Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 57

The Defining Dinosaur 53 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