What's most amazing about people who hate that birds are dinosaurs is that, without the discovery of birds being dinosaurs in the 1960s, none of y'all would have ever actually cared about dinosaurs
the history:
dino craze in 1800s. people thought, birds are very similar to these guys. Dollo fucked it up, made a bad theory, and people stopped thinking that
Early 1900s, dinosaurs deemed sluggish, stupid, pointless evolutionary failures. most people not really into dinosaurs anymore. this continues until
1960s: Deinonychus discovered. suddenly, dinosaurs interesting again: vibrant, lively, warm blooded animals. Also... birds might be dinosaurs?
from the 60s through the 70s, a slow buildup of dinosaur culture - both in crappy stop motion movies, but also in children's books and other media
80s cladistics revolution shows birds are living dinosaurs, though not without flaws. documentary after documentary is made, causing the major dinosaur boom of the late 80s and early 90s
the peak of this boom are the A&E and PBS documentaries, which both outright state birds are dinosaurs
cartoons like land before time and other dinosaur content keep coming out too, especially at the end of the 80s and the earliest 90s
the book jurassic park, referencing the birds are dinosaurs thing, is written in the late 80s. in the early 90s, is adapted into one of the greatest blockbusters of all time. now dinosaur interest is MAINSTREAM.
jurassic park isn't the start of the dinosaur boom, it is the apex
90s becomes the decade of dinosaurs, with tons of new discoveries, television shows, documentaries, and other programming
1996 first feathered "nonavian" dinosaur discovered. birds are dinosaurs is the closest thing we have to proven phylogenetic fact
1999 walking with dinosaurs premieres, revolutionizing the dinosaur-documentary genre.
early 2000s becomes the age of Period-Type Dino-Docu-Dramas
velociraptor is determined to have feathers
suddenly, dinosaur mania starts to die in the later 2000s
even though discoveries keep happening and we learn so much in the 2010s, the 2010s becomes a very regressive time - a sort of reactionary response to the birdification of dinosaurs and the dinosaurification of birds. the height of this is jurassic world
we may be in the middle of a dino-docu-drama revitilization thanks to prehistoric planet. stay tuned on that one
like, everyone was fine with the birdification of dinosaurs up and until they looked "feminine" on the outside, because of feathers.
It's just all such transparent misogyny and homophobia and people who react against feathered dinosaurs or birds being dinosaurs are just... so transparently parroting conservative talking points
Anyways, yeah. without birds are dinosaurs, you wouldn't have jurassic park. Sooooo
Look at this T. rex concept art from the first Jurassic Park:
Look at how dynamic these pieces are, the emphasis on the talon-like foot claws over the teeth. Compare to 80s paleomedia's lumpier tyrannosaurs, still getting over the hump of the earlier part of the century:
Jurassic Park took a big, conscious effort to portray dinosaurs as the active, warm-blooded animals they were - a view that we would not have without the bird connection. Even the word "raptor" means "bird of prey".
The final shot of the movie highlights pelicans for a reason.
As a random side note: the sound design for Jurassic Park, amazingly enough, also reflects BAD. A lot of bird calls went into the vocals of both the Velociraptor and the Dilophosaurus. The sequels would continue using bird calls for Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Spinosaurus, Compsognathus, and more. It may not be much, but before Jurassic Park, most paleomedia did not do this. Instead they leaned even more heavily on mammals, amazingly enough (watch old dinosaur movies, you're gonna hear a lot of elephants, cats, hoofed mammals, and dudes screaming). I doubt there wasn't some intent behind this.
#iirc Jurassic Park trying to figure out how to make the dinosaurs move with cgi is what led to some understandings about#like. how they were bird like
yup! Both JP and WWD had research components to their productions that lead to amazing discoveries, especially how bird like their bodies were. like, when I say "if a dinosaur doesn't look like a bird on the outside, it's definitely still on on the inside", this is the shit I mean. The work done by Phil Tippett alone was instrumental in the paleo-biomechanical field.
Dinosaurs walked, made noises, and - as far as we can tell from the fossil record - behaved like birds. Birds in niches we now associate with large mammals, but birds nonetheless.
You can even tell how much the dinosaur-bird connection got growing by the number of documentaries made about them/prehistoric life overall by the decades. 1910s: 1 Doc, 11 others 1920s: 4 Docs, 10 others 1930s: 2 Docs, 10 others 1940s: 1 Doc, 13 others 1950s: 9 Docs, 30 Others (Television becomes widespread and the film industry solidifies) 1960s: 10 Docs, 30 Others 1970s: 10 Docs, 46 Others (Note, 1977 saw the first documentary on the dinosaur-bird connection with "The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs" from Horizon (and reran by NOVA), and you can see the effect as 6 of the 10 docs are from 1977 onward) 1980s: 40 Docs, 55 Others 1990s: 80 Docs, 73 Others (Here we have the JP effect) 2000s: 112 Docs, 111 Others (Let's call this the Walking With Effect) 2010s: 106 Docs (+2 YouTube series), 117 Others Only some of this can be explained by the rise of things like Cable Television, but it's clear to see that the bird-dinosaur connection played a pivotal role in their popularity today. So, yeah. Birds are Dinosaurs. And that is what made them popular.
Otherwise, our dinosaurs would still be like this:
and like, mad respect to the past and how much we've learned and everything, but every single step in that process has lead to more realistic and believable dinosaurs
there's a reason the dinos in Prehistoric Planet cause people to lose their breath and it's not the CGI
Didn't that guy Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás say dinos were birds in the 1800s? Sorry if my history is a little rusty not sure when exactly he said that
he did, the magnificent gay bastard. so did huxley
dollo ruined everything, though
