Dressing up with Dinos

In 2013, the Field Museum of Natural History opened the limited-time-only Caves of Lascaux exhibit – a life-sized, interactive reconstruction of the Paleolithic art discovered in winding caverns near the French town of Montignac in 1940. In the 70 years since this site was stumbled upon, we modern humans have obsessed over this discovery – so much so that the original caves were closed to visitors after extreme crowds damaged the estimated 17,000 year-old paintings.

The paintings are beautiful, but the draw of the site comes from something more complex than mere beauty. Trying to comprehend that our ancient ancestors created art, and trying to answer the eternal question of why they did so.  The caves are home to layers and layers of animal images including bison, equine, birds, cattle and felines. Did these early humans want to tell stories, communicate with the gods, or record information for future generations? How much like us were they?

For as long as humans have been creating art, we have been creating art that depicts animals,  emphasizing important relationships between species.  We can imagine that the men and women of Lascaux painted animals they feared, hunted, or worshipped – but we’ll never know. We do know that modern humans continue to represent animals that intrigue and fascinate us in all facets of art, including traditional art, clothing and tattoos. We see images of Big cats, birds and, as this blog aims to highlight - dinosaurs.  The dinosaur even has a special place in modern jewelry.  In fact, a quick Google result for “Dinosaur Jewelry” reveals about 5,940,000 results.  Almost 6 million hits for jewelry depicting dinosaurs. Skimming these hits shows that although some of these pieces are for kids:

Many of these beautifully crafted pieces are made for adults. For as much as dinosaurs are still often seen as a “boy’s interest,” these tiny triceratops earrings, delicate apatosaurus pendant, and herbivorous anklets are clearly geared toward gals.

The customers of these many online retailers cannot only be paleontologists, amateur dinophiles, and Ms. Frizzle .  Regular people must be also purchasing dinosaur themed accessories. 

Why do regular folks desire dinosaur jewelry? Do the ancient secrets of dinosaurs evoke some kind of sexy aura of mystery? Is the diminutive size of these shrunken dinos just too adorable to resist?

Is being into dinosaurs suddenly hip? Man, I hope that's it.