1842: Dinosaur - The book of science

Dinosaur
Pet dinosaurs
The perspective of time
Commentary

Dinosaur

Richard Owen was said to be ambitious,
envious, “arrogant,”
“untruthful and dishonest”
and yet
as a great publicist, he knew how to promote
his anti-evolutionary views—
—by accepting the known facts
and making them his own.
To distinguish the fossilized relics
of Iguanodon and Megolasaurus
from surviving reptiles
Owens coined the term “dinosaur.”
Owens worked with artist Benjamin Hawkins
to construct a Dinosauria theme park
featuring huge dinosaur models of iron and concrete.
The inside of the Iguanodon was big enough
to host a dinner for leading scientists
on the day of the grand opening by Queen Victoria.

Pet dinosaurs

Small plastic Tyrannosaurus Rexes
terrorize Kens and Barbies
delighting small boys everywhere.
Rexy stomps up the halls
to munch on sisters’ ankles
leaving an imaginary trail
of blood and gore.

The perspective of time

History mocks fools and great minds
convinced of their own greatnesses.
Things larger than life grow smaller
as they slip through the narrow neck
of the hourglass of time
in which each tiny grain of sand
is convinced of its own greatness
and the modernity of its own.

We should be more fascinated by the fascinations of our children. Our cultural obsession with dinasaurs began with commercial and philosophical motives.

Owens was a widely respected comparative anatomist and palaeontologist and greatly opposed to the idea that one species could be transmuted into another, as claimed by Lamarck, and to evolution by natural selection as claimed by Charles Darwin.