Attempting
to write about nonhuman species brings with it many challenges, among them the
difficulty of trying to represent nonhuman species accurately, and to what
extent a human writer can actually do so.
For much of the twentieth century dinosaurs functioned as a sort of
“throwaway monster” in the public conscience, something that would show up,
randomly attack jungle explorers or historically inaccurate cavemen, and then
get killed. Tyrannosaurus often had a
penguin-like waddle, when he wasn’t unfortunate enough to be played by an
iguana with a fin glued on his back. Sauropods and stegosaurs would randomly
eat meat, dinosaurs from distant time periods would encounter each other,
non-dinosaurs such as Dimetrodon
would explicitly be called “dinosaurs”, and nobody cared as long as Doug
McClure would show up and save the day in the end. During the 1970s, the “Dinosaur Renaissance”
took place in paleontology, and new discoveries were made about dinosaur
behavior and biology that contradicted earlier stereotypes. Only once Michael
Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was
published in 1990 would these discoveries influence the broader public
perception of dinosaurs.
And yet,
in creating the Garanians, a “dinosauroid” race for Spy Station, our second Forlani Saga novel, I found that many of
the “Dinosaur Renaissance” era assumptions had themselves become dated. Dale A. Russel’s original Troodon-derived dinosauroid concept did
not have any feathers; since 1982, multiple fossils of Coelurosaurian dinosaurs
have been found with fossilized feathers, therefore I decided to give the
Garanians a vestigial neck crest of feathers that would stand erect when they
were agitated. I was also fascinated
with trying to research dinosaur intelligence and brain size. The pre-Dino Renaissance belief that
dinosaurs were all dimwitted clods was clearly wrong, but beyond a very
generalized “birdlike dinosaurs were probably the most intelligent” consensus,
I had trouble finding a set of theories that were broadly agreed upon. This was made even more difficult by the lack
of research into the brains of still living archosaurs; there are far fewer
studies of avians and crocodiles than there are of mammals. With newer studies indicating surprising signs of intelligence in crocodiles, could there be potential aspects of dinosaur
behavior that our current level of scientific understanding doesn’t understand
yet?
Even the
basic dinosauroid body plan is now considered contentious in some circles. Some researchers believe that a dinosauroid
of sapient intelligence would have to use its head and feet to manipulate
objects, as the forelimbs become less used in existent ground-dwelling birds
and dinosaur groups such as the abelisaurs and tyrannosaurs. I decided on a body plan resembling Russel’s
original dinosauroid more than these; not only did numerous coelurosaur groups
such as the “raptor” dromaeosaurs and therozinosaurs retain their large
forelimbs, but I aesthetically thought that having Tashto operate a gun with
his feet would have made him more of a warrior parrot than a warrior
dinosaur. Of course, this could be my
own bias in simply wanting something that resembled my own pre-2010s notion of
what a dinosaur could be.
Part of
the nature of speculative fiction is that it is as much bound by what an author
enjoys as it is about scientific reality.
As a writer, I tried to bridge the notion of the popular Jurassic Park “raptor”, my own personal
favorite depiction of a dinosaur, with the newer insights into how dinosaurs
would have looked. This was perhaps
slightly easier with a “raptor” since this type of dinosaur was newer in the
popular imagination, and therefore more malleable, than creatures like Tyrannosaurus. Ultimately, we only know a tiny fraction of
knowledge about most given dinosaur species, and much of our expectations about
their behavior lies rooted in imagination, conjecture and (sometimes erroneous)
tradition. Regardless of whatever is
discovered about dromeosaurids in the time after Spy Station is published, I can at least take pleasure in the fact
that, unlike Jurassic World, I
bothered to put feathers on my “raptors”.
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