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How else to celebrate Children’s Day than with an article about children and their often very positive relationship to a certain very popular group of Mesolithic reptiles. About, that it is good to encourage children’s interest in dinosaurs, I have already written on my blog (although I must admit that my seven – year – old daughter is still winning Disney princesses). Why dinosaurs are popular and important for scientific knowledge however, we already know. But we should definitely stop at one interesting scientific work, who took the tyrannosaur to the paschal, drawing and a representative sample of the young population. The result is an interesting study of why we usually draw representatives of a species Tyrannosaurus rex completely wrong.[1] Whether they are five-year-olds, high school students or seniors, in the vast majority of cases, their likenesses of the “king of predatory dinosaurs” are desperately outdated and correspond to ideas from about the middle of the 20th century.[2] The tyrannosaurus is often depicted in an upright, vertical position with its tail just above the ground or even pulled across the ground. Indeed, the original reconstruction of a giant predatory dinosaur from the past is so deeply rooted that it could not be removed even by the influence of popular films. as Jurassic Park and its continuation? In 2013, three scientists from the Institute of Paleontological Research at Cornell University in Ithaca tried to answer this question. Paleontology professor Warren Allmon and his colleagues came up with this unusual research task after many years of observing science students how they often misrepresent the iconic dinosaur. Instead of horizontal posture and a dynamic, moving body frame, outdated reconstructions with an upright figure and a seemingly cumbersome body structure predominated. A newer idea of the anatomy and physiology of large theropods it has been accepted since the 1970s and since the 1990s it has also manifested itself in skeletal specimens in most museums.[3] The products of popular culture also have a significant influence in this respect, which, from toy shops to blockbusters, usually already depict predatory dinosaurs in the spirit of this newer view. Of course, this is not the case in all cases, but better toys and documents have been fully respecting this rule for almost thirty years. So how is it possible that most people, including students of biology or even paleontology, misunderstand the anatomy of a popular dinosaur to such an extent?
Today, we can hardly imagine an exposed tyrannosaur skeleton with a vertical spine, at least in the case of really high-quality reconstructions. Here is a famous skeletal specimen AMNH 5027 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, renovated in the 1990s. Credit: Evolutionnumber9; Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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According to the researchers, the answer is a kind of cultural inertia, which here represents a practically insurmountable barrier to thought progress. The idea of a tyrannosaur as an upright creature, towering six meters high above the surrounding countryside, was so firmly imprinted in our consciousness by Paleoume artists, rubber models, chicken nuggets and children’s coloring books that even three decades after the remake of the famous skeleton of a tyrannosaurus specimen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to a better position, this erroneous collective concept was not overcome.[4] After all, it can be a bit related to our own anatomy. We are upright primates with a markedly vertical spine, so the idea of an upright tyrannosaur is perhaps closer to us than the more correct concept of horizontal posture. Allmon himself had his students draw a tyrannosaurus since 2000, having to rely only on their memory. About 63 to 72% of them, ie about two thirds of all, drew a predatory dinosaur with a spine at an angle of 50 to 60%, in accordance with the already obsolete idea of posture. Because it was a growing generation long after the “Dinosaur Renaissance”, this fact is even more strange.[5] In the vast majority of cases after the year 2000, popular science books and programs depict the tyrannosaur more or less correctly, so Allmon and colleagues came up with another probable “culprit.” According to them, these are mainly toys and children’s shows, in the United States of America mainly the character of the pink tyrannosaurus Barney, the green tyrannosaurus from the popular Toy Story, the already mentioned chicken nuggets for children and other similar products. Therefore, children become aware of the incorrect form of the tyrannosaurus at an early age and usually do not get rid of it even after watching the film Jurassic Parks or reading new books about dinosaurs. Research by Allmon and his colleagues thus re-established, among other things, the fact that pupils and students enter the educational process with certain of their own expectations and ideas, which they often acquired at pre-school age. These usually unconscious judgments about the surrounding reality can be helpful to their learning process, but they can also make it significantly more difficult. And this must always be taken into account in the educational process – at least as much as the fact horizontal posture of the species Tyrannosaurus rex!
Written for DinosaurusBlog a Donkey.
Short Summary in English: An interesting study, published in 2013, revealed that the concept of Tyrannosaurus rex body anatomy in students is mostly outdated and obscured. Children and adults alike are drawing it in an outdated upright posture most of the time, despite the fact that more accurate T. rex body posture is known for over forty years.
Links:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/02/blame-barney-students-perception-t-rex-outdated
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/t-rex-doesnt-look-way-you-think-it-looks/
https://www.livescience.com/27071-t-rex-anatomy-correct-posture.html
[1] Ross, R.; Duggan-Haas, D.; Allmon, W. (2013). The posture of Tyrannosaurus rex: Why do student views lag behind the science? Journal of Geoscience Education. 61: 145-160.
[2] Breithaupt, B. H.; Southwell, E. H.; Matthews, N. A. (2005). In Celebration of 100 years of Tyrannosaurus rex: Manospondylus gigas, Ornithomimus grandis, and Masterful Dynamosaurus, the Earliest Discoveries of Tyrannosaurus rex in the West. Abstracts with Programs; 2005 Salt Lake City Annual Meeting. Geological Society of America. 37 (7): 406.
[3] Baker, R.T. (1972). Anatomical and ecological evidence of endothermy in dinosaurs. Nature. 238 (5359): 81–85. doi: 10.1038/238081a0
[4] Paul, G. S. (2000). A Quick History of Dinosaur Art. In Paul, Gregory S. (ed.). The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs. New York: St. Martin’s Press (str. 107–112). ISBN 978-0-312-26226-6.
[5] Glut, D. F.; Brett-Surman, M. K. (1997). Dinosaurs and the media. The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (str. 675–706). ISBN 978-0-253-33349-0.
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