Articulating Dinosaurs: A dense academic book, but rewarding even for a lay fan

Articulating Dinosaurs by Brian Noble

I have to confess that Articulating Dinosaurs (2016) by Brian Noble wasn’t quite what I’d expected, though that was certainly more my fault for not reading the description closely and in its entirety. Basically, any author/publisher has me at “dinosaurs,” so everything after that is just so much superfluous verbiage. So yes, I can’t say I was at all fully prepared for the academic/critical theory nature of the work, though it didn’t take too many early references to Lacan or Foucault before I figured out my misperception and readjusted my expectations. It’s been a few years (OK, decades) since my crit days, and I can’t say that even when I was reading critical theory that I was wholly enjoying or comprehending it (I do recall doing a lot of back-and-forth page-flipping re-reading with Lacan, for instance. Plus, I’m pretty sure there was swearing). Those memories didn’t quite encourage me to go back and ground myself more fully, so I just forged ahead with Noble’s work, cheerfully acknowledging my ignorance of many of his referents, and you know what — and here’s the key for those of you already thinking you’re moving on — it didn’t matter.

Because while a good amount of abstruse terminology reared its sometimes ugly/intimidating/annoying head (or, for those better versed in such things, its informative/insightful/thoughtful head), I still thoroughly enjoyed Articulating Dinosaurs for its arguments, its real-world concrete examples of points (especially in the form of the lengthy case study of a specific museum exhibit), Noble’s lucid prose (despite the inherent fogginess of some of the critical language), and the way the work places dinosaurs in a sociological/cultural context.

I don’t want to downplay the critical theory — readers should be prepared for terms, passages, and section headings such as:

• “Chronotope” — “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and special relationships … expressing the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space”)
• “Zone of Implosion” — “a provisional agentive-form and organizer of time-space with attendant lives — animated, reanimated, or otherwise … In the case of the Mesozoic nexus, these actors and forces merged around a modernity-generated topos and chromos that produce and condition what can count as truthful visions of nature as a changing yet constrained dynamic … The multiple, layered, messy performative nexuses combine, working much the same sense as Michel Foucault’s apparatus, and more specifically as a dispotif.”
• “The Rhizomatic non-System: Recalibrating Systematics and Phantasmatics”

There’s no doubt there’s a lot of this sort of thing throughout Articulating Dinosaurs, as Noble is not writing for a general or lay audience. But that said, as mentioned one can, well, maybe not “glide” through, but certainly pick one’s way across to such lines/passages to more clearly understandable territory in that next paragraph or two. And it all holds together pretty well as general argument, even if you’re missing (as I did) some of the specific points.

What Noble does with all this is to attempt to write “a book about dinosaurs, but more particularly a book about the action that brings them back, back to life.” The two ways this is mostly done is via fiction (whether print or film or others) and science (museum exhibits and papers, for instance, and Noble is interested in how:

scientists manage incursions of what is only supposed to be fictional into what is only supposed to be factual? Or do that all? Do they — or, just as importantly, why should they — care about this? … The ultimate proposition … is that articulating dinosaurs is a mode of articulating power in different ways … a political anthropology of dinosaurs … tracing the public emergences and transformations of two dinosaurs in particular.

One of those two is the T-Rex, especially its role in fiction, specifically Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (in print and film), the original King Kong, and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, but also its discovery as fossil and subsequent exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. Into this mix he brings issues of race, eugenics, gender, the role of nature in our lives, and other socio-cultural-political factors. Opposed to the T-Rex and taking up the second half of the book is Maiasaura, in particular an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. With its name translated as “the good mother lizard,” Noble’s very detailed ethonographical examination of the exhibit allows for further exploration of the aforementioned issues, and how society’s attitudes toward them have or have not changed.

Here, for example, is a passage regarding gender roles based on some of the exhibition textual displays:

Here, almost from the outset, are the suggestions of the Maiasaur’s life and times, its nurturing capacities aligning in an uninterrogated way with its gendered nomination as “the good mother.” There is no mention of nurturing “fathers” or males. There is instead a matter-of-fact point about who does the caregiving … The configuring of family, feminine gendering, nurturance, a “gentle” and “adorable” dinosaur, articulating with “families” as “natural” audiences for this exhibit was becoming increasingly obvious.

Articulating Dinosaurs is not your typical dinosaur book by any means. Nor is it, as mentioned, aimed at the lay audience. But that’s not the same as saying a lay reader can’t get a lot out of it. What Noble does is open our eyes to ways of thinking about things we’ve never considered, even when we’ve been thinking about them (dinosaurs) ever since we were children. What more can you ask?