of course, they had a wrong head.
These errors were suspected early enough. In the 1930s, the Field`s own curator, Elmer Riggs, was the first to state that brontosaurus was the same as the earlier-named apatosaurus. But even though the skull was also presumed wrong long ago, the Field`s apatosaurus was wrong-headed until recently.
Finally, in 1978, paleontologists at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh wrote a definitive paper on the true skull type of apatosaurus. Then, after the Carnegie changed the head on its specimen, the Field was the second in the country to get a cast of the correct skull for its apatosaurus, in 1981.
So, there is no separate brontosaurus, but because the name has been used for decades, it is still acceptable, though improper, to call the apatosaurus a brontosaurus.
While it is not uncommon for scientists to correct themselves as new discoveries are made, these appear to have been errors made in the name of popular success. ”In the late 1800s,” says Carmen, dinosaurs ”were so popular with the public, the scientists decided to go real fast and make something up.”
Today, paleontology is a little less spectacular-fewer fossils are being found-but no less compelling. For example, even some small children know the extinction theory holding that an asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago, causing fire and enough clouds to cause darkness, killing all vegetation and taking the dinosaur down the path to extinction.
Whether developed for popular consumption or not, other dinosaur theories are uncommonly vivid for children and adults alike. Montana paleontologist John Horner, for example, is coming to the museum at 2 p.m. Saturday for Dinosaur Days to discuss not just scholarly work but also his children`s book ”Maia: A Dinosaur.” The story is built around Horner`s theory that dinosaurs were actually loving parents, unlike modern reptiles.
Other Dinosaur Days activities involve the opportunity for children to paint dinosaurs. While this may seem strictly for children, the impulse to paint an imagined prehistory was behind some of the best-known murals at the Field. The murals, in Hall 38 (”Hall of Dinosaurs”), were painted by Charles R. Knight, a specialist in prehistoric settings and a very famous artist in the 1930s. It is recalled that curator Riggs resented the freedoms that the artist took in painting lifelike scenes of tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops and others.
The Field Museum is the best place for people with an eye for dinosaurs but not the only place where they are. At Armerding Hall at Wheaton College in Wheaton, the Perry Mastodon is on display. It is the bones-with some replacement parts-of a mastodon found on the Glen Ellyn property of Judge Samuel Perry in 1963. (Call 260-5007 for information.)
The discovery began when workers dredging the judge`s pond discovered a giant femur (thigh) bone. Geologists and paleontologists were brought in and found most of the 50,000-year-old beast. In 1974, it was reassembled and put on a turntable, half of it covered with authentic-looking skin, the other half bare skeleton.
Mastodons, we are reminded (by children as well as scholars), are not dinosaurs. But what they lack in remote antiquity they make up for in immediacy for Midwesterners. From about 10 million years ago, ”they roamed the continent but they were most abundant around the south edge of the Great Lakes,” says Dr. Gerald H. Haddock. Haddock says that other nearly complete fossils have been found in the western suburbs, some of them now kept in boxes in cellars at museums and colleges.
The reality of old bones is one element behind the romance of dinosaurs. But even when they are not the real thing, dinosaurs can be very popular when they have the look of authenticity. The creatures of Dinamation Dinosaurs International, a San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-based firm, are that. These one- half and one-third size dinosaurs are made of synthetic materials. They roll their eyes, move legs and tails and even appear to breathe. The company is exhibiting 10 sets of such models and is building more. In Chicago, there is talk of bringing an exhibit to the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
The public has shown great interest in Dinamation, which was developed by a retired airline pilot and authenticated by University of Colorado paleontologist Robert Bakker. During an recent exhibition at the Milwaukee Public Museum, attendance nearly tripled in October. The exhibition was tied in with a coloring contest for an exhibit poster that brought 2,700 entries, according to a museum spokesperson.
Happily, paleontologists often approve of these kind of facsimiles. ”It makes you try even harder to imagine what these dinosaurs must have been like,” says Bill Simpson, a paleontologist and preparator of fossil exhibits at the Field. He notes that even if dinosaurs have been commercialized, ”much of it is related to an academic interest.”
Of course, nothing will replace the real thing. Even modest finds-like the 5-foot-long leg and tail-bone fossils at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford-are the things that truly ignite the imagination. If the Academy of Sciences gets Dinamation, it will be accompanied by the academy`s own real ”footprints” of dinosaurs that came from a limestone quarry in Connecticut.
After all, it`s the real thing that makes ersatz things such as models, T-shirts and even dinosaur trading cards worthwhile for kids.
”You can actually stand next to these things” (the bones), says Spock. They are huge, exotic-and real. ”We live in an electronic age,” he says.
”We are accustomed to abstract forms of communication. We crave contact with the real thing. When we get it, it can be very powerful.”
What: Dinosaur Days
Where: Field Museum, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive; 322-8854.
When: Saturday and Sunday and Nov. 21
How much:Free with museum admission, $2; students, $1; seniors, 50 cents;
families, $4. John Horner lecture, $6.
