At the moment a hungry public is gorging on yet another chunk of dinosaur flesh, unofficially known as Jurassic Park II. What can explain the success of its multibillion-dollar, multimedia franchise? In part, our fascination with death and resurrection: though dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, people are entranced by the impossible dream of the great beasts’ return. And in part, the fascination lies in the dinosaurs’ being truly great beasts, in their numbering among them fearful predators of a kind now absent from the planet. Of course, paleontologists like to remind us that strictly speaking, dinosaurs aren’t dead. The pigeon perched on the gutter, the starling yakking in the bushes, the finch pecking at the feeder--they are all dinosaurs as much as humans are mammals.
Somehow, though, that message doesn’t really take. When we think of dinosaurs, we don’t think of them as a clan of species all related ...
