Animal point-of-view fiction (also sometimes called “xenofiction”) is a niche genre that emerged in the modern era. Both prose fiction and comics told from an animal point-of-view can offer unique insights into cultural understandings of animal behavior, nature, and the environment more broadly. This article delves specifically into dinosaur point-of-view fiction, which at times has even been written by or with support from professional paleontologists. Through several popular examples of dinosaur fiction and comics published from the 1990s to the 2010s, this article will examine how these texts illustrate how fictional representations of scientific understandings conform to or challenge dominant narratives around the natural world, gender, and power. These stories, including Stephen Bissette's unfinished comic series Tyrant (1993–1996), and Robert Bakker’s novel Raptor Red (1995), and most recently Tadd Galusha’s graphic novel Cretaceous (2019), use creative storytelling techniques to entertain readers, while also representing and participating in scientific discourses of paleontology and animal behavior.

Over the course of the past century, dinosaurs have become a mainstay of both entertainment media and scientific outreach, so much so that for dinosaur fans and the lay public, scientific understandings and cultural representations of dinosaurs may be difficult to parse out. For example, the line between science-informed paleoart and dinosaur imagery for entertainment purposes is often blurry for many audiences (Witton 2018). Since the 1990s, a niche subgenre of animal point-of-view fiction has emerged in narrative fiction and comics. These stories, including Stephen Bissette’s unfinished comic series Tyrant (1993–1996), Robert Bakker’s novel Raptor Red (1995), and most recently Tadd Galusha’s graphic novel Cretaceous (2019), use creative storytelling techniques to entertain readers, while also representing and participating in scientific discourses of paleontology and animal behavior. Like other animal stories, these texts both represent and inform public attitudes about animals and the natural world. This article will first situate dinosaur stories with the broader context of animal studies, then contextualize the relationship between animal fiction and scientific understandings, further discuss the historical and cultural frames that inform popular perceptions of dinosaurs as animals, and, finally, examine motifs that arise in selected dinosaur fiction texts. This analysis will showcase the interrelationship between scientific understandings, entertainment media, and cultural frames to better understand the ways in which these texts represent popular conceptions of animal behavior and the natural world. This article has been developed from a portion of a much larger project (Gartley 2022). In the course of this previous work, I discovered that gendered (or masculinist) and colonial ideologies have become deeply embedded within dinosaur imagery from the outset of paleontology as a distinct science; even today, these biased views of dinosaurs, and the natural world more broadly, still appear in popular representations of dinosaurs, including the texts examined in this article.

In the “Introduction to the Illustrated Animal” for the special issue of Antennae, Lisa Brown (2011) notes that both the comics form and the field of animal studies have long held an association with children and even been seen as “childish indulgence.” Brown (2011), Michael Chaney (2011), and David Herman (2016) compellingly argued that animals in comics (in addition to other literary and visual representations) offer important insights into cultural beliefs about animals, which in turn reflect and influence popular attitudes toward real-world animals, the environment, and the natural world at large. Since the early 2010s, scholarship into this intersection has grown: a 2013 special issue of Antennae, “Literary Animals Look” (edited by Robert McKay) also featured scholarship on literary and visual representations of animals and the 2017 volume Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives (edited by David Herman) specifically presented new scholarship on animal representations in comics. Individual articles and book chapters exploring nonhuman perspectives in comics have also appeared in recent years (see Herman 2012; Keen 2011; Varis 2019).

Although broadly understood as extinct, dinosaurs, along with dimetrodon, pterosaurs, and other mythologized extinct megafauna, are animals—long extinct animals, but animals nonetheless. To borrow a term from Donna Haraway (2006), dinosaurs are a kind of “boundary creature”—not quite as real as extant animals such as a cat, a dog, a great white shark, or polar bear, but certainly more real than a dragon or a unicorn. Of course, they are a very real part of the natural history of life on Earth. Although they left evidence of their lives, legacy, and existence through fossils, today dinosaurs exist almost exclusively within the human imagination. But if cultural interest in (extant) animals is a childish diversion, special attention to the cultural meanings of dinosaurs must be even more juvenile. Indeed, cultural analyses of dinosaurs such as The Last Dinosaur Book (Mitchell 1998) and Dinomania (Sax 2018) have made passing mention of the connection between children and dinosaurs. But all animals, extant and extinct alike, are subject to cultural meaning. Animals have long been attributed with human values, fantasies, prejudices, and symbolism (Malamud 2012). Through selected examples from animal fiction and comics, this article will examine the ways in which gendered and imperialist belief systems have become embedded in cultural understandings of dinosaurs, animal behavior, and the natural world.

Animal stories have a profoundly long history in literature, reaching back to oral traditions, folk tales, and fables. The term animal stories can refer to any number of different genres and subgenres, from fairy tales to narrative nonfiction. The portrayal of animals in fiction is often more representative of human values than of the characteristics and motivations of actual, living animals. In the twentieth century, some authors made efforts to create naturalist stories told from the point of view of animal characters. Despite popularity with readers, these naturalist animal stories have led to tensions and even controversy around the boundaries of fiction, the natural world, and science. While stories told from the point of view of animal characters can offer opportunities for the creator and audience to imagine nonhuman lifeworlds, distinctly human teleological beliefs about the natural world still inform storytelling, even as creators make efforts to imbue their works with scientific accuracy.

Fiction told from the perspective of real-world animal protagonists emerged as a literary genre in the modern era, and is generally attributed to the success and popularity of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty. In his survey of animal point-of-view fiction, video essayist Cardinal West explains that xenofiction includes any story told from a nonhuman perspective, and that animal xenofiction can be further divided into three branches: anthropomorphic, which features physically anthropomorphized animals (such as in The Wind in the Willows or the works of Beatrix Potter); fantasy, which features fantasy animals such as unicorns or dragons; and naturalist, which features real-world animals (West 2021).

Black Beauty, and similar novels that followed, typically featured domesticated animals and narratives that were heavily moralistic and cloaked in progressive politics. The 1898 work Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton and the works of Jack London, such as The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), moved away from the moralizing of the previous era, and sought to focus on more realistic depictions of wild animals based on scientific observations ( West 2021). Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps because of) these authors’ efforts for more realistic depictions of wild animals, they came under intense scrutiny. Naturalist John Burroughs attributed the popularity of animal stories of the time to the public’s love of both nature and fiction, but harshly criticized Thompson Seton for anthropomorphizing animal protagonists and labeled his work “sham natural history” (1903, 298). Sitting US President Theodore Roosevelt also delved into the foray, labeling authors as “nature fakers” and their work as the “yellow journalism of the woods” (1907, 428).

Nearly a century after the “nature fakers” controversy, a different kind of animal story similarly generated both praise and criticism. Although paleontologist Robert Bakker’s 1995 novel Raptor Red, told primarily from the perspective of a female Utahraptor, received positive reviews from literary critics, including a starred review from Booklist (Olson 1995), fellow scientists were less enthusiastic. David Norman, then the director of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology at the University of Cambridge, compared Bakker’s novel to “an old Walt Disney wildlife epic” in his review for Scientific American (1996, 108). The crux of Norman’s criticism is that Bakker was writing fiction as a well-known scientist and paleontologist. According to Norman, “The merging of science and fantasy is at its worst in books like Raptor Red because none but experts can disentangle fact from fiction; this type of nonsense turns an uninformed reader into a misinformed one” (109). Notably, in the same article, Norman was significantly less critical of Michael Crichton’s 1995 follow-up to Jurassic Park, The Lