Why Kids Love Dinosaurs

03.28.2024

Dinosaurs are big, fierce, scary—and long extinct. So, why are these toothy reptiles a childhood staple for so many?

I couldn’t wait to meet the giant. Already the epitome of a dinosaur nerd at five, I’d pored over pictures and illustrations of the “Brontosaurus” standing at the Upper West Side’s American Museum of Natural History for months upon months. They were bigger than big, but not only that. The roughly 150 million-year-old bones once lived inside an animal that I could only know in osteological outline. How the hefty reptile moved, ate, sounded, slept, and more was left entirely up to my imagination, just as much as that of any expert.

Looking at the gleaming bones in the dark Hall of Jurassic Dinosaurs, it was the invitation to imagine that kept my mind racing. The “Brontosaurus” in my head was no one else’s—especially as so many questions about the animal remain unanswered and yet demand some kind of response. The dinosaur must have had a heart, and skin, and emotions. What did all those parts look like? Thirty-six years later, I’m still transfixed by them.

As a grown-up dinosaur kid, I’m often asked why children love dinosaurs so much. From 1988 to the present moment, why is it that toothy reptiles of eons ago are such a staple of childhood for so many? I feel like the askers are usually hoping for a simple and pithy explanation. But I don’t think there can be a svelte and streamlined answer for why we’re so fond of animals we didn’t even have a name for two centuries ago.

The classic response to the popularity of the terrible lizards is that dinosaurs are “big, fierce, and extinct.” Animals like Brachiosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and other favorites were generally larger than any terrestrial animals alive today, and seem overly gifted with spikes, fangs, claws, and other traits that make us wonder what such supposed armaments were for. The traits fascinate us just as much as they must have stood out to the animals themselves, modern fossil research finding that many of the exaggerated features of our beloved dinosaurs were used to communicate and tussle with members of their own species. Dinosaurs locked horns, bit each other on the face, and bashed their tails against each other’s sides. Yet, the fact that they are extinct makes them safe and child-appropriate—the logic goes—and so dinosaurs can do no harm.

If dinosaurs are so safe, though, why do we spend so much time imagining them chasing us down and eating us? The billion-dollar Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises are fueled by child endangerment. In the first film of the lumbering series, childhood love and fascination turns to terror as the loose dinosaurs almost immediately try to eat Lex and Tim, two children who are visiting the theme park and who become a foil for the adults of the film to gather around them as a makeshift nuclear family. Every single one of the following films features at least one child who comes close to seeing the inside of a Mesozoic carnivore. It could be said that such silver screen monsters are still safe, but the fact that we envision dinosaurs hunting and terrorizing children suggests that it’s not the supposed safety of the dinosaurs that we find so transfixing.

The fact that they are extinct makes them safe and child-appropriate—the logic goes—and so dinosaurs can do no harm.

Paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that dinosaurs of the modern era are so popular because of good marketing. The reptiles, he wrote, might be little more than fads. “Every few years, someone figured out how to make yo-yos sell,” according to Gould. He saw dinosaurs as no different. “You just need a little push to kick the positive feedback machine of human herding and copying behavior into its upward spiral,” he wrote, a point that’s hard to argue with given the continued commercialization of dinosaurs.

Think of any item you can purchase—from pajamas to shower heads. There is almost certainly a dinosaur version of it. Depending on the context, a dinosaur can be the real fossilized remains of an animal that lived long ago, but also be a CGI terror stomping across the screen, a cute mascot for a breakfast cereal, a plush toy to cuddle at night, or shiny pin that symbolizes nerdy interests, among much else. Precise figures on how much dinosaurs bring in are hard to acquire, largely because dinosaur merchandise is so pervasive and varied that there’s no central set of figures to draw from.

Dinosaurs are so commercially successful that their pop culture reign seems like a postmodern Jurassic era. During the time I made my first visit to the Natural History Museum in the 1980s I could throw off my dinosaur-pattern sheets, and wearing my dinosaur-themed pajamas, eat dinosaur cereal while watching dinosaur cartoons with my own plastic dinosaur menagerie gathered at the table. The same is true today. Since the 1980s (at the very latest), we’ve taken them in and projected our human traits onto them just as we’ve named sports teams after powerful beasts and robed ourselves in animal print to make a statement.

