Poster for Camille Flammarion’s Le monde avant la création de l’homme (‘The world before man’s creation’), 1856

Flammarion’s book was a work of popular science, and sought to awe its readers as much as inform them. Although the rather overweight dinosaur here borrows heavily from the reconstructions made about fifteen years earlier by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ for the Crystal Palace exhibition, the image of a dinosaur standing next a high building looking into its top floors would prove compelling enough to last.

A pivotal element in the portrayal of dinosaurs has always been their size – and, often, little else. The (literal) otherworldiness of these animals came to light even more when they were placed in surroundings that were familiar to us. The contrast between such huge, unwieldy and chaotic animals, and our own comfortable and controlled surroundings would increase our awe of them (and, of course, our fear).

In fact, the very first ‘real’ dinosaur movie was based on this theme. In Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) Winsor McKay shows us an animal who drinks lakes and eats trees, but is not unfriendly or agressive. That would change rapidly. Harry Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925) already features dinosaurs that seem set on making poor humans’ lives as miserable as possible. Likewise the Japanese Godzilla series had a dinosaur of sorts (enhanced with fire-breathing and nuclear abilities) wreak havoc to entire cities from the early 1950s onwards. And more recently the Jurassic Park series of films adopted (one might say: copied) the same approach.But what makes all of these portrayals so compelling is still, as with Flammarion, the confrontation between the ‘other’ and our own, daily experience. Godzilla’s tail destroys our comfortable surroundings, in Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus rex chases a vehicle no modern animal would be able to chase. It’s the juxtaposition of scale and unpredictability of the animals, and our estrangement with what we hold as obvious.

As we have seen, the habit of emphasising a dinosaur’s size by having it peep into a high-rise building therefore dates back to at least 1856. However, the picture from 1898 below (like Gertie would later be, a product of the Hearst press) probably portrays its most famous application, also because it sparked off Andrew Carnegie’s interest in (and subsequent sponsoring of) the excavation of dinosaurs in the American West.

The New York Journal and Advertiser, front page, 11 December 1898.

When it ate, it filled a stomach large enough to hold three elephants

A ‘Brontosaurus giganteus’ is seen peeping into the 11th floor (sorry, that’s the 10th floor) of the New York Life building. The article is accompanied by typically hysterical Hearstianisms and a level of factual inaccuracy that would become typical for press attempts to cover scientific subjects. The skull, for instance, although portrayed as the plant-eating Brontosaurus, is in fact Ceratosaurus nasicornis, a very nasty-looking thing indeed that doubtless was deemed more impressive than the rather undaunting Brontosaurus skull (which in fact was Camarasaurus, but let’s not confuse the issue even further). For good measure, click here in order to see the entire page*.

The way in which the cover artist for Flammarion’s book was copied (this is not the only instance) by Hearst’s artist is something we see happening over and over with reconstructions of extinct life. Below is another example, this time (from left to right) an amalgam of a scale comparison from The Century (USA; 1904), a cover which Charles Knight created for Scientific American in 1907**, and what The Mentor World Traveller (UK) made of both in 1922. Knight’s adaptation of the stance of Diplodocus suggested in the Century reconstruction seems quite clear, and with the Mentor re-inserting the human figure Knight took out, the reconstruction seems to have come full circle again.***

*Source: Tom Rea (2001), Bone Wars. The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), page 31.

** Much of this issue was devoted to the donation by the American Museum of Natural History to the Frankfurt Senckenberg museum of a partial skeleton of Diplodocus longus.

*** I haven’t been able to ascertain whether Knight originally painted this as a size comparison as well, and if the Mentor used an original painting or added the human figure themselves (which, considering the difference in style, seems obvious). I’d be grateful for further information on this point.