The appeal of some prehistoric animals over others

One thing that puzzles me is the arbitary selection of certain prehistoric animals as "cool" and others as being put aside. For example, mammoths (essencially elephants covered in fur) are often considered "awesome", yet far more unique and powerfull things like Gorgonops usually only receive a pacing glance; lithornithids, which are essencially flying proto-ostriches, don't have as much publicity, despiste being about as unique as mammoths.

Is this mostly due to them being what we are familiarised too, or are things like champsosaurs, Thylacosmilus and pachycephalosaurs genuinely boring, mundane things (despiste nothing akin to them being alive today)?

edited 5th Mar '11 2:23:36 PM by Mullerornis

I blame the media for deciding on what to make popular in the first place.

^ Pretty much. Dilophosaurus is a case in point.

See: Small Taxonomy Pools, Stock Dinosaurs

I think it's also because "mammoth" is easy to pronounce while someone looking at "lithornithid" is going to go "WTF??".

Plus a lot of the big names were some of the earlier ones discovered so they had more time to move into the public perception. Heck raptors weren't really well known until Jurassic Park.

Hence why we call them "raptors", which wasn't their name before AFAIK. Scientifically, a raptor is a bird, but "dromeosaurids" is too much of a mouthful so "raptors" has stuck.

That's my Small Reference Pools for you, still could be worst. My cousin only found out that dinosaurs actually existed in her late teens.

edited 5th Mar '11 4:08:48 PM by joeyjojo

Blame the media.

Call something "Tyrannosaurus" - tyrant lizard - and you'll pretty much guarantee it'll have an enduring appeal in media.

Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops was shown fighting since the earliest time people could make model fights on movies, that's why both are so famous, compared to Allosaurus and Stegosaurus for example.

Allosaurus and Stegosaurus are both pretty famous, though.

Some of them had better PR people.

This is a huge problem to paleontology.

They still aren't. The deinonychus has been an unfortunate victim of mislabeling. Even ignoring the things we've learned about dinosaurs since then, if you were to show an actual velociraptor to the layman, he'd be like, "Oh, I remember these things swarming that military guy in the second movie!"

Yep.

I still feel we need more Miocene in pop culture. A 1 ton flesh-eating hippo that could run at 30 miles per hour? A 700-pound mix between a wolf, bear and lion? A giant bear-sized dog? A wolverine the size of a leopard? The biggest crocodile to ever live? The predator that took the sabretooth design to its limit? A specialist meat-eating bear that could chase you down like a dog? A giant killer bird that ran at 60 miles per hour, stood 12 feet tall and wielded a 60cm beak? A giant hyena confirmed to hunt rhinos? The biggest venomous snake ever, a viper the size of a very large boa constrictor? A flesh-eating dolphin with a BFS on its head? Largest flying birds ever? And to top it all off, the largest shark ever that was also the ultimate (in size, efficiency, world domination and successfulness) predator the world has ever seen?

Why that period-perhaps the most predator-packed time period ever-has never been shown in any documentaries is beyond me.

EDIT: add the largest post-KT land predator, the largest creodonts and a giant killer whale to the list, just to make a point.

edited 1st May '15 8:03:42 PM by Bk-notburgerking

Yeah, it just has to do with movie writers not knowing a lot about taxonomy.

It's mostly the overhyped T. Rex responsible for this. Fanboys too. T. Rex wasn't as specialized (and only as strong as) a Spinosaurus nor did it kill prey larger than itself.

Sounds about right. The Tyrannosaurus captured our imaginations as kids, thanks in large part to its phenomenal depiction in JP. It's the Batman of dinosaurs.

When you get right down to it, that's your answer. Why the appeal of some prehistoric animals over others? Because Jurassic Park.

edited 2nd May '15 8:36:06 AM by TobiasDrake

T. rex really doesn't deserve its name or its fame.....it's only claim is having the strongest bite of any strictly terrestrial predator and even then this is a double-edged sword.

T Rex was famous long before JP. Part of its success is simple time for osmosis; it was among the first large predatory dinosaurs to be reconstructed, and was made into the poster boy for pop paleontology.

There's also the fact that as a large biped with an enormous jaw, it is unlike any animal alive today. Same applies to Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Pteranodon, the plesiosaurs and to some extent the duck-bills. Whereas many "Giant X" mammals since K-T have been just that, larger versions of modern animals. Impressive but not as striking or intriguing.

Jurassic Park took already popular dinosaurs. The ones it made popular, or at least brought to the spotlight, were raptors and the Spinosaraus .

However it popularised Tyrannosaur as a low-backed biped, instead of the stumbling tripod it tended to be before. This was known since the seventies but was not reflected in most dinosaur illustrations. A pity they aren't following up by giving the theropods feathers in the latest film.

Yeah, there's a lot of things it would be nice to see updated in Jurassic World. I can respect not changing their look - even in the book, they weren't supposed to be 100% accurate as a consequence of their hybrid genetics; with the franchise already possessing a built-in justification for Science Marches On, making them consistent to previous films does take precedence over consistency to actual dinos - but I would bring everyone I know to that movie if it contained this scene.

• CHRIS PRATT: These were my favorites since I was a kid. I love veloci-
• SCIENTIST: Deinonychus.
• CHRIS PRATT: What?
• SCIENTIST: That's a deinonychus.
• CHRIS PRATT: The file said velociraptor.
• SCIENTIST: Yes, but unlike the people who wrote those files, we employ actual scientists, not college kids who can't even spell Stegosaurus.

edited 3rd May '15 10:59:28 AM by TobiasDrake

I'd imagine Chris Pratt's character would know the name of the things he's training.

Worst thing about Tyrannosaurus? Authors of books on paleontology keep reinforcing the hype. I've got books written in the last few years, and some of them are awful about it. I've got one book, which gives most dinosaurs a single page. T.Rex gets five, most of which are spent apologising for the fact that it's not the largest land predator anymore, and trying to give reasons why it's still "better" than Giganotosaurus, Charcharodontosaurus, or any of the other large terrestrial carnivores. It's like watching Batman fanboys talk about how he could totally beat up Superman.

I suspect some of it is because, sadly, Tyrannosaurus is the dinosaur that got a lot of scientists interested in paleontology in the first place.