Annals of the Former World April 8, 2019 Issue The Day the Dinosaurs Died, New Yorker, Douglas Preston

  Since dinosaurs have been a major interest in my life, and a subject of abiding interest in science fiction books and films since the genre began, I though I would share this link to a fascinating New Yorker article about what could, potentially, be a fairly significant discovery. 

As article author, Douglas Preston (Dinosaurs in the Attic - An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History) states:

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

What the paleontologist Robert DePalma might have discovered are fossils laid down just after the asteroid impact that is believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. I have included a couple of quotes from the article. The first is part of the best description of the kind of damage the impact could have caused, that I can remember reading. As a science fiction fan the fact that the impact could have dispersed material, possibly even living microbes, so far out into space is quite exciting. It could be the dispersal that could launch a thousand plots one might suggest. The discussion of the finds themselves are incredible, hopefully this site will merit a documentary at the very least. So since I love dinosaurs and books, and books about the dinosaurs, plus dinosaurs in films and dinosaur models and since my most memorable birthday cake was one my mother covered with plastic dinosaurs, I wanted to share this link. And some photos of dinosaur goodies of course. Maybe this discovery is too good to be true, but I hope not, and so does that little boy looking at that cake, all those years ago.

"Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth."

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“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.” No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalma’s hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

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But eventually life emerged and blossomed again, in new forms. The KT event continues to attract the interest of scientists in no small part because the ashen print it left on the planet is an existential reminder. “We wouldn’t be here talking on the phone if that meteorite hadn’t fallen,” Smit told me, with a laugh. DePalma agreed. For the first hundred million years of their existence, before the asteroid struck, mammals scurried about the feet of the dinosaurs, amounting to little. “But when the dinosaurs were gone it freed them,” DePalma said. In the next epoch, mammals underwent an explosion of adaptive radiation, evolving into a dazzling variety of forms, from tiny bats to gigantic titanotheres, from horses to whales, from fearsome creodonts to large-brained primates with hands that could grasp and minds that could see through time.

All quotes from the New Yorker, hopefully they will not mind.

Cover credits:

Dinosaur figures; Papo France

Prehistoric Animals; Zdenek Burian

Cryptozoic!; Don Punchatz

Analog; H. R. Van Dongen

Science Wonder Stories; Frank R. Paul

The Beast from 20,0000 Fathoms; VHS design?, signed by Ray Harryhausen at Royal Tyrrell Museum

Dinosaurs Past and Present; Cool Weather by William Stout

The Greatest Adventure; Ed Emshwiller

Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction review – almost all non-human life is here, Barbican London

The Cyclops from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and two of

my favorite of Ray's  films.

(all photos for this post from my collection not the exhibit)

As my wife and I are planning to be in London this fall she alerted me to a show on science fiction material appearing at the Barbican in London. Sadly we will miss it by several weeks but I thought I would mention it here in case it was of interest to others.

The exhibit sounds wonderful, and as you might guess it contains material on Ray Harryhausen's work.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/18/into-unknown-journey-through-science-fiction-barbican-review?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I was interested because of course I enjoy science fiction in many forms as does my wife. 

We are also both interested in architecture and the Barbican is one of London’s best examples of Brutalist architecture.

The Barbican  link discussing the exhibit

http://www.barbican.org.uk/intotheunknown/ more on the exhibit

Link to the history of the Barbican

http://www.barbican.org.uk/about-barbican/history

The third reason for me is the Barbican is the headquarters of, as well as the name, of the European Men in Black type organization represented by the wonderfully realized Immacolata Sexton, found in Caitlin Kiernan's brilliant Agents of Dreamland.   

I discussed her novel on my HPL site and the link to my comments can be found here.

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.ca/2017/04/agents-of-dreamland-by-caitlin-r-kiernan.html

For SF buffs Kiernan's novel lies at the wonderful intersection of science fiction and horror that can be found in the works of authors like George RR Martin and Richard Matheson. (Read it)

But I digress, there are a couple of things about the review of the show at the Barbican I wanted to discuss. The author Rachel Cooke starts with the following statement. 

"The most brilliant definition of science fiction I know comes courtesy of the writer Brian Aldiss, who once described it as “hubris clobbered by nemesis”. " While Aldiss's
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, as well as his extensive list of science fiction novels and short stores has given him a well deserved stature in the field, this does not appear to be a useful definition of anything. Just had to get that off my chest.

The second observation I found interesting was her statement. "Dinosaurs used to be a metaphor, a means of addressing our most deep-seated fears. They roared and we trembled; we fought them to win. Now, though, they bring with them a prelapsarian longing." I asked my wife about this, we both grew up in the 1960's. The dinosaurs we saw in the works of Ray Harryhausen ( my hero ) and his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, (O'Brien worked on The Lost World, King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen created the dinosaurs that appeared in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Valley of Gwangi among others) were menacing but they were not metaphors for fear in our minds. I wonder if that is a generational difference, possibly after films like Jurassic Park dinosaurs assumed this metaphorical role I cannot say. Certainly in the 1960's as now, dinosaurs were everywhere, in films, cartoons, books, advertising, tchotchkes of every kind and in my case as plastic dinosaurs on a birthday cake, thanks Mom.

This illustration is from a post on science books on my nature website. 

But if they were metaphors then, I think they were metaphors for the mysteries unlocked by science. Science then was the lens by which we were examining the mysteries of the earth, of time and of the universe. We had the past via dinosaurs and archaeology, the first exploration of the ocean depths with submarines, bathyscopes and aqua-lungs and outer space with our telescopes, satellites and rockets. And of course all of this became the stuff of our science fiction dreams and sometimes of our science fiction nightmares.