Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 50

46 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