Hairy Museum of Natural History

A Brief Review of Offbeat Prehistory in Popular Culture

In a well-coordinated bit of publishing, National Geographic has followed up Thursday’s Nigersaurus announcements with its December 2007 issue featuring a spiky Dracorex hogwartsia glaring out from the cover, with the promise of “Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs” featured within. The article itself is titled “Extreme Dinosaurs,” and features a gallery of anatomical sketches and computer-generated recreations of fossil oddities such as the sailed-sauropod Amargasaurus, the giant-armed Deinocheirus, and, yes, the wide-mouthed Nigersaurus.

The National Geographic website has a slew of added content, including a gallery of the dinosaurs highlighted in the article, a critique of dinosaur art from previous issues, highlighting what’s changed in our understanding of dinosaurs, and an interview with article author John Updike. Over at Stones, Bones, and Things, National Geographic staffer Chris Sloan is holding a “Bizarre Dinosaur ‘Beauty’ Contest,” inviting readers to suggest their picks for the most unusual dinosaur ever discovered.

I’m glad to see National Geographic following in a grand tradition of pop-paleontology by bringing a handful of weird and wonderful dinosaurs to millions of readers this month. Ten years ago, a similar sentiment formed the core of the Hairy Museum of Natural History’s first web-based offering: each week (more or less), visitors to the HMNH could access a new online trading card in the Goofy Dinosaurs of the World series. The 45-card set came to a close in 1998, so the science and art is a bit dated, but you can still access the complete collection in the “back rooms” of this website.

Figure 1: A Photoshopped packet of GDOTW Trading Cards

With hundreds of millions of years of evolution to look back on, it should come as no surprise that plenty of other artists and writers continue to draw inspiration from the more mind-boggling forms revealed in the fossil record. While working on the Goofy Dinosaurs, I came across Ray Troll’s Strange Critters of the Deep, and the similarities between our two projects sparked a decade of conversations, collaboration, and comraderie. In 2001, the talented Luis Rey published his version of Extreme Dinosaurs, which included both obscure and familiar dinosaurs restored with his signature vibrant colors, dramatic ornamentation, and dynamic perspective. Artist Gary Staab is currently traveling an exhibit that covers the evolutionary gamut of goof called Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present. And over at the blog When Pigs Fly Returns, Zach Miller occasionally weighs in on all manner of Prehistoric Weirdness, including, most recently, a promising start to a new series of posts on unusual sauropods.

But this is by no means a recent phenomenon. One of my favorite books as a child was titled Prehistoric Monsters did the Strangest Things, published in 1974. This was part of a series of books (written by Leonora and Arthur Hornblow and illustrated by Michael K. Frith) about the strangest things done by different types of animals, but Prehistoric Monsters was the only one I read as a child, which served as my first introduction to such worthies as Diplocaulus, Glyptodon, and Paraceratherium (as “The Beast of Baluchistan”).

Figure 2: The cover of Prehistoric Monsters did the Strangest Things, by Leonora and Arthur Hornblow, 1974.

In 1948, A. Hyatt Verrill published Strange Prehistoric Animals and Their Stories, a charming volume that not only covers bizarre forms of the past, but also has chapters on “Sea Serpents and Loathly Worms”, “Fantastic Creations, Past and Present”, and “Monstrosities of Today”.

Figure 3: The title page of Strange Prehistoric Animals and Their Stories, by A. Hyatt Verrill, 1948.

The book was illustrated by the author, and while the restorations were not terribly accurate (even for their time), they do have a certain colorful personality:

Figure 4: Color Plate from Strange Prehistoric Animals and their World.

The earliest example of weird prehistory that I’ve come across dates back to the early years of popular paleontology in America. In 1897, William H. Ballou published a nine-page article in The Century magazine titled, “Strange Creatures of the Past,” which included reproductions of several early paintings by a young Charles R. Knight.

Figure 5: Detail from “Strange Creatures of the Past,” showing a serpentine Elasmosaurus painted by Charles R. Knight, 1897.

Cornell University Library has made the article (along with several years of The Century magazine) available to view online here.

Whether labeled as extreme, bizarre, goofy, or strange, the presentation of dinosaurs and other extinct animals as sensationally mind-boggling has a long, rich history. (I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface here, and I’d very much like to hear of any other examples I’ve missed—especially from outside the U.S.) It certainly deserves its own place alongside the other well-worn tools of the paleontological promoter: Prehistoric Animals as Monsters, Paleontologists at Work, Prehistoric Animals as Living Animals, New Discovery overturns Old Theory, Prehistoric Animals as Collectibles, etc.

Ultimately though, “strange” only exists in the eye of the beholder. Simply because an animal appears unusual to us as Holocene hominids doesn’t make it intrinsically weird. As Smithsonian paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues is quoted in the National Geographic article, “In evolution nothing is really bizarre. Every structure makes perfectly good sense to the organism. In the case of extinct animals the challenge is to identify what the purpose might have been.”

Still, I’m very glad that, somewhere along the evolutionary twists and turns that led to Homo sapiens, we developed some capacity to understand, admire, and be amazed by them.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Paleo-Pop.