Where Gould had it wrong, however, was the idea that dinomania appeared as if out of nowhere. The way science informs pop culture has changed over the past 40 years, but dinosaurs have always been draws for the public. It took science catching up with public fascination to catalyze the more enthusiastic dinomania that we now take as a given.

I suspect the late 20th century burst of renewed dinomania grew out of scientific dissatisfaction with the saurians. Dinosaurs have been pop culture icons for a very long time—from the 1914 animated short Gertie the Dinosaur through The Flintstones and multiple films using stop-motion monsters like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth—but paleontologists of the 20th century weren’t nearly as interested in the ancient creatures as the general public. Dinosaurs were big, weird, and rare compared to fossil mammals. Their bones were good for drawing crowds to museums, but seemingly of little use for experts who wanted to study evolutionary change and other biological phenomena across time. Dinosaurs seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere; a big evolutionary dead end that kept the rest of Earth’s life on hold for millions of years. The pop culture image of dinosaurs as slow, dim-witted, and drab wasn’t too far from the scientific consensus.

I didn’t just love dinosaurs. I needed them.

By the late 1960s, however, experts began to take an interest in dinosaurs again. Ideas about warm-bloodedness and dinosaur social lives that were restricted to scientific asides started to become tantalizing questions in scientific circles, including the mystery of why so many impressive animals could suddenly disappear from the planet 66 million years ago. Even as experts argued with each other in papers and conference volumes over the true history of the Mesozoic, they all inadvertently agreed to a central point: the dinosaurs science had introduced us to thus far were all wrong. Dinosaurs had long been presented as dim-witted, slow, and so bizarre that they practically deserved their own extinction. A “Brontosaurus” lounging in a swamp, sodden greens hanging from its lazily-chewing mouth, was the stereotypical image of what dinosaurs were. Starting with the Dinosaur Renaissance of the late 20th century, the same animal was now seen as an active mammal that lived among conifer forests, holding its tail aloft and moving with a social group as the animals nibbled the Jurassic forest. And given that the press thrives on controversy, the dinosaurs we thought we knew jumped from academic journals and technical meetings to magazine covers and documentaries with a revitalized image.

Dinosaurs may very well have remained as prehistoric cartoons if science hadn’t accidentally created a false image that had to then be reconstructed like so many of those old bones. The “Brontosaurus” I was so eager to visit at the Natural History Museum had stood more or less in the same pose from 1905 until 1995 when the leaps in paleontology became too great to ignore.

History, however, can’t be the only explanation as to why kids continue to play with dinosaurs, just like the bones of a Parasaurolophus couldn’t tell us what the tube-crested duckbill thought about as it waded through Cretaceous marshes. Our answer has to be emotional, too, and feelings leave no fossil record.

If there is an answer to “Why do children love dinosaurs so much?” the answer can’t come from adults. Only a child can reply, even if it’s the child still in ourselves. The answers may be as individual as kids themselves, dinosaurs presented to us as a socially-acceptable prompt to explore some of our own thoughts and feelings. When I think back to standing in the shadow of those massive legs and ribs, I was certainly enthralled by all the question marks; all the things that we might still learn about dinosaurs. I hoped I would wander the desert in search of bones myself one day. But that wasn’t all. I wanted the brontosaur to be my friend.

The world can be so scary for children. It’s even more frightening when home isn’t a safe place to live; when harm doesn’t come from drooling, sharp-toothed reptiles but from people who are supposed to be your safety and comfort. Decades away from my transition, and unaware I’m autistic, I was a lonely and sensitive child who’d learned to fear some of the adults around me most of all. There were so few friends I could turn to that seemed bigger and stronger than the people I was afraid of—but dinosaurs were. A tyrannosaur’s roar might drown out the yelling. A Triceratops could take me away to someplace else where we could live together.

I knew my wish could never be fulfilled. It’s not exactly a secret that all our favorite dinosaurs went extinct a long, long time ago. And yet what good is a wish if you don’t use it on something fantastic? I loved learning about our planet, all the life that has come and gone before us, but it would be ridiculous to say that my interest at five was purely academic. In my imagination, in the swamps of the Jurassic, I could stay with Brontosaurus and know I was safe. I didn’t just love dinosaurs. I needed them.