This is Throwback Thursday #327. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks!

---

David Bressan of the History of Geology group on Facebook has an interesting post about the 1991 A&E documentary series “Dinosaur!”. Walter Cronkite was the host. Several episodes are available to watch on YouTube.

I vaguely remember watching the series when it aired. Revisiting it today is fascinating as it offers an opportunity to see what scientists knew about dinosaurs more than thirty years ago. It’s remarkable to see just how much our understanding has advanced since then.

July 17, 2009, American broadcast & journalist Walter Cronkite died on this day in New York aged 92. Famous for his reporting of the trials in Nüremberg after WWII and the Moon landing, he covered also dinosaurs.

“Digging For Dinosaurs” was a 1960 audio guide prepared by the American Museum of Natural History and narrated by Cronkite.

Then in 1991 he hosted a successful series of dinosaur documentaries named “Dinosaur!”

Riley Black wrote a nice piece (“Looking Back at A&E’s “Dinosaur!“) about the series for Smithsonian Magazine in 2011 and she had a similar impression.

In 1991, the cable channel A&E ran a four-part prehistoric extravaganza hosted by Walter Cronkite and simply called Dinosaur! I was only eight when it aired, and I remember begging my parents to stay up to watch the episodes. Irrepressible little dinosaur fan that I was, I even convinced my third grade teacher to play a tape of the first episode in class one day.

The shows made quite an impression on me. I didn’t know who they were at the time, but for years afterward I could recall seeing paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, James Farlow, Dan Chure, David Weishampel, Bob Bakker, John Ostrom, and others explain the latest fossil discoveries. From time to time, puppet dinosaurs popped up in the show. Until Jurassic Park opened two years later, Dinosaur! seared the mid-1990s image of dinosaurs onto my brain, and I was delighted when I was able to dig up the series on YouTube.

What we have learned about dinosaurs in the 20 years since I last saw the show is astounding. Viewed from our current perspective, the show is something of a cultural fossil—a preserved trace of dinosaur science just as dinomania was sweeping the cultural landscape. There is perhaps no better way to ascertain how far we have come than by watching the final episode of the series, “The Tale of a Feather.”

Walter also narrated an audio guide called “Digging for Dinosaurs” in 1960 for the American Museum of Natural History.