Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It sucks for various
reasons, and when you try to escape it, say, by reading Donald R. Prothero’s
collection of dinosaur-related essays, named THE STORY OF THE DINOSAURS IN 25
DISCOVERIES, it sucks even more. Why?
Well, to be different, let us look at the ‘final’,
twenty-fifth, discovery – ‘Triceratops’. What is it composed of? The first
section – a collection of anecdotes regarding Cope & Marsh and Triceratops’
misadventures with them: Cope called it Agathaumas
and assumed that it was a hadrosaur; whereas Marsh at first assumed that it was
a giant prehistoric bison at first, (even though bison horns and Triceratops
horns are very different). Ha-Ha. How humorous. These days, Cope & Marsh seem
to be hybrids of paleontology’s founding fathers and Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum
and Tweedledee from his ‘Alice’ duology. Everyone and their dog know something
about Cope and Marsh, especially in their homeland of USA, mainly that they
were the first paleontologists there ever, that they participated in ‘Bone Wars’
that were half-grand and half-ridiculous… and this is it. There is even a ‘Weird
West’ novel where some Native American shamans begin to animate dinosaur bones
slash bring dinosaurs back to life, because the dysfunctional duo and their
entourage have intruded on a holy site of some sort or another, ho-ho. Groan. The
problem is not about the respect/disrespect of those two deceased worthies, but
about the fact that everyone in the US and their dog knows that much about
them, and is not impressed about it.
…Except maybe for the current POTUS and the rest of the D.C.
crowd. There is a political cartoon on the DA site that depicts the two parties
as flies that crawl over a chop of meat that is the country of USA. Frankly, it
speaks to me.
‘Triceratops’ the chapter’s opening salvo begins with reused
and recycled material that is on par of AoS & MCU reusing and recycling
Hydra no matter what. They seem to be replacing them with the Kree in
Spider-Man II, but then real life happened, apparently, somebody got scared or
something, and Hydra is coming back instead, just because. The Disney/Marvel
juggernaut does not do explanations; it just does whatever it wants. This
attitude has aggravated the SW fans, cough, and so now that faction of the
juggernaut is trying to win them back by SW comics, that these days contain
various mini-essays about this or that SW character. Sigh. In today’s Western
society, what is sauce for the goose-comics may not be sauce for gander-movies;
the SW comics themselves aren’t exactly selling like hot cakes; maybe the
upcoming ‘Mandalorian’ series, set in the era of the rising First Order, may do a better job – we’ll have to wait and
see.
After the Cope & Marsh anecdote of the chapter, Mr.
Prothero went into the biography of another prominent paleontologist – Mr.
Hatcher, John Bell. And immediately the Triceratops angle of the chapter began
to suffer, as the deceased was not just about the old three-horned face, but
went all over the place, including Patagonia, to dig for extinct mammal fossils
there. Where is the Triceratops?
In the historical anecdotes and vignettes, of course! Marsh
was trying to write a monography on Triceratops and died; Hatcher picked up the
slack and also died; it was up to Mr. Swann Lull to finish it. How exciting! …If
you did not know about any of this thing, of course, but… However, these days
the Western society is becoming increasingly stratified, and in case of
paleontology, you either have heard it all before and are not impressed because
Mr. Prothero is recycling the same old chestnuts, or you have not heard this
before because you do not care about this, and therefore are not impressed for that reason instead. You can hit an owl
with a stump, you can hit a stump with an owl, the end result is all the same:
the stump is unaffected, the owl definitely is. Mr. Prothero? Your actual
readers are your owl. Your essay collections are the stump.
