Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 51

The Defining Dinosaur

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nosaur. He notes an inaccuracy in the puppeteer’s operation of the model and steps
in to help: ‘“ Here’s how it should work,' I said, taking control of the levers on the
electronic puppet....Spielberg withdrew to one side and waited more or less pa
tiently while we rehearsed the dinosaur one-step, polishing that single, simple ges
ture to perfection” (3). In his account, Horner’s role is supervisory, a sort of scien
tific cultural gatekeeper, present on the set of Jurassic Park to “keep it on track.”
Every now and then, as in the example with the “puppet” rex, Horner must literally
“take the reins,'’ setting the film’s depiction of dinosaurs aright. In this “correc
tion,” Jurassic Park functions as a stand-in for popular culture in general, which is
itself described as a social formation that produces texts not subject to the rigors of
scientific method: “[Scientists] favor the simplest, most economical explanations
when trying to understand the natural world, because that’s what nature seems to
favor. Fiction writers and filmmakers, by contrast, seek to entertain, and that is
less likely to be achieved through parsimony than through imaginative elabora
tion” (7-8). The excesses of popular representations necessitate the scientist’s (and,
metonymically, science s) role as Spartan economist of symbolic exchange. At
first glance, this managerial role does not seem so surprising. After all, most con
sumers of popular culture would probably agree that filmmakers and authors have
taken certain liberties with “science” for the sake of “art.” However, when this
administrative function and the (mis)representational skills of mainstream culture
as depicted in the first chapter of Dinosaur Lives are juxtaposed with other state
ments and accounts in Horner’s texts, their normative purposes become clear.
According to Horner, one of the biggest “errors” or excesses of Jurassic Park
is its insistence on portraying T. rex as an aggressive predator: “Another departure
from present paleontological evidence involves the aggressive behavior of the rogue
tyrannosaur, especially when it chases the Jeep in which Ellie, the biologist, and
Ian, the mathematician, are trying to escape” (4-5). Horner then explains his theory
of T. rex as scavenger, an idea he elaborates at length in his earlier text. The Com
plete T rex. Horner bases his behavioral hypothesis on physiological evidence;
among other things, T. rexs arms are too small to be useful in hunting, and its leg
bones do not seem structurally suited to running at any speed: “The revised T. rex
is a twelve-thousand pound animal that can’t grasp, can’t run, and can’t see. Doesn’t
sound like much of a predator, does it?” (6). Like other pop cultural misrepresen
tations, this rex “excess” is depicted as simply “wrong,” another example of the
filmmakers’ indenture to the imperative of entertainment. What is curiously ab
sent is any mention of the “scavenger versus predator” debate’s long (80-year)
history, along with the fact that this debate is still boiling within the paleontologi
cal community.The relative merits or “accuracy” of either view is not the issue here. The
culturally significant facet of this debate is that Horner does not lend the filmmak-