Cultural depictions of dinosaurs have been numerous since the word dinosaur was coined in 1842. The non-avian dinosaurs featured in books, films, television programs, artwork, and other media have been used for both education and entertainment. The depictions range from the realistic, as in the television documentaries from the 1990s into the first decades of the 21st century, or the fantastic, as in the monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s.
The growth in interest in dinosaurs since the Dinosaur Renaissance has been accompanied by depictions made by artists working with ideas at the forefront of dinosaur science, presenting lively dinosaurs and feathered dinosaurs as these concepts were first being considered. Cultural depictions of dinosaurs have been an important means of translating scientific discoveries to the public.
Cultural depictions have also created or reinforced misconceptions about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, such as inaccurately and anachronistically portraying a sort of "prehistoric world" where many kinds of extinct animals (from the Permian animal Dimetrodon to mammoths and cavemen) lived together, and dinosaurs lived lives of constant combat. Other misconceptions reinforced by cultural depictions came from a scientific consensus that has now been overturned, such as dinosaurs being slow and unintelligent, or the use of dinosaur to describe something that is maladapted or obsolete.
Depictions are necessarily conjectural, because petrification and other fossilization mechanisms do not preserve all details. Any reconstruction is thereby an artist's view that, in order to stay within the limits of the best knowledge at the time, must necessarily be inspired by other pictures already scientifically proved.
History of depictions
Early human history to 1900: Early depictions
The classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has proposed that the profusion of literary descriptions and imagery of the griffin in Greek and Roman literature and art beginning in the 7th century BC to the 3rd century AD were influenced by observations and travelers' accounts of fossilized beaked dinosaur skeletons found in the Turpan and Junggar basins and Gobi Desert. She noted that according to Aristeas, Sophocles, Herodotus, and other ancient writers, griffins were said to inhabit and lay eggs in nests on the ground in the lands beyond the Issedonian territory of the Altai region. Tales of these griffins traveled from east to west along the silk routes. Mayor draws connections to Protoceratops, a frilled dinosaur and Psittacosaur fossils and dinosaur nests with eggs conspicuous in the Gobi, sharing features associated with griffins: sharp beaks, four legs, claws, similar size, large eyes (or eye sockets in the case of the fossils), and the neck frill of Protoceratops, with large open holes, argued as inspiring descriptions of the griffin's large ears or wings. The palaeontologist Mark Witton notes in his blog that Mayor's suggestion ignores pre-Mycenaean accounts, and has not found favour with archaeologists including N. Wyatt and T.F. Tartaron. Many Near Eastern and Minoan artworks feature imaginary composite creatures, including quadrupeds with birds' heads but these were not called "griffins" and no writings link them to strange beasts of Central Asia. There are no pre-Mycenaean or Minoan texts to relate bird-headed quadrupeds with classical griffins.
According to Mayor, Navajos used to hold ceremonies and make offerings to dinosaur tracks in Arizona. Tridactyl tracks were also featured as decorations on the costumes and rock art of the Hopi and Zuni, probably influenced by such dinosaur tracks.
The scientific study of dinosaurs began in 1820s England. In 1842, Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur, which in his vision were elephantine reptiles. An ambitious promoter of his discoveries and theories, Owen was the driving force for the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures, the first large-scale public dinosaur reconstructions (1854). These sculptures, which can still be seen today, immortalized a very early stage in the perception of dinosaurs.
The Crystal Palace sculptures were successful enough that Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen's collaborator, sold models of his sculptures and planned a second exhibition, Paleozoic Museum, for Central Park in Manhattan in the late 1860s; it was never completed due to the interference of local politics and "Boss" William Marcy Tweed.