Holding Hands with Dinosaurs

It’s official: humans like dinosaurs more than money. In recent months two television series have swept the television ratings world by storm. The cliff hanging format of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" makes for compulsive viewing and topped the ratings in both the USA and the UK. The producers must have thought their formula of watching complete strangers win hundreds of thousands of dollars and pounds would be the television hit of the decade. But lumbering in the wings was perhaps the most unexpected hit of recent times, an animated science series about long dead creatures.

The BBC’s science documentary series ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ has broken all television records around the globe. In Britain alone it peaked at around 19 million viewers, almost one in three of the total population. The stupendous scale of this success must have come as a great delight to the producers but for years television executives have known that dinosaurs are good box-office. It seems that all of us, children and adults alike, are obsessed with dinosaurs. Just how and why did this group of extinct reptiles get to be so popular?

Dinosaurs are members of a group of around 1300 reptiles that first appeared on our planet 210 million years ago. Mysteriously they became extinct about 65 million years ago, and just one descendant, the birds, has survived to the present. The first dinosaur remains were uncovered in England in the 1820’s. It was soon realised that some of these creatures were huge, they lived on the land and many of them could walk upright on two legs.

Paul Sereno Eoraptor - the most primitive dinosaur lived 228 million years ago and was a small fierce predator.

It was this last discovery that set the scene for the human imagination to run wild. It has led to all kinds of speculation about their locomotion, behaviour and physiology. Imagine if we had to share our planet with creatures that could run up to 26 miles an hour, weighed up to 100 tonnes and had a taste for human flesh. In reality many of them were probably vegetarian, but it’s the flesh eaters that have fuelled our fears. By the 1840s they were officially named the ‘Dinosauria’: meaning Greek for ‘terrible lizard’.