At the moment a hungry public is gorging on yet another chunk of dinosaur flesh, unofficially known as Jurassic Park II. What can explain the success of its multibillion-dollar, multimedia franchise? In part, our fascination with death and resurrection: though dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, people are entranced by the impossible dream of the great beasts’ return. And in part, the fascination lies in the dinosaurs’ being truly great beasts, in their numbering among them fearful predators of a kind now absent from the planet. Of course, paleontologists like to remind us that strictly speaking, dinosaurs aren’t dead. The pigeon perched on the gutter, the starling yakking in the bushes, the finch pecking at the feeder--they are all dinosaurs as much as humans are mammals.
Somehow, though, that message doesn’t really take. When we think of dinosaurs, we don’t think of them as a clan of species all related by evolutionary descent. We think of them in the etymological sense, as the terrible lizards. Some, like Tyrannosaurus, were terrible in size; others, like Velociraptor--the swift marauding costar of the first Jurassic Park--made up for a relatively small stature with an alien predatory grace. Velociraptor in fact was terror incarnate, a prime example of the general dinosaur type whose disappearance we so mourn: a fast-running biped elegantly fitted for carnivory, one that could run down prey, disable it with slashing, clawed feet, tear at it with razor-sharp teeth, and hold it down with arms to finish it off. A crow hardly makes up for its loss.
Small wonder, then, the broad appeal of dinosaur resurrection tales. Yet to tell such a story, you don’t need a lab of special-effects tech-heads or a coffee bar of script doctors. All you need are a few bones sitting at the bottom of a Florida river: they suggest that a strikingly dinosaurian mode of existence really was resurrected once, by a group of birds, no less. And like the original version, the sequel succeeded admirably. Indeed, it continued playing until quite recently.