…From the biography of Hatcher, where the Triceratops came
and went, we go onto the third part of the chapter, which describes the
Triceratops in general, from a biological/paleontological P.O.V., and again, it
is all generic, it is basically a lite paraphrase of Wikipedia info. When in
the 1970s USSR Nikolai Plavilshchikov released his book ‘Homunculus’, which was
a collection of biographies of various scientists from the 17th
century to pre-revolutionary (and WWI) Europe and Russia, it was basically the
same thing. Just with the emphasis not on dinosaurs, but on life sciences and
scientists, and it is a more coherent book because it doesn’t try to combine
dinosaurs with life histories of people in a medium of vignettes and anecdotes
released as essays – no, it’s just a collection of vignettes and anecdotes,
released at a time when Wikipedia and the Internet didn’t exist, (especially in
the USSR), and as such ‘Homunculus’ came across, at least initially, as more
original, even though the lay-out was the same – minimum text with maximum
illustrations. Just no Wikimedia commons unlike the ’25 Discoveries’… because
they did not exist of course, but we are not talking about Plavilshchikov here,
but about Mr. Prothero. Did he skim on the Wikipedia? Oh yes he did, with ‘skim’
being the key word: as he is talking about Triceratops on the recent media, he
talks about such pieces as – Walking with
Dinosaurs. The horned dinosaurs in WWD were actually Torosaurus. In ’25 Discoveries’
you get the feeling that Mr. Prothero adheres to the theory that states that Torosaurus
and Triceratops are two different dinosaurs, so why the
conflation and confusion regarding the horned dinosaurs in WWD? There’s even ‘The
Complete Guide…’ made by Impossible Pictures, the same company that made WWD,
that succinctly describes Torosaurus and shows several photo stills of this bull
lizard.
…Oh wait, there was a single dead Triceratops in WWD, as
opposed to all the live Torosaurus. Nice eyes, Legolas, great generalization!
What is next?
Mentions of the Jurassic
Park franchise in all of its’ incarnations. The problem is that in JP3
there were no horned dinosaurs, especially in main roles, and neither were they
in the first JW movie. Why did Mr. Prothero include those two movies? Because
he was just skimming through the Wiki looking for Triceratops info and got
complacent? Because just as Marsh (in the ‘Triceratops’ chapter) was putting
his name onto his assistants’ work, so does Prothero have the ghost writers do
all the work for him, and one of them decided ‘to stick it to the man’? Because
Mr. Prothero knows that in the modern Western, (especially American and
Canadian) society books aren’t really bought and/or read anymore, and his
publication of ’25 discoveries’ and other books is just to stoke his own ego
and to demonstrate to his friends, enemies, rivals and so on that he can afford
to do this on his salary of ‘a paleontology and geology researcher, teacher and
author’? Who knows… Which is where ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ comes in. Several
weeks ago, it released the Nasutoceratops species profile, and began to look
around for information sources beyond the Wikipedia about this dinosaur, and ’25
discoveries’ supposedly had it.
Only they do not. The only mention of the dinosaur in
question is the author’s photo of the ‘family tree of ceratopsians at the Utah
Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City’. I have no idea what Mr. Prothero,
his publisher, and the rest of the team were sinking, but the photo isn’t just
black-and-white, isn’t just ‘meh’ in quality, but also made at such an angle
that it is even harder to see and distinguish all of the skulls in the photo,
let alone see what number goes with what skull. Did Mr. Prothero even get
permission to photograph this ‘family tree’ or did he just photoshoot it once
on the sly and got the hell out of there?.. However, we digress. What was the
point, again?
…That JW: BBR, at its’ 8 to 9 minutes in length is precisely
the dinosaur movie we deserve. Let us break it into acts. Act I – we meet the
Motorhouse family. The actors are
credited post-movie, aye, but their roles
have no names, they are functions rather than people, apparently. They are
shown to be your typical American family, racially diverse and woke, and yes, it
is a double-edged sword of itself: when the movie is good, such as ‘Spider-Man
II’, being woke makes it better; when the movie is bad, as it was in ‘Dark
Phoenix 2019’, then wokeness will only make it worse. In BBR, the plot is so
brief – the feature film itself is under 10 minutes, remember? – that it doesn’t
matter whether or not this family is nuclear, composite, are its’ members WASPs
or POCs – all it matters is that they saw a struggle of dinosaurs, then a
carnivorous dinosaur attacked them, and they survived. The end. BBR has all the
main characters of a JP franchise movie: dinosaurs & humans, and all the
main themes of a JP franchise movie: dinosaur attack, human survival of the
dinosaur attack, and human family issues. The only theme missing is the human
corporate greed, (but then again, the JP3 film lacked it too), and the entire
human mad science creating dinosaurs. JP3 film did not have it either, so JW:
BBR actually does not stand out there either. What was the main message of the
JP novels, especially the initial
one? Life finds a way. This is what the novel version of Ian Malcolm,
especially in the first novel, was talking about, however long-windedly and
roundaboutedly. Everything else was just dressing, and the BBR post-credits
scenes show precisely that. …The final scenes of JW: FK do that too, so no ground-breaking
new achieves here in BBR either. The JP franchise goes round and round in
circles, as does MCU’s AoS, for comparison, only AoS was doing it for longer
and more continuously, proportionally speaking, therefore it is more obvious.
…And then we come to the Nasutoceratops. Whereas ‘Big Al’
had been a fan favorite of the American public for a long time, for a while it
was second only to the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the best and most known North
American carnivorous dinosaur, Nasutoceratops has been introduced to the
general populace by the paleontologists only in 2013. Right now, it’s fall
2019, so let assume that people have known about the Nasutoceratops under 7
years. That’s not that long, so the fact that this dinosaur received several
minutes of pure film footage is remarkable; yes, it’s a feature film of JP
franchise and the Nasutoceratops’ role could’ve been taken over by any of its’
featured cousins, such as the aforementioned Triceratops or Sinoceratops – but it
didn’t. JW: BBR and the rest of the JP franchise actually did something new,
whereas Mr. Prothero in his ’25 discoveries’ went with the tried, tested, and
old – Triceratops and Protoceratops, for example. Yes, Protoceratops fossils
were possibly one source of inspiration for the griffin myth, this was
acknowledged at least from the 1990s, if not earlier – is Mr. Prothero putting
a brand new image for that story? No, not really – the bigger half of the 24th
chapter is about the Protoceratops and its’ discovery, and the rest is about
Psittacosaurus, both tried and true dinosaurs, well known to the public. Unlike
the JP franchise, Mr. Prothero is not about to talk about the brand new, but
about the really old and well known – and in the last part of the 25th
chapter, Einiosaurus supposedly had a thick bony boss instead of a horn, just
as Pachyrhinosaurus did.
…Einiosaurus – and this was established for a while – had a nasal horn and it jutting upwards
and forwards like a horizontal hook or a sickle, whereas most horned dinosaurs
had a horn that jutted either straight upwards, as in case of Monoclonius and
Styracosaurus, or at an angle, as in case of Triceratops and Torosaurus. It is
Nasutoceratops that actually lacks a nasal horn, and it is an established fact
by now, so either Mr. Prothero has confused it and Einiosaurus, or there is
some other gaffe. Ouch.
Let me start to wind down my rant. In the introduction to
his ’25 discoveries’, Mr. Prothero may wax poetic about us living in the
dinosaur renaissance. He is echoing the language used in the intro to Planet
Dinosaur mini-series, (aired in 2011), but that is not the point. The point is
that he, and the rest of the official paleontological world, are going around
in circles, not unlike the rest of the Western/American society, going for old
reliable while presenting them as brand new with nary an effort – and what
effort there is, echoes directly back to 1970s and 80s, when the ‘dinosaur
renaissance’ truly began in the first main mass media – printed books. These
days printed media is decreasing in popularity, but officially, it is still
going strong, and Mr. Prothero, at least, is trying to get his piece of
happiness by publishing all sort of essay collections – but this is not the
point. The point is that the entertainment
sector of the Western/American mass media is being the pioneer here, with the
official science lagging behind. That is just a sad state of affairs, people!
…And this is it for now; see you all soon!
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