The Last Dinosaur Book

W. J. T. Mitchell begins The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (University of Chicago Press, 1998) by hypothesizing a post-human future, when visitors from another galaxy — imagined as erect bipedal reptiles — arrive on earth and attempt to reconstruct human life from the fossil remains. To these visitors,…

Dinomania

“To make sense of phenomena like dinomania, we need to understand ‘dinosaur’ broadly as a construction in which palaeontologists are not the sole arbiters.” (p. 238) Boria Sax is a professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College and is known for his writing on human-animal relations. In Dinomania: Why We Love, Fear…

Articulating Dinosaurs

Brian Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. One area of Noble’s research is the anthropology of science, techniques and expertise. Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (University of Toronto Press, 2016) explores how scientific knowledge and public practices intersect to articulate dinosaur natures. Noble begins by…

Palaeocast

I came across the podcast Palaeocast through Episode 30: Palaeoart which featured an interview with Julius Csotonyi, two-time winner of the Lanzendorf-National Geographic PaleoArt Prize, awarded by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. I listened to that and a few other episodes in a similar vein: Episode 80: Paleocreations, which featured an interview with paleoartist Robert…