Why We Love Dinosaurs

By inspiring fantasy in children, dinosaurs can reduce a child's feeling of helplessness. Unlike the power of adults of assertive peers, dinosaur power is under a child's thumb.

Dinosaurs appeal to a Victorian sort of "childhood wonder," emerging spontaneously in children, with little adult encouragement.

The most popular representations of dinosaurs ignore the limits imposed by paleontology.

Early discoverers of dinosaurs greatly exaggerated their size, appealing to the public's taste. Even with highly sophisticated tools, only so much information can be inferred from bones and related objects. Those who wish to reconstruct the appearance and habits of dinosaurs are using their scope for imagination.

The reason for the popularity of dinosaurs is that their symbolism is flexible enough to accommodate a vast range of meanings.

• Dinosaurs became extinct, and that story resonates with the apocalyptic traditions of the Zoroastrian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic religions.
• Their size and power suggest empires and battles of a huge scale. The view that some dinosaurs survived to become birds suggests a sort of angelic elect that will be saved.
• Secular views have changed the meaning of dinosaurs. The apocalyptic associations could be used to express the terror of a nuclear holocaust or ecological collapse.
• Dinosaurs have also been used to comment on human violence, innocence, wealth, failure, and many more.