Barney and Friends

Barney and Friends

 

 

As what has previously been discussed, the 19th Century was a very exciting time in science.  I just feel as though there were so many leaps forward in all areas of science, whether it be astronomy, biology or paleontology.  Part of these leaps though, like in any period of experimentation, were some pretty inaccurate or darn right silly assumptions and theories.  Today we have such incredible technology, and are far more educated and sophisticated in science that it is difficult to imagine why or how individuals could have thought otherwise about this stuff.  A place like the Crystal Palace came to be to put into perspective the discoveries of the time for enjoyment of the public.  I feel like art, as with certain stories like the Moon Series, were less concerned with factual information and honest detail than they were concerned with capitalizing on these areas of science to feed the imagination and draw more attention.  This was probably easy to do at the time, especially since the general population knew very little or had little access or care for the details.  An artist could paint dinosaurs in whatever shapes and colors they wished because people at the time did not have anything else to compare it to.  Elaborate stories were easily made entertaining since they could only use their imagination to understand new scientific concepts.  I feel another contributing factor to the public's view of dinosaurs was probably linked to the religious barrier that science often faced, as well as resistance to a pretty controversial issue at the time that would be known as Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, the evolution theory, as was pointed out in Wrongosaurus.  The artist was not concerned especially with the scientific detail, but instead with somewhat modernizing the idea of these creatures and probably hinting that these were in fact God's creatures.  Perhaps this is why the dinos of Crystal Palace were quite different than what we would come to know today.  Essentially, I believe capitalizing on the unkown frontier, however, was an easy and probably popular game many artists and writers of the time were playing.  As for my first encounter with Dinosaurs, I am pretty sure it may have started with America's beloved childhood purple dinosaur, Barney!  For as long as I can remember, I held onto my stuffed purple friend and sang-a-long with the infamous but outrageously annoying tune that stirred the hearts and minds of so many children of the early 90's.  I still feel the need to defend him when he is made the object of discrimination (ok, maybe not really, I am in my mid-twenties here...I DO NOT love Barney anymore, I just consider it to be nostalgia in terms of my childhood).  Anyway, having grown up in the California public school system, I remember having studied dinosaurs and although I cannot tell you what grade I was in, or what the teacher taught aside from their extinction, I do remember my class learning how to make a fairly large dinosaur out of paper machet patched onto some type of wire that had been preshaped.  As with so many others, I find the pursuit of dinosaurs quite meaningless today since it cannot help me in my every day life, and I am too old to believe that they walked, talked, and hugged each other.  Now how did the image of the dinosaurs in the lives of children become so important, when in fact the first pieces of art representing a child's encounter with dinosaurs suggested they should be afraid of them?  I think dinosaurs are just so far fetched in terms of our imaginations that it is easy to fabricate stories of them.  They lived millions of years ago and the closest creatures we can consider to relate to them today are birds and maybe crocodiles.  Popular culture art, even today, has had a habit of turning into entertainment things that we do not or cannot understand.  We can learn about these animals and look at what we believe to be pictures of them, but none such creatures have existed in our human history really, so we can create these childish fantasies because we have nothing else to go on (I guess that means we do still relate to people of the 19th Century in some ways).  And who is the easiest target to introduce these kinds of stories and fantasies to?  Young, impressionable children!  Maybe in the end it may have set out to make children more interested in science as well.