Overview

In this remarkable interdisciplinary study, anthropologist Brian Noble traces how dinosaurs and their natural worlds are articulated into being by the action of specimens and humans together. Following the complex exchanges of palaeontologists, museums specialists, film- and media-makers, science fiction writers, and their diverse publics, he witnesses how fossil remains are taken from their partial state and re-composed into astonishingly precise, animated presences within the modern world, with profound political consequences. Articulating Dinosaurs examines the resurrecting of two of the most iconic and gendered of dinosaurs. First Noble traces the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex (the ""king of the tyrant lizards"") in the early twentieth-century scientific, literary, and filmic cross-currents associated with the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Then he offers his detailed ethnographic study of the multi-media, model-making, curatorial, and laboratory preparation work behind the Royal Ontario Museum's ground-breaking 1990s exhibit of Maiasaura (the ""good mother lizard""). Setting the exhibits at the AMNH and the ROM against each other, Noble is able to place the political natures of T. rex and Maiasaura into high relief and to raise vital questions about how our choices make a difference in what comes to count as ""nature."" An original and illuminating study of science, culture, and museums, Articulating Dinosaurs is a remarkable look at not just how we visualize the prehistoric past, but how we make it palpable in our everyday lives.

Full Product Details

Author:   Brian Noble
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.10cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.770kg
ISBN:  

9781442627055

ISBN 10:   1442627050
Pages:   512
Publication Date:   07 July 2016
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

1 / Can there Really be an Anthropology of Dinosaurs? Part One / Animating the Tyrant Kingdoms 2 / Materializing Mesozoic Time/Space 3 / Land of the Fear, Home of the Bravado 4 / Animating Tyrannosaurus rex, Modelling the Perfect Race 5 / Politics/Natures: All the Way Down 6/ Vestiges of the Lost World: Recirculating the Tyrant Nexus 7 / Phantasmatics in the Systematics of Life Part Two / Articulating the Good Mother Lizard 8 / Articulating Maiasaura peeblesorum 9 / “A Real Sense of a Dynamic Process” 10 / A Really Big Jurassic Place 11 / Need to Say, Need to Know 12 / The Difference a Lab can Make 13 / A Perfect Time for Raising a Family 14 / Technotheatrical Natures 15 / Mirabile dictu! 16 / “Just Trying to Be a Scientist”

Reviews

'It's about time such inventiveness was studied so seriously!... Highly recommended. All levels/libraries' -- A.F. Roberts Choice Magazine vol 54:07:2017

‘It’s about time such inventiveness was studied so seriously!... Highly recommended. All levels/libraries’ -- A.F. Roberts * Choice Magazine vol 54:07:2017 * ‘This book provides an immensity of intimate detail that will be of significant value to scholars of museum studies.’ -- Richard Fallon * Museum and Society vol 15:02:2017 * ‘I found this volume engaging and provocative and look forward to my next paleontology museum visit.’ -- Robert L. Anemone * American Ethnologist vol 44:02:2017 * ""[This book] addresses readerships from different fields and is itself informed by a variety of theoretical positions ranging from social anthropology and gender theory to actor network theory, as well as science and technology studies, museum studies, and cultural studies."" -- Mereike Vennen, Technical University of Berlin * Isis, vol 109:4 *

Author Information

Brian Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University.

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