An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs

No other animal from the distant past captures our imagination like

dinosaurs

. Any child old enough to hold a crayon can probably draw one. And we older children have our own images that come to mind when we think about terrible lizards. But the reason we have to imagine non-avian

dinosaurs

, of course, is that they are extinct. Fortunately, a lot of science has contributed to our understanding of what dinosaurs looked and acted like. But the truth is that we've only had a few hundred years to bring that image into focus. So if you flip through a book on natural

history

or walk through a museum hall, you'll have an idea of ​​what paleontologists think dinosaurs were like.

But even the most up-to-date restorations of our prehistoric favorites are only part of the story. Because our image of dinosaurs has been constantly changing (evolving, you might say) since naturalists began studying them about 350 years ago. And this evolution is reflected in hundreds of years of drawings, paintings and models of dinosaurs, each made in an attempt to bring us a little closer to visualizing animals that have been lost to time. Taken together, these images can tell us a lot about how much we have learned in just three and a half centuries. So today we're going to explore the

history

of dinosaur science, as seen through the history of dinosaur art.

When naturalists began finding dinosaur bones, they didn't quite know what to do with them... as can be seen in the first illustration of a dinosaur fossil ever published. In 1677, more than 160 years before the word "dinosaur" was coined, an English chemist named Robert Plot published his Natural History of Oxfordshire, a catalog of rocks, minerals and fossils from his native county. And it included a drawing of a strange bone that had been found in a limestone quarry. The plot could say it was the end of a femur or the femur. But it was clearly from a much larger animal than any living in England at the time.

He suggested that the thigh fragment could have belonged to a Roman war elephant, or perhaps even a giant human. But it turned out that, in his book, Plot had given the world the first scientific illustration of a dinosaur fossil. In 1763, the English naturalist Richard Brookes reprinted Plot's illustration in a six-volume collection he called A System of Natural History. And Brookes gave the fossil a name. In a caption to Plot's image, he called the specimen Scrotum humanum. Because...really? Because even though he knew it was a piece of femur, he thought it looked like... a pair of human testicles.

Paleontologists now know that the bone belonged to Megalosaurus, a dinosaur named by William Buckland in 1824. Working with more and better material, including the lower jaw and teeth, Buckland was able to tell that this animal was a previously unknown type of animal. carnivorous reptile. In Buckland's opinion, the creature did not look like a giant, or even an elephant, but rather a crocodile, albeit the size of a bus. And from that time we still have a lithograph of the crucial fossil: the one that established Megalosaurus as a ferocious new ancient life form. From these rather inauspicious beginnings (cases of mistaken identity involving war elephants and human genitalia) the idea began to sink in that dinosaurs were something truly special, specifically, a species of reptile that used to exist, but no longer existed. . .

But in the early 19th century, scientists still imagined that dinosaurs were very similar to the modern reptiles they knew. The English doctor Gideon Mantell, for example, thought that if dinosaurs were reptiles, they must have basically just been giant lizards. Based on some fossil teeth he found in Sussex, Mantell was convinced he had found the prehistoric equivalent of an iguana, albeit one that measured about 30 meters long. He sketched the creature's skeleton in his personal notes, following the same skeletal plan of the modern lizard. And in 1825 he officially gave the animal the name Iguanodon, or “iguana tooth.” A few years later, Mantell was visited by artist John Martin.

Martin was famous for his paintings of dramatic and apocalyptic scenes, such as his 1822 painting, The Destruction of Pompeii. And after meeting Mantell, Martin used his vision of the Iguanodon to create the first (and perhaps most exaggerated) dinosaur combat scene ever committed to canvas. This painting, Iguanodon Country, is all spirals, teeth and claws. It's all very... raw. And at the time, he summed up what experts thought ancient reptiles were like: giant, ferocious lizards that hissed and bit at each other. But all that was about to change. British anatomist Richard Owen proposed that Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and another recently discovered animal, called Hylaeosaurus, shared special physical traits (found in their hips and other bones) that made them different from all other reptiles.

And in 1842, he came up with a new name for this extinct life form: “dinosaur,” from the Greek meaning “terrible lizard.” But Owen went even further. Dinosaurs weren't just large lizards, he said. In many ways, they resembled mammals in their structure and posture. And Owen portrayed his vision of dinosaurs not on paper or canvas, but in three dimensions! For England's Great Exhibition of 1854, Owen worked with artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to create life-size versions of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures, just as he imagined them. The models were so immense that Hawkins even famously held a New Year's banquet inside a model of Iguanodon!

And when the models were released to the public, they became the new image of what we thought dinosaurs looked like. These animals were built more like rhinos, with their legs under their bodies, but with scaly skin and tails that trailed on the ground behind them. And it was further new knowledge about dinosaur legs that led to the next big change in the way we imagined animals. Most of the first dinosaur fossils were found in Europe and were extremely fragmented. Sometimes it was difficult to know which parts went with which. But when naturalists began searching in North America, they found more complete skeletons that caused paleontologists to completely rethink dinosaurs.

