Each author led a session on their chapter at the Popularizing Palaeontology online meetings, which meant they could showcase their work and get feedback. And we had a small in-person workshop once the whole draft manuscript was ready, where we could talk about the book and all the comments in the round. I hope this was successful in making sure that all authors got heard, and that the book became a coherent collection of related case studies.
Dr Chris Manias, Reader in the History of Science for UCL Press
31 January 2025
How pop-culture's love for dinosaurs has deepened our understanding of them
From Jurassic Park to Toy Story’s Rex, dinosaurs have always captured our imagination. Dr Chris Manias’ new book delves into the two-way relation between pop culture moments and palaeontology.
Dr Chris Manias, Reader in the History of Science’s, Palaeontology in Public considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. The open access book includes a collection of case studies exploring different connections between the public, society and culture and discoveries in and funding for paleontological sciences.
The case studies are each written by academics from a range of institutions and explore people’s fascinations throughout time, including mentions in children's stories and toys, traditional Chinese medicine and the Bible.
Since the late eighteenth century, palaeontology has been one of the most high-profile sciences. Dinosaurs, mammoths, human ancestors and other lost creatures from Earth’s history are some of the most prominent icons of science, and have contributed to our understanding of nature and time. Palaeontology and its practitioners have had a huge impact on public understandings of science, despite their often precarious and unsteady position within scientific institutions and networks.
I especially liked the chapters which took the case studies beyond the traditional European and North American framework that a lot of the history of palaeontology has been written around. This included Irina Podgorny’s chapter on the relation between glyptodons, art and literature in twentieth-century Argentina, Zichuan Qin and Lukas Rieppel’s discussion of the role of dinosaurs in China, and the highlighting of the role of African and Asian research in palaeontology and human evolutionary studies in several chapters. These are things that the academic literature is starting to focus on, and tells the history of palaeontology in a new light.
Dr Chris Manias, Reader in the History of Science for UCL Press
Chris is a historian of science, specialising in the history and cultural role of palaeontology and related fields. As well as working on Palaeontology in Public, He has recently written another book about the history of mammal palaeontology in the nineteenth century, looking at why scientists and public audiences in this period were so interested in fossil mammals, and what this tells us about global connections and understandings of nature and the environment in this period. He is currently working on a new project, looking at how palaeontologists and geologists engaged with the crises of the 1920s and 1930s, and has recently been awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to work on this (detailed here, p. 9).
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Reader in the History of Science