The Dinosaur Rennaisance

Though they have been larger-than-life figures in the human imagination for the better part of two centuries, the image of the dinosaurian class has been repainted with very different colors since the 1960s.

Midway through the 19th Century Sir Richard Owen depicted Igauanodon as an enormous and brutishly ugly lizard, its thumb-spike planted firmly on a crusty reptilian nose.

By the opening decades of the 20th Century, the increased number of finds, particularly coming from the American West, had added greatly to the scientific and popular perceptions of dinosaurs and their great diversity, but they were still widely imagined as plodding lizards. Ungainly dragons at best, dragging their tails behind them like a ball-and-chain. Several generations of American schoolchildren were brought up envisioning Brachiosaurus hiding underwater and Tyrannosaurus waddling after his 'trachodont' prey in something of a clumsy parody of the human gait.

The so-called 'Dinosaur Renaissance' was ushered in largely through the discovery of Deinonychus by John Ostrom in 1964. The first of several dozen species of deinonychosaurs ('raptors') to be discovered to date, this animal was nothing like the traditional image of its kin. Its form was light-weight and even bird-like, its tail was an erect counterbalance to its head, and its eyes, hands, and feet were those of a rapacious, active hunter. Above all else, it only stood as tall as a large dog.

Many later discoveries encouraged further re-evaluation of traditional imagery of dinosaurs. These included further specimens of Deinonychus that suggested social, pack-hunting behavior, as well as the famous discovery of Maiasaura - the 'Good Mother Lizard'. Maiasaura, a medium-sized American hadrosaurid, was apparently not only a herding animal, but one that put great care into guarding its nest and arranging its eggs in preparation for their hatching. Subsequent discoveries would suggest this was the case with many dinosaurs, even 'land-sharks' like Allosaurus.

Today's children and teenagers are being brought up with an extremely different envisioning of dinosaurs than their grandparents' generation. Since the mid-1990s, the prolific bonebeds of China have yielded evidence for a variety of theropods who had feathers or feather-like body covering, leading enthusiastic scientists to declare that, far from being extinct, dinosaurs live on in today's birds.