A couple of critical findings were made in New Jersey. In 1858, a farmer found the bones of an animal we now call Hadrosaurus. The skeleton was not complete, but there were enough parts of the arms, legs, and tail to know that this dinosaur's forelimbs were shorter than its hind limbs. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was called upon again to reconstruct the dinosaur skeleton for the public in Philadelphia, the first to be displayed anywhere. And the strange thing about this model was that... it stood on two legs! The discovery of a carnivorous dinosaur also in New Jersey, eventually named Dryptosaurus, showed that it was also bipedal.

And its discoverer, the notoriously moody American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, drew the dinosaur in a crouching, kangaroo-like pose, totally different from Owen's Megalosaurus. The best finds only added fuel to this revolution in the way we imagined dinosaurs. The discovery of an entire herd of Iguanodon in a Belgian coal mine in 1878, including complete skeletons, confirmed that those dinosaurs had short arms and long legs, suggesting that they were also largely bipedal. And the discovery of entirely new genera, such as Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops, showed that dinosaurs were stranger and more diverse than paleontologists expected. Bone by bone and skeleton by skeleton, a new image of dinosaurs began to take hold.

Although they were still classified as reptiles, by the end of the 19th century they were considered to act more like mammals or birds than lizards. An important painting from 1896 illustrates this point. Charles R. Knight, working for the American Museum of Natural History,

illustrated

a moment of fierce combat between two snarling Dryptosaurus. These were not Martin's dragon-like lizards, nor Owen's rhinoceros-like reptiles. Instead, they were agile, bird-like dinosaurs unlike anything we had seen before. Then, in the early 20th century, scientific opinion about dinosaurs changed again. At the time, dinosaurs were seen as big, strange and scary – great for drawing crowds to museums! -- but his reputation was beginning to tarnish.

If dinosaurs were so big, some paleontologists wondered, why did they become extinct? Instead of being impressive, dinosaurs came to be seen as inferior, an evolutionary failure. And this attitude was reflected in the paleoart of the time, which depicted dinosaurs as slow, lumbering beasts, usually trapped in some swamp. Don't get me wrong, the artists of that era depicted these scenes beautifully. Artists such as Knight, Zdeněk Burian, and Rudolph Zallinger created some of the most iconic and detailed dinosaur artwork of all time. They filled books and museums with their work, and many of their murals can still be seen on display in places like the Field Museum and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

It's just that their generation saw dinosaurs as chubby, dumb losers in the evolutionary game of life. However, in the late 1960s, new findings caused experts to question what they thought they knew about dinosaurs. The key here was the discovery of Deinonychus, the inspiration for the tenacious “raptors” of Jurassic Park, by American paleontologist John Ostrom in 1969. This small carnivore had a stiff, counteracting tail and a wicked, sickle-shaped “killer claw.” on each of his feet. It was impossible to imagine this thing as a dumb, slow reptile. He was agile and dynamic, even... one could say... like a bird.

This revelation sparked what became known as the Dinosaur Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. It opened old debates and sparked new ones, transforming what we thought dinosaurs were like. And paleoart followed suit! What paleontologists did in laboratories and museums, illustrators like Greg Paul, Ely Kish, Douglas Henderson and more did with their sketches and paintings. In the works of these artists, the dinosaurs' tails were lifted from the ground, their postures adjusted, and they were shown running, jumping, scratching, and biting with greater vigor than ever before. And, of course, as with everything that evolves, our image of dinosaurs has not stopped changing.

Today, paleontologists are finding more dinosaurs than ever. In fact, a new species is now named, on average, every two weeks! But most importantly, we are learning a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs, such as their anatomy and physiology. In addition to fossil bones, researchers are now studying things like impressions of skin, feathers, and other soft tissues, giving us a more complete picture of not only what these animals looked like, but also how they moved and what they did. they could and could not do. do. In particular, the discovery of dozens of feathered and fluffy dinosaurs has totally changed the way we view some of our favorites.

And recent paleoarts have reflected these changes. Artists such as Julius Csotonyi, Gabriel Ugueto, Nobu Tamura and Emily Willoughby are incorporating the latest knowledge from the field and are also using new technologies, such as 3D scans, to recreate dinosaurs in more detail than ever before. While the paleoartists of yesteryear worked with paint and lithographs, many modern artists have gone digital, depicting new visions of prehistoric life as soon as they are announced. What really sets these modern paleoartists apart is how they draw on the traditions of previous generations, while also challenging previous tropes and ideas. Paleoart is now in its grand Experimental Phase, reflecting what we hope dinosaurs were like, while also speculating on what we don't yet know.

But the lesson here is not that modern paleoart is right while earlier editions were wrong. Dinosaur art is always a reflection of the era in which it was created. Just as the dinosaurs themselves evolved, so did our thoughts about their lives. Paleoart is a living document of these alterations. We've come a long way from the days when we thought dinosaur fossils represented a race of giants, or large lizards, or bulky pseudomammals. And a hundred years from now, natural historians will be able to look back on the illustrations we use today and marvel at how wrong we were.

Fortunately, the more science reveals to us about the nature of non-avian dinosaurs, the closer we come to representing the truth in our illustrations. But as long as dinosaurs remain extinct, it is possible thatThere is always a small part of them that we will have to imagine for ourselves. What do you want to know about the history of life on Earth? Let us know in the comments. And don't forget to go to youtube.com/eons and subscribe! But the fun does not end here! Do yourself a favor and check out some of our sister channels from PBS Digital Studios.