“Made my blood run cold,” remarks Jack Holmes, author and amateur artist, the protagonist of “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain” (1918), the first film to feature animated dinosaurs. A magical telescopic device had transported Jack back into the Jurassic and right to the frontlines of a deadly battle between a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus rex, won, of course, by the latter, the first of many similar fantastical encounters. Even if there is no proof that such a fight ever happened, T. rex bite marks found in 1996 on the fossilized pelvis of a Triceratops do indicate that these two giants, each weighing more than three well-fed hippos, weren’t buddies.
Dinosaurs are the ultimate memento mori, writes the paleontologist Steve Brusatte in “The Rise and Reign of the Mammals,” the sequel to his bestselling “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” (2018). Such titles unabashedly play on our perennial fascination with the collapse of civilizations—and the lessons to be learned from such stories, which aren’t really so different when the dramatis personae are cold-blooded reptiles instead of anxiety-ridden humans. If today’s reconstructed dinosaur skeletons are grinning at us ominously from the mothball-scented halls of natural-history museums, they also comfort us: After all, we are still here, and they, apart from their bones, are not.
