Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 50
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Popular Culture Review
case of the contemporary paleontological sciences and their textual populariza
tions, the objects that somehow “contain” or “possess” scientific value might seem,
on first reading, to be fossils. Upon closer textual examination, it becomes clear
that the repositories of scientific value are actually the dinosaur reconstructions:
amalgams of science and imagination that belie repeated attempts within popular
and semi-popular paleontological texts to sunder the realms of science and art.
Through a close textual analysis of specific contemporary paleontological
popularizations, I examine the discursive construction of scientific value concepts
operating today, and, by Juxtaposing those value formulations with a consider
ation of the formative and mutually-determining nature of paleontological art and
science, I make the claim that the textual construction of scientific value can be
seen as not only assisting in the definition of “science” in general and the disci
pline of paleontology in particular, but also operating in a distinctively ideological
fashion, as a divisive and exclusionary tool that marks off science from art, sup
plying the alibi of a concrete and realizable “content” or signified of science, all
the while existing purely as an oppositional and nominative label, applicable to
any “scientific” object necessary.
The “value” of fossils and other scientific artifacts is a recurrent theme in the
work of vertebrate paleontologist John Horner, whose cultural cache weighs heavily
in diverse areas of the social matrix and many cultural texts, not the least of which
are Steven Spielberg’s popularization of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and The Lost
World, and the current broad cultural fascination with “baby” dinosaurs enabled
by Horner’s discovery and naming of the “Good Mother Lizard,” Maiasaura. The
two texts I examine here. The Complete T rex (1993) and Dinosaur Lives (1997),
are aimed at a popular or non-discipline-specific audience, and they evince a pic
ture of scientific theory and practice familiar to most: science progresses in a cu
mulative fashion, each discovery building upon the next, approaching asymptoti
cally the “truth” of material reality. Whether the