Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars

2. The Heresies of Dr. Bakker

2 THE HERESIES OF DR. BAKKER The Age of Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and it was all a mistake in the ¤rst place.A better day was already dawning at the close of the Mesozoic Era.There were some little warm-blooded animals around which had been stealing and eating the eggs of the Dinosaurs, and they were gradually learning to steal other things too. Civilization was just around the corner. —Will Cuppy, “The Dinosaur,” in How to Become Extinct The picture’s pretty bleak, gentlemen. . . . The world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut. —Stegosaur lecturer to dinosaur audience in The Far Side by Gary Larson The quotes from Will Cuppy and Gary Larson capture one popular image of the dinosaur: an evolutionary cul-de-sac, stolidly resigned to replacement by superior mammals. Combating this image of dinosaurs has been the life’s work of paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, a self-described “dinosaur heretic.” In 1968, while still an undergraduate student at Yale University, Bakker published an article calling for a new approach to dinosaur studies (Bakker 1968). In his subsequent articles,book,novel (Raptor Red),and numerous television appearances (where his long hair, beard, and wide-brimmed hat have made him almost as familiar as the dinosaurs themselves), Bakker has been the tireless champion of dinosaur revisionism. This chapter will present Bakker’s “heresies” and the debates they 22 provoked. As with the controversies examined in the last chapter, the debates precipitated by Bakker have drawn little attention from professional historians of science. The most extensive accounts of these debates are in such semipopular works as those by Lessem (1992),Wilford (1985), and Desmond (1975). I shall reconstruct the debates from the original articles. According to Bakker,by 1968 dinosaurs had become synonymous with obsolescence: dimwitted hulks that managed to dominate by size alone until they were superseded by new, smarter, faster, warmblooded mammals (Bakker 1968). He points out, though, that mammals evolved in the late Triassic at roughly the same time as the dinosaurs . Dinosaurs quickly replaced the successful mammal-like reptiles that had dominated the Triassic. Dinosaurs remained the largest and most successful land animals for the next 150 million years.Mammals remained the primitive and diminutive occupants of a few narrow ecological niches until the dinosaurs’ extinction. How, Bakker asks, could the hapless, lumpish, swamp-bound leviathan of the popular stereotype have been so successful as the dinosaurs were? Bakker sought to replace the image of dinosaurs as slow, stupid, and mucking about in swamps with a view of them as fast, smart, and ¤rmly on dry land. Bakker never adequately documents the claim that his construal of dinosaur “orthodoxy”—slow, stupid, and swamp-bound—was the received view among paleontologists. In an essay entitled “Return of the Dancing Dinosaurs” Bakker claims that he is restoring the lively, energetic view of dinosaurs held by early paleontologists such as E. D. Cope,T.H.Huxley,and O.C.Marsh (Bakker 1987).Though his claims about Cope, Huxley, and Marsh are well documented, the alleged eclipse of this view by a stultifying “orthodoxy” is not. Some have even asserted that Bakker’s broadsides against paleontological “orthodoxy ” are aimed at straw men (Crompton and Gatesy 1989, p. 111). Bakker seems to have been chie®y offended by the standard museum depictions of dinosaurs—restored as if shuf®ing about in an awkward semisprawl (Bakker 1987, pp. 43–44). He opens his book The Dinosaur Heresies with an autobiographical anecdote about a moment of deep insight that came late at night in the Yale Peabody Museum : “I remember the ¤rst time the thought struck me! ‘There’s something very wrong with our dinosaurs.’I was standing in the great Hall of Yale’s Peabody Museum, at the foot of the Brontosaurus skele23 The Heresies of Dr. Bakker ton. It was 3:00 A.M., the hall was dark, no one else was in the building . ‘There’s something very wrong with our dinosaurs.’ The entire Great Hall seemed to say that” (Bakker 1986, p. 15). Maybe Bakker’s reaction against dinosaur “orthodoxy” was more a response to museum restorations and to popular stereotypes (as in the Cuppy and Far Side quotations) than to the paleontological literature . Of course, museum displays and even popular metaphor often re®ect accepted...