Dinosaur In a Haystack - A Website About Stephen Jay Gould's ...

drawing backwards would have to be second nature to engraving professionals. He alsoconsidered and rejected the hypothesis that the advent of photography forced these artiststo draw snails the normal orientation; there is a century between 1750 (when the snailsappear dextral) and photography’s introduction. Gould concludes that it must have beena formal convention of some sort, although why he has no idea what or why. He asks forhelp on this from his readers, and from antiquarian book dealers. In an epilogue, hethanks the many people who offered ideas, but reports that none to date had discoveredthe solution.DIH 17. DinomaniaGould was fascinated by dinosaurs in elementary school, while most of his classmateswere not. After recapitulating some childhood slights regarding this discrepancy ofvalues, he poses a question: why do these same creatures periodically capture the world’simagination in a fad-like way [a theme he also explored in BFB 6]? The specificmotivation in writing this essay was the phenomenal success of Stephen Spielberg’smovie Jurassic Park, based on the best-selling novel by Michael Crichton. [This essayoriginally appeared in the New York Review of Books on August 12, 1993, rather than hismonthly column. Gould reviewed both Crichton’s novel and the book The Making ofJurassic Park (about the movie) by Don Shay and Judy Duncan.] Gould expresses thehope that this round of dinomania is based on their recently-improved reputation,stemming from discoveries suggesting that, as a group, dinosaurs were not slow andstupid, and did not become extinct because they could not compete with mammals.Whether the seed of this feedback-driven enterprise was a brilliant marketing executive,or an innate reaction to our fascination with the “big, fierce, and extinct,” he does notknow.He critiques the book and the movie, from the perspectives of both a professionalscientist and a lifelong fan of dinosaur movies. He identifies certain factual errors: mostof the dinosaurs that appear in both media lived during the Cretaceous and not theJurassic, for example, and that most Velociraptors were smaller than the stars of the bookand film. He generally liked the book, but was a bit disappointed with the movie(although he did love the dinosaur scenes themselves). He could easily identify severalpopular “trends” within the professional community, such as the views that dinosaurswere warm-blooded and lived in herds. He appreciated the mechanism of using ancientblood-sucking insects trapped in amber as a source of dinosaur DNA, although he thendiscusses at some length why this would not work in practice. He emphasizes that theproposed technique of filling in the genetic gaps with frog DNA is “their worst scientificblunder.” He appreciated Crichton’s use of chaos theory in the book (life is verycomplex, and will behave in unpredictable ways) as an explanation for how the dinosaursget loose and wreak havoc. In the movie version, Gould is irritated that the chaos-theoryversedmathematician quickly defaults to the old chestnut about humans playing God asthe source of the inevitable drama.Gould closes with a discussion of the early scene in which the creator of the park enticesa “big name” paleontologist to visit and recommend his facility. The scientist has no23