DRAW A T. REX: THE INTELLECTUAL INERTIA OF POPULAR SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTIONS

Ask your students to draw a T. rex. Most or all of your students will have been born significantly after the reinterpretation of theropod stance that took place in the late 1960's. Yet most of your students will likely draw an upright T. rex that looks remarkably like that in the 1905 publication by Henry Fairfield Osborn. This is an interesting example of the strong intellectual inertia of scientific conceptions that enter popular culture.

In order both to document quantitatively what we observed in museums and undergraduate classrooms, and to discuss science and the origin of common conceptions with our students, we asked students to hand in drawings of T. rex. Most of our data is from several “History of Life” classes at Ithaca College and from a variety of groups receiving educational programs from PRI's Museum of the Earth. In each drawing we measured the angle of the spine from a horizontal surface. An average angle of 50-60 degrees, with tip of tail at ground level, is found in drawings from all groups, independent of age and educational background, within about 5 degrees of the 1905 posture at 57 degrees. Modern depictions tend to be about 0 to 10 degrees.

To determine if this lack of conceptual change in the public comes from popular books that continue to depict the traditional stance, we measured over 100 T. rex images in a wide variety of books, most of them for children, published from the 1950's to today. Since 1970 a gradually increasing proportion of books have been representing T. rex with a more horizontal back. In the 1970's the distribution is bimodal, with the larger peak at 50-60 degrees and a small peak at low angles; by 2000, the modes had switched in dominance. Thus books, while slow to change, cannot account for all of this intellectual inertia. We are now testing the idea that erect T. rex stance continues to be dominant in other areas of popular experience such as inexpensive toys and in cartoonish dinosaurs.