Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 57
The Defining Dinosaur
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artist, not the scientist, at fault for “inaccurate” representation: “I should mention,
of course, that as the scientific adviser to Jurassic Park, I could do no more than
make suggestions, some of which were adopted, many of which were not. The
filmmakers took liberties whenever they felt such liberties would improve the story.
There is no evidence that Dilophosaurus could spit, for instance” (4). Although
the dinobot signifies the mutual partnership of paleontological science and “art,”
its nature as a phantasmatic scientific artifact comes under erasure in the drive to
secure scientific legitimacy. The dinobot exceeds the sum total of fossil remains
and excavation site “context,” requiring aesthetic considerations and market analy
ses to flesh out its corpulent form. Thus, if scientific value is posited as residing
“in” the object of science, it therefore must express either the abstract social labor
time expended in the production of the object, or the “use value” constructed for
the object in question. In either case, the ontological implications get murky.
If scientific value expresses labor, then, as we have seen, the object proper to
paleontological science today, the dinobot, being the product of “context” inter
pretive scientific labor and speculative imaginings coupled with artistic labor,
encompasses a laboring “space” that reduces both scientific Vaborand artistic “cre
ation” to the same abstract equivalence. In this picture, textual constructions that
utilize “scientific value” and its “loss” to patrol scientific borders, to “keep out”
unwelcome “nonscientific” immigrants, are seriously undermined.
If scientific value expresses “use value,” then the onion of hermeneutics needs
to be peeled back another layer. What is the “utility” of the paleontological arti
fact? How might it be measured? Is a “dinobot” more “useful” than an unprepared
and dismembered fossilized scapula? Useful to whom? Whenever questions such
as these appear immanent in his narrative, Horner resorts to replacing one term
with another. As noted earlier, Horner claims that the “primary value” of fossils is
“educational,” but we must always bracket “fossil” in these texts as shorthand for
fossil artifacts and their contextual interpretations. As we might recall, Horner
himself admits that these interpretations might only be of “interest” to paleontolo
gists. Therefore, the “utility” of the scientific object in question is most definitely
a “usefulness to wh