Dinosaurs!

 The Cabazon Dinosaurs

 When the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were first introduced, I can only imagine what the public thought and felt about them. Today's public has grown up seeing huge, lifelike sculptures of almost every type of creature imaginable, and so have been somewhat desensitized to the amazingness of the actual sculptures. The public of the 1800s would have never seen something like the Crystal Palace dinosaurs before. I imagine that the first sight of the creatures would have been awe-inspiring, a little bit frightening, and overwhelmingly interesting. It must have been a huge deal to discover that we could "travel back in time" by using our imaginations to recreate creatures of the past. I think that because this idea and these sculptures were so new, the public had a much greater respect for them than we do now.  When Charles Knight was painting dinosaurs in the early 20th century, we were still discovering how dinosaurs really looked and behaved. There was still a huge interest in the extinct creatures, and Knight was revolutionary in his technique of looking at the skeletons of the dinosaurs and working his way out from there. I found it really interesting how he based his dinosaurs of off modern animals like elephants, perhaps reinforcing the idea that many of today's animals evolved from dinosaurs (source). However, once we had dinosaurs "figured out", the public lost interest in them. They wanted something new to discover, and the result of that attitude is the deterioration of dinosaur-mania in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The generations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries treat dinosaurs as something trivial and "old hat". Today's youth especially seems to be more taken by zombies, werewolves, and vampires than any dinosaur or other natural creature. I think this phenomenon is largely influenced by the media of today. The market is over-saturated with movies, books, and TV shows about mythical beings and the supernatural, but dinosaurs and natural history are noticeably absent. Another contributing factor to the decline in interest in dinosaurs could be how children are first introduced to them. W.J.T. Mitchell talks about how his first introduction to dinosaurs was very dull, and seen as "science" (source). I have to agree with him on that point. When I was in elementary school, we most definitely learned about dinosaurs on more than one occasion, but I honestly cannot recall what was taught to me. In schools, the subject of dinosaurs is very boring and dry, which is why people today aren't interested in them. If dinosaurs were seen as something really cool and amazing from the very beginning, I think that people today would have more respect for dinosaurs.

I grew up in San Diego, where the museums in Balboa Park have always been free on Tuesdays, so I spent a lot of time in museums as a kid. It was always fun to go the Natural History Museum and see the dinosaurs and other animals, but my favorite was always the train museum. Dinosaurs just didn't stand out for me. As I got a little older, I started seeing dinosaurs in movies. The first dinosaurs that I remember actually liking were in the movies Jurassic Park and PeeWee's Big Adventure. The Jurassic Park dinosaurs were scary and exciting to watch, and I think that the movie made dinosaurs and the research of dinosaurs seem really cool. That movie was almost like our generation's Crystal Palace, in that it showcased a new way to imagine dinosaurs. The idea that we could bring them back to life using science was similar to how the dinosaurs were brought back to life in sculpture form at the Crystal Palace. In PeeWee's Big Adventure, PeeWee goes to the Cabazon Dinosaurs, which I grew up seeing on trips to Palm Springs. While these are not real dinosaurs, they are similar in my mind to the sculptures of the Crystal Palace. When I saw these huge dinosaurs in the middle of the desert, I would imagine that they were still alive and this was their natural habitat. Since then, that image has always stood out in my mind, and I imagine that the Crystal Palace visitors felt the same way.