Book Review: Starring T. Rex!
For several years I have thought that it would be a fun project to write a book about dinosaurs in the movies. Unfortunately, Jose Luis Sanz has beaten me in this quest with the publication of his book, Starring T. Rex! Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture.
Sanz divides Starring T. Rex! into two parts. The first part of the book introduces us to the study of paleontology since 1677, when Robert Plot, the first curator of the Oxford Ashmolean Museum published his Natural History of Oxfordshire and made the first published reference to a dinosaur femur (although at the time he believed that it belonged to a giant human). The second part of the book is concerned with analyzing the structure of the myths surrounding dinosaurs and how they have been portrayed in books, film, and comics.
Sanz briefly discusses the books Voyages et Aventures du Docteur Festus (Journeys and Adventures of Doctor Festus) (1833) by French novelist Rodolph Toepffer and Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) (1864) by Jules Verne. In both of these books, the characters discovery of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons living at the poles in the case of Toepffer's Doctor Festus, and an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur living inside the Earth in the case of Verne's Professor Lindenbrock).
Sanz, however, credits the publication of The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries) in 1912 as the novel that created the myth or theme of the "lost world," a place unknown to scientists in which animals believed to be extinct still thrived. Doyle apparently wrote the novel as part of a bet, to prove that the creation of new types of adventure novels was still possible.
Soon after the publication of Doyle's The Lost World, the first dinosaur appeared on film in the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur (other films about prehistoric life had been made before Gertie, but they had portrayed prehistoric humans, not dinosaurs). Gertie was also the first dinosaur to be portrayed as a good-natured pet, another theme in dinosaur-oriented movies.
The film version of Doyle's The Lost World was released in 1925, and the dinosaurs created by Doyle are transformed from bit players to major starring characters. The Lost World is also notable as a film in that the artist Marcel Delgado who created the dinosaurs took great pains to portray the dinosaurs as accurately as possible according to the paleontological knowledge at the time.
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