Part I: Perpetuating the Life Through Geological Time Paradigm -- Sir Humphry Davy's Volcanic Considerations of Life Through Geological Time -- Popularizing the Life-Through-Time "Paleo-Novel" -- Henry Robert Knipe: A Forgotten Paleo-Popularizer -- Dinosaur Extinctions I: When a "dinosaur book" Isn't: Henry Fairfield Osborn's Origin and Evolution of Life (1917) -- Filmic Illustrations of Life Through Geological Time -- Lovecraft's Paleontological Time Travels -- Part II: Doomsday Dinosaurs -- Dinosaur Extinctions II: Volcanoes Presage Environmental Apocalypse -- Sizing up Radiation's Unnatural Cold War Dangers -- Nuclear Dragon: Godzilla and the Cold War: 1954 -- Godzilla's Dinosaurian Origins -- Oxygen Destroyers: When Oceans Die -- "After and Before": Gorgo's Alternative Adventures -- Prehistoric Life Spawns an Environmental Movement -- Beyond the Smog Monster: Godzilla in the Anthropocene -- Part III: Man and Dinosaur as One -- Decade of the Dinosaur -- Dinosaur Extinctions III: Warning from Space: Science Fiction Becomes Scientific -- Shadow of Our Past: Evolution of the Beast -- That First Intelligence -- When Dinosauroids Speak
Summary
"As fears of human extinction escalated during the ecological movement of the 1970s, dinosaurs communicated their metaphorical message of extinction, urging us from our destructive path. Using an eclectic variety of examples, this book outlines the three-fold 'evolution' of dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters in pop culture, from their poorly understood beginnings to the 21st century"-- Provided by publisher
