Gosh, I have no idea when or how I became interested in dinosaurs. It was a
long time ago, I know that much. My mom theorizes that she got me a book on dinosaurs when I was very young which sparked my obsession, but if that is indeed the case, we’ve long forgotten what book it was. I
think I was into dinosaurs before I watched
The Land Before Time, but that movie definitely had an immeasurable influence on my love of them. My favorite species back then were
Tyrannosaurus,
Struthiomimus, and
Pteranodon (not a dinosaur, as I knew even then, but always associated with them). Naturally, Petrie and Sharptooth were my favorite characters in LBT, and you can bet that I was ecstatic years later when I discovered LBT II with its lovable egg stealers.
The first dinosaur documentary I ever remember seeing was a 1992 PBS series called "The Dinosaurs!" (the second episode of which can be found
here on Youtube), which contained several animated sequences of various Mesozoic creatures, which remain some of my favorite ever documentary depictions of prehistoric life. (
This one, by far one of the most memorable to me, featuresóin order of appearanceóa pair of
Herrerasaurus, a small cynodont, a rhynchosaur, and a
Saurosuchus. Another clip, which I can't find online at the moment, showed) Sadly I broke the tape on which the series was recorded, after which my parents bought me another documentary on VHS, 1985's "Dinosaur!", which I didn't enjoy as much as its predecessor, but nonetheless satisfied my dinosaur documentary needs for the next few years. It contained stop-motion sequences of
Brontosaurus/
Apatosaurus browsing on trees, a
Monoclonius (now
Centrosaurus) being stalked and attacked by a
Tyrannosaurus, and a family of
Hadrosaurus whose nest is raided by a
Struthiomimus, which eats several eggs before being chased off by the parents (who, in possibly the most unintentionally[?] hilarious moment in the whole show, mournfully inspect their now mostly destroyed nest, realize that there's one egg that can't be accounted for, andóI swearóturn and "yell" furiously at the retreating
Struthiomimus as it struts off with the missing egg, presumably cackling villainously under its breath). Afterwards the poor
Struthiomimus is ambushed and killed by a pair of
Deinonychus (which are not only anachronistic to the time period, but get their name pronounced "DINE-o-NICK-us" by the narrator :huh:). Ironically, we lost the video a few years later, and afterwards rediscovered “The Dinosaurs!” at a college library, which promptly returned to being the most regularly watched dinosaur documentary in our household.
Surprisingly enough, I didn't watch
Jurassic Park until several years later, though at some point my dad recorded a documentary on the making of the movie, which became yet another of our family’s frequently re-watched videos. The program featured most of
Jurassic Park’s major dinosaur sequences, and as a result, the movie itself made less of an impression on me when I finally watched it than it probably would have otherwise, though it nonetheless became one of my obsessions. I was fully aware of most of the well-known errors in the movie even before I saw it, but I loved it so much that I depicted JP-style dinosaursóparticularly my favorite: the frill-necked venom-spitting mini-
Dilophosaurusóin many of the drawings and stories I made for the next few years (not that I ever claimed these to be scientifically accurate).
A new chapter in my dinosaur obsession opened in 2000 or 2001 (I can’t remember which), when I received the DVD and companion book of
Walking With Dinosaurs for my birthday. Unsurprisingly, I loved it, and it became my new favorite dinosaur show, though ironically the episodes that made the greatest impression on me were the ones that focused on non-dinosaurs: “Cruel Sea” (marine reptiles, especially
Liopleurodon) and “Giant of the Skies” (pterosaurs, mainly
Ornithocheirus). For a time, I considered WWD to be my premier dinosaur resource: the most accurate and up-to-date documentary around. That turned out to be a huge mistake.
It makes me feel even stupider that I was aware that much of the behavior of the creatures in the show was conjectural, but assumed the physical appearance and size statistics of many of them to be scientifically accurate. It was only later that I found out that the sizes of many of the creatures, particularly
Liopleurodon and
Ornithocheirus, were grossly exaggerated; the result of dubious estimates of fragmentary fossil remains that often had not yet been scientifically described. (Annoyingly, I’m still finding books that state
Liopleurodon is stated to have been 80 feet long. I’m not too surprised that I was fooled, but the authors of these books, some of whom are scientists themselves?
). Over time, as I continued to watch dinosaur documentaries, I realized that many of them were doing the same thing as
Walking With Dinosaurs (sometimes worse): portraying outdated, poorly researched, or downright inaccurate data (and sometimes pure speculation) as fact, and overdramatizing their creatures at the expense of scientific accuracy and often plain realism. As a result, my interest in dinosaur documentaries began to wane, and sadly I don’t watch them much anymore.
(There are a few shows, such as
Dinosaur Revolution, that I’ve heard good things about and am curious to see, but so far I haven’t gotten around to it.) On that note, I find it a little disturbing that few, if any, of the dinosaur documentaries of the past decade have had all their facts straight (and these aren’t facts that have been overturned by the onward march of paleontology since the documentaries were produced; I’m talking things that science already knows about that’s
still being portrayed incorrectly).
Okay…this was more of a history of my love of dinosaurs (mainly my experiences with dinosaur films) than a story of how I first became interested in them.
I guess I’ll stop here.
