Mourning for dinosaurs, 65 million years too late - CNN

Dinosaurs have been fearsome and fascinating — but tragic?

Those prehistoric creatures who met their end around 65 million years ago are currently being memorialized online by dino-heads who mourn their mass extinction. Fans chop up animated footage of dinosaur hatchlings or long-necked herbivores in courtship (mostly taken from the recent Netflix docuseries “The Dinosaurs”) and set it to somber music. “The world was supposed to be theirs,” one viewer lamented in the comments.

Dinosaurs do not know, another TikToker opined, that “we found them and we love them with everything we have.” Others wondered how they could miss creatures they never knew.

But humans have a long habit of inserting their own feelings into the story of the dinosaurs. Our vanished gargantuan predecessors have served in the imagination as monster-movie villains, preschool companions, friends or house-sized house pets. Small children memorize big facts about them; rich people invest or squander fortunes buying their bones. They can’t stop showing up in movie theaters: This coming summer, they’ll walk among humans again in a mysterious film starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor.

When science said dinosaurs were pea-brained and cold-blooded, humans took their demise as proof of the superiority of warm, clever mammals. By the late 20th century, though, the notion that the dinosaurs died out because they were slow and stupid was falling apart on two fronts: more and more fossil evidence pointed to their having had high metabolisms and sophisticated behavior, and geologic evidence suggested they had been wiped out in a sudden cataclysmic asteroid impact, rather than slowly undone by any evolutionary inadequacies.

If dinosaurs were strong and intelligent — if humans didn’t really deserve to inherit the Earth from them — then their death in a cosmic freak accident represents unimaginable loss. What if humans were to lose their dominion over the planet, too? What if, in our case, it does turn out to be our own fault?

In the early ‘90s, the sitcom “Dinosaurs” started as a kid-friendly program about a blue-collar family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs and ended with the characters facing certain death in a deep freeze brought about by overdevelopment. It was an unsubtle but prescient look at dinosaurs’ new role as avatars for humans living through what feels like their own creeping apocalypse — call it extinction anxiety.

“They lasted for a long time, were hugely successful and diverse, but now (apart from the birds) are gone,” said Chris Manias, historian of science at King’s College London who wrote a book about paleontology in public life. “They lend themselves to a sense that even the most powerful and dramatic creatures, and the most extraordinary worlds, have an ending.”

Why we fear, respect and mourn dinos

Humans have long loved dinosaurs because their very existence feels stranger than fiction, Manias said.

BC-era humans had an idea dinosaurs existed, even if they didn’t quite know what to make of their monstrous bones. But paleontology didn’t really get going until the 19th century, when fuller fossils were uncovered and experts started to call these massive lizard-looking things dinosaurs, said Vicky Coules, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK who studies how dinosaurs became visual icons. The idea that we shared a common planet shocked people at the time.

In the mid-1800s, the British sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built immense models of dinosaurs based on fossils and fragments, though they more closely resembled existing reptiles than the giants we now know they are. Their height and heft frightened and thrilled spectators, earning dinosaurs a permanent place in the public imagination, Coules said.

Mostly, that imagination revolved around finding ways for humans and dinosaurs to overlap. In 1864, Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” imagined explorers finding dinosaur-like creatures living underground. Just under 100 years later, the Flintstones adopted the friendly Dino as a pet. Barney taught children to share.