Why Dinosaurs Matter by Kenneth Lacovara

Author:Kenneth Lacovara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Leaping Laelaps is a prescient portrayal of dinosaurs, the likes of which would not be seen again for another hundred years. The painting is imbued with the Darwinian view of life: a competitive and savage struggle for survival. In Knight’s scene, there will clearly be a winner and a loser, or possibly two losers. (I think we can rule out a win-win situation.) Either way, the ability of these two individuals to transmit their genes into the future lies at stake. Why are they battling? Knight leaves that up to us to contemplate. Combat over a mate, perhaps? They might be laying mortal claims upon a territory. They might be embroiled in a deadly argument of ownership over a particularly succulent duckbill carcass lying just beyond on the forest floor. Whatever the cause, we see in this struggle the incremental functioning of the existing causes, mindlessly driving evolution toward increasing fitness.

Thinking back on the state of human understanding just a few hundred years prior, the Hutton-Lyell-Darwin revolution overhauled not just our view of the world but also our view of ourselves. Was the Earth not created for us and sovereignty over it given to us? Was our place upon this planet not inevitable, not foreordained? Are we truly no more than a late-sprouting twig on the vast and bountiful tree of life?

A seventeenth-century farmer turning up a fossil shark tooth might have pondered the mysterious, mystical forces that spontaneously generated such a sublimely shaped object, or he might have silently recited a little prayer in his head, giving thanks for the miraculous handiwork of an all-powerful creator. But he would not have seen the biological thread tying it to him. He would not have meditated on the antiquity of the object and experienced the humility that the contemplation of deep time so often brings to those who consider it. It’s stunning to think that our species, related to every other living thing on the planet, and the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, on a 4.5-billion-year-old world, had convinced itself of just the opposite. We had told ourselves that this planet was our temporary domicile and that we were created, quite recently, as something apart from it—special beings, endowed with a right of dominion over all that we saw.

By the end of the nineteenth century, though, paleontology, geology, and evolutionary biology had forged a new way for humanity to understand itself and to contextualize the world around us. By removing us from center stage in the drama that is Earth history, we began to see ourselves as part of nature, as part of this world. For some, this view is unsettling, ego bruising, and out of line with deeply cherished beliefs. For many others, though, the discovery of deep time, evolution through natural selection, and common descent brings with it a sense of connectedness to all other living things and a humbling feeling of smallness of being. Within the incomprehensible ocean of time, now revealed to us, our entire

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