Fri, Jul 01, 2005 page9

• It wasn't so tyrannical when Bambiraptors ruled the Earth

  A new exhibition in the US suggests that dinosaurs were a much more alert and vulnerable creature than Hollywood's blockbusters might care to portray

  • By Edward Rothstein / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  I do not know if we get the dinosaurs we deserve, but we certainly get the dinosaurs we desire. Once, they were known by their gigantism and monstrous power, by their claws and armored plates, their incisors and grotesque skulls. They earned their names: thunder lizard (brontosaurus), carnivorous bull (carnotaurus), three-horned face (triceratops). They were primal forces erupting from the planet's crust, relics of a brutal past.

  Now, we have something else in mind. The extraordinary exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, "Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries," for example, opens with a recently discovered skeleton of a birdlike dinosaur named after a gentle Disneyesque deer: Bambiraptor.

  And that's not the least of it. Where once scales and armor predominated, now there is discussion of feathers and soft tissue. Instead of being associated with earthbound reptiles, dinosaurs are being linked with ethereal birds. Their speed has been ramped down, their delicacy pumped up. Their earthen colors have turned spectacular. The male archetype once ruled, now the female one does. And even their extinction -- once proof of thuggish inadequacy -- is now a sign of mere victimhood: They were apparently wiped out in a mass extinction caused by a comet hitting the earth.

  This exhibition genteelly pins the old dinosaur image to the ground, overwhelming its primitive brawn with contemporary brain power and technological advances, revealing its soft underbelly. With great care, it manages to almost completely overturn the ways dinosaurs were once understood. The only concern is that in ways we cannot yet know, the new interpretations may be making some of the same mistakes as the old.

  The transformation has been taking place for the last few decades, but it has picked up pace recently, with the computerized tomography (CT) scanning of fossils, computer simulations of muscle movement and remarkable new finds, including remnants of soft tissue. Fossils discovered in Liaoning Province in China have also, as the exhibition shows, revealed new information about fine details of skin and feather. So some of the transformations in the image of dinosaurs clearly come from an increase in understanding.

  FAMILIAR CHANGES

  Some of the changes, too, have become relatively familiar. A generation of purple Barney puppets has already been worn out. Children's books long ago turned dinosaurs into empathetic companions, fellow travelers in a natural world before civilization or socialization.

  A dozen years ago, Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park may have even been a kind of rebellion against this trend of treating dinosaurs as E.T.-like proto-pets -- safely contained inhabitants of a Disney fantasy. The effort to show them with all their monstrous powers intact backfired, of course. Jurassic Park was really a kind of a thrill ride -- which it later literally became. The movie did not restore the threat of dinosaurs; instead, they were tamed by commerce.

  At Toys "R" Us in Times Square, a giant Tyrannosaurus rex opens his mouth, roars and twists his head and tail, his eyeballs ominously roving over the photo-snapping visitors, inviting them up a ramp to purchase Jurassic Park products.

  But it is clear enough that the old image, popularized in pulp sci-fi and film, could not have sustained itself, even if scientific research had continued to uphold it. Dinosaur skeletons, which were first mounted for public display in 1868, once held immense significance. There is hardly a major country that doesn't have such skeletons on view. US president Thomas Jefferson used the East Room of the White House as his Bone Room. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie sponsored excavations that led to the discovery of the Diplodocus carnegii -- and then donated replicas and casts to museums in South America and Europe.

  RELICS OF POWER

  Such fossils were relics of power. And they offered Darwinian testimony. For all their strength, the theory went, dinosaurs had heads that were too minute to be of much use after mammalian brains became dominant. The dinosaurs were supplanted, their fossilized remains serving like the skulls of vanquished enemies, mounted on poles around a temple, occasionally coming back to life in popular fantasy.

  Of course, that fearsome image also grew out of the knowledge of its time and changing knowledge, which for example, later identified the Brontosaurus with the Apatosaurus. Now we learn, based on new computer simulations involving muscle mass and joints, that the T. Rex probably could not have chased after that jeep in Jurassic Park, that its top running speed was probably closer to 16kph than 72kph. And that the bulbous skulls of pachycephalosaurids were probably too thin to support the old idea that they would butt heads in combat like today's bighorn sheep. One new dinosaur modeled here is named Confuciusornis sanctus -- sacred Confucius bird -- which is about as far from a thunder lizard as you can get.

  "What's the point?" asks one of the signs along a mock trophy wall of elaborate skulls with baroque spikes and horns and frills of bone. "You might think these animals were aggressive, fierce fighters."

  But the ceratopsians, we learn, were actually sluggish plant-eaters who moved in herds. Even the famous spikes of the Stegosaurus are now thought to have been far too weak to be useful as armor or weaponry.

  "So why all the sharp points?" the exhibition asks. For display, not defense. "Flirt or fight?" another sign asks. Here the emphasis is on flirt: the fearsome skulls and spikes and collars were used for "dramatic courtship displays."

  One still wouldn't want to meet these creatures on an open plain, and the surviving teeth of even the wisest of them look as if they could still do substantial damage. But perhaps there is some comfort to be had in imagining that they were alert beings, sensitive to ecological disaster, more preoccupied with mating than mastery. Presumably, somewhat like ourselves.
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