Dinosaur Dreams Analysis

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Claire Minton Clare Echterling English 102 August 30, 12 QCQ: Hitt, “Dinosaur Dreams: Reading the Bones of America’s Psychic Mascot” “Controversial scholarship has turned up a new interpretation of how the great-meat-eater lived, and it is so at odds with T. rex’s public persona that even scholars hate to talk about him anymore. In a sense, the scientific reality of the King of the Tyrant Lizards has laid bare our symbolic uses of him. So T. is hiding.” (Hitt, 109). The essay describes the typical American view of the T. rex as the “great-meat-eater” and “King of the Tyrant Lizards;” powerful, scary, a predator. But the theory about the true nature of the T. rex, developed by the “self credentialed iconoclast” Jack Horner, is quite at…show more content…
But why is that such an issue? Why do people have such a hard time accepting the truth about something so inconsequential to our daily lives? And while I think it is ridiculous that some people just refuse to believe it, I can understand where they are coming from. This theory about the “new” T. rex has him categorized as a scavenger, almost the exact opposite of what he claims to be, in my opinion. This “real” T. rex “was not the great predator who marauded through primordial landscapes but rather a slow, putzy scavenger that poked around the Cretaceous countryside in search of maggoty carrion” (Hitt, 109). And we’re not just taking this person’s word for it either, he has plenty of substantial evidence to back this theory up such as the physical aspects that this dinosaur has. So it should be rather easy for us to switch our way of thinking given the sound evidence that is given to us. But we don’t. We want to hold onto our previous depiction of the T. rex; fearless, powerful, terrifying. Ever since the first T. rex was found, we have made him out to be this predatory creature that he simply isn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that, we
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