Hello and welcome! This is the 75th issue of Place. Today’s newsletter centres around a topic that may throw you off if we spell it out here, so we’re going to keep you waiting a couple more scrolls. But we can say this: what does the discovery of things from the distant past do for the present? And what does it mean to bring a Place drenched in possibility, into your everyday life? Read on for more.
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In some parts of the world, monsters appear in plain sight. Their remains push up through the surface of dry cracked plains, where rock rises out of the ground in forlorn shapes, swooping red and orange. These are places that are fertile to the imagination. Possibility dwells in the shadows beneath craggy overhangs, and at times, it even feels like those monsters, dead and gone as they may be, are watching you.
There are not many places that are this treasure-laden, not many places that make us step carefully, or keep our eyes peeled to the ground in case of what we may see there. But badlands are one of them.
Badlands, forms of which exist all over the word, came to be known by this name in English through a rough translation of a French description of the terrain. As colonists expanded their reach across North America, such areas were deemed ‘bad land to cross’ because of their diving canyons and swirling hoodoos – rock formations that emerge from the ground like sublime pillars, often resembling some sort of an odd shaped squire wearing a hat.
On appearance alone, badlands conjure the possibility of otherworldly happenings. They seem naturally in-human, and devoid of life as we know it, vibrating with the energy of something unknown. But indeed, life is here, and at its most defining intersection: that of death.
So discovered Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who, at 26 years old, embarked on an expedition for the Canadian Geological Society, prospecting for coal in the badlands of Alberta in 1883. Tyrell was climbing a steep rock face when he came upon something curious, something that was definitely not coal. It was smooth, and yellowish-orange, and it stood out from the duller rocks around it. He was, unbeknownst to him, looking at a fossilised bone of a creature that was at that point, still vastly undiscovered, shrouded in myth and legend. It was part of the skull of a dinosaur.
The word dinosaur immediately conjures visions and gut feelings; from cringe and kitsch, to fascination and nostalgia. Most of us can remember a time that we were taken in by the thought of their existence – likely as children, or on our first viewing of Jurassic Park. And while the tackiness of paleoart (the practice of drawing dinosaurs), and legions of plastic figurines that dot toy aisles can turn many of us off from them in adulthood, they remain the most culturally explosive field of science. You may not have wanted to be a palaeontologist when you were young, but there’s a good chance you at least knew what a palaeontologist was.
I can’t remember a time when I wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I have always romanticised the idea of finding something, stumbling upon a mysterious looking shape that would turn out to be something remarkable. That feeling is no greater than when I visit badlands provincial park in Alberta, a few hours away from where I live – the place where Joseph Burr Tyrrell found his first Tyrannosaurus skull over a century ago, where a subsequent dinosaur museum was built and named after him, and from whence, year after year, headlines like this emerge:
“12-year-old finds rare dinosaur fossil.”
There are a myriad of scientific discoveries made every day – many which would arguably affect our daily lives much more than the study of dinosaur bones – news of which is barely articulated past niche scientific circles. And yet, dinosaur discoveries in Alberta ring out loud over the radio at the top of the news hour, and weave their way into conversations around the dinner table.
What underlies our obsession with these relics? What is it about them, and the places that they are found, that captivates us, no matter how begrudgingly? When the boy in the headline, called Nathan, found his dinosaur bone, he said to the news crews that interviewed him that hot afternoon, “I just couldn’t believe I was looking at a real live monster.”
Before palaeontology as a Western field of science existed, people all over the world had already come across dinosaur bones, and constructed their own beliefs about them. In China, they were believed to be the remnants of dragons, perpetuating old tales and motifs in Chinese visual art. In North America, indigenous people thought that the fossilised footprints of dinosaurs were the footsteps of a mighty creature they dubbed Thunderbird, who made it into creation stories and fables. And once ‘dinomania’ caught hold of Victorian audiences, conjurings of the skeletal remains became no less grand. Early paleoart depicted ferocious beasts with giant teeth tearing each other apart, underscoring the genre of gothic horror that had already grabbed hold of society.
In my own memories, dinosaurs took the place of wolves and bears as figures in my nightmares. Monsters – like Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and Frankenstein – they became. But unlike this latter cast of characters however, I was confident that dinosaurs, however unreal they seemed, did at one point exist.
German philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote that the civilian preoccupation with dinosaurs is a ‘collective projection of the monstrous total state’ and that, ‘people prepare themselves for its terrors by familiarising themselves with gigantic images’. It's here then that dinosaurs straddle a unique line of both the fantastic and the terribly devastating.
In one view, they are vessels for wonder and discovery, however macabre a story they tell. At their worst they are projections of our deepest fears - that which we know are ominously hurtling towards us, that we are just not ready to face. But beyond what they symbolise, theirs is a demise that surely echoes perceptions of our own apocalyptic end. In this truth, they are brought out of the realm of fantastical storytelling and back firmly to the ground, nestled in their hardened graves.
In a recent episode of the podcast Ologies, palaeontologist Dr. Michael Habib, notes that, while there admittedly some impractical notions for studying dinosaurs, there is also a very real, applicable reasoning: “If you want to know what goes down when global atmospheric energy or average surface temperature changes very rapidly, you need to go into the fossil record,” he says. “This shit has happened before.”
Palaeontology isn’t technically just the study of dinosaurs. The word comes from the Latin word for old (‘paleo’) and being (‘on’), meaning that contextually, it's the study of old beings, of life in the past. Our cultural interpretations of dinosaurs, for better or worse, do make it difficult for us to visualise them for what they were at their core - creatures that thrived in diverse ecosystems, before meeting a tragic end.
Places like badlands can indeed take on a nature of the spectacular, but they are also places of deep memory. Where lush rainforest, deep rivers, and lakes, instead of eroded metamorphic rock, used to cover the earth. Where the bones of species long dead give clues to how they lived and who among them perished.
At one point in scientific history, the belief that the event that wiped out the dinosaurs took everything else with it was a widely held consensus. Palaeontology has revealed to us however, that in fact not everything from that time period died. Some creatures survived. Those who were able to adapt lived on, including birds, some reptiles, frogs and salamanders. Will we, as humans, be able to do that same? Or will we end up meeting the same fate that our famed predecessors did?
“The dinosaurs we meet as children don’t stay around for long,” said science writer Brian Switek. While he meant this in regards to the fact that palaeontology is a quickly changing field, it rings true in other ways as well. Dinosaur bones that reach up past their rocky mantle today are exposed to warmer air than those discovered while I was still a child. The rate of change is fast, already causing new mass extinctions and evacuations worldwide. The awe with which I met the world and all its wonderful creatures in my youth is now tampered by the possibility of its elimination.
And yet as long as these bones in the earth exist, possibility awaits. A chance for us to see things differently, to be changed, to recast our fate while the red-orange hoodoos still bask in the evening sun. Treasures are everywhere out there on the ground, if we choose to look. Maybe dinosaur fossils are the reminders we need of what may await us should we continue in our ways. And if, like the birds, adaptation is our only salvation, perhaps they can also be the source of the imagination to get us there.
- Kylee Pedersen is a writer and editor based in Calgary, Canada
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