Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Frederick Oliver Beeby Maglaque, Exhibition Researcher, Pacific Museum of Earth and Masters student in Art History, University of British Columbia
“This is the story of the dinosaurs as it has never been told before,” narrates Morgan Freeman in the opening of Neflix’s The Dinosaurs docuseries.
The four-part series combines advanced CGI with real nature footage to create cutting-edge photorealistic visuals and tell a compelling story. The Dinosaurs is undeniably a technical and scientific achievement.
Netflix’s marketing has emphasized the show’s accuracy and engagement of more than 50 scientific advisers. Meanwhile, experts describe some scenes as “speculative,” given our evolving knowledge of the Mesozoic Era.
What The Dinosaurs does tell us, with great accuracy, is a lot about ourselves.
Tracing the rise and extinction of dinosaurs from the Triassic period to the Late Cretaceous period, the show — much like the dinosaur media that came before it — reflects our own reckoning with possibilities of human extinction that is only more necessary as our planet changes rapidly due to climate change.
It also reinforces another familiar narrative: the story of life on Earth as a story of conquest.
Exotic beasts to be tamed, classified
Dinosaurs first entered the visual culture of western science in the 19th century. Famous depictions include two full-sized dinosaurs — an Iguanodon and Megalosaurus — that were unveiled at Crystal Palace Park in London in 1854.
(Wikimedia Commons), CC BY
The Crystal Palace itself was designed for the 1851 Great Exhibition — which displayed animals, minerals, cultural objects and more from across the British Empire. It was a steel and glass monument to industrial modernity and imperial power.
These “exotic” fake dinosaurs were placed on small, artificial islands, within lakes in the palace park, where visitors could view them from afar. They were positioned as beasts to be viewed with as much wonder as terror that the combined authority of science and empire could tame and classify. They are still there today.
Imperial fantasies of extraction
The film Jurassic Park, released in 1993, followed its 19th-century predecessors, depicting dinosaurs as creatures that dwell in distant exotic realms that humans, typically white explorers or scientists, must journey to.
The film is set on the imaginary Costa Rican island of Isla Muerta, where dinosaurs are born from amber extracted from the fictional Mano de Dios mine.
Like the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, they evoke an unknown exotic frontier — shaped by imperial fantasies of extraction. And yet, films like Jurassic Park also question this framing. Characters who seek to dominate nature — the businessman, the lawyer, the big game hunter — ultimately meet their downfall.
Dinosaurs versus Earth
So, what happens when these familiar tropes are presented through the hyperrealism of modern dinosaur documentaries, alongside real paleontological discoveries, as “accurate?”
“In a savage and ever-changing world, some will rise and some will fall. But through it all, the dinosaurs will expand their empire and advance relentlessly to seize Earth’s final frontiers,” narrates Morgan Freeman in Episode 3 of The Dinosaurs.
Throughout the series, dinosaurs are portrayed as seeking to colonize the planet. This is evident in the episode titles — Rise, Conquest, Empire, Fall — and in how the other organisms are depicted.
Read more:
What bite marks on a dinosaur fossil tell us about the T. rex’s eating habits
The first episode concludes with a cowboy-style showdown between a dinosaur and a rauisuchian, a Triassic reptile described as a monstrous, lesser “other.” This scene marks the beginning of the dinosaurs’ so-called “reign.”
Again and again, The Dinosaurs tells a story of dinosaurs versus Earth, where natural events like volcanism are described as “Earth’s darkest forces.” The planet itself becomes something to be overcome in the dinosaurs’ pursuit of empire.
This Mesozoic, non-human history is also told as a story that is always moving toward a known ending. The first episode opens with a Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex) in the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact, a 100- million megaton blast that struck the Gulf of Mexico region and devastated the planet.
The T.rex closes its eyes as ash falls across an apocalyptic landscape. Dinosaurs are portrayed as conquerors of Earth and as always already doomed to fail — ruled by this so-called “tyrant lizard king.”
A story of human mastery
The Dinosaurs engages in what we could call the “dino dialectic” — a trope where dinosaurs are presented as allegorical stand-ins for humans, reflecting an anthropocentric and often colonial vision of the human subject.
As media theorist W.M.T. Mitchell writes, “Dinos R Us.”
At the same time, their inevitable extinction is used to define them as primitive and inferior. Dinosaurs are us, but we remain superior, masters of our fates and of our planetary dominion.
If The Dinosaurs, the latest in an increasing number of contemporary dinosaur documentaries, reflects our own apocalyptic anxieties while reiterating this “dino dialectic,” we are continuing to tell the same story that led us here.
These documentaries are examples of what visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “Anthropocene visuality” — a way of seeing that “keeps us believing that somehow the war against nature that western society has been waging for centuries is not only right; it is beautiful and it can be won.”
Frederick Oliver Beeby Maglaque receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Kirsten F. Hodge receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Association of Science Centres.
– ref. Netflix’s ‘The Dinosaurs’ rehashes a very old story — of empire and conquest – https://theconversation.com/netflixs-the-dinosaurs-rehashes-a-very-old-story-of-empire-and-conquest-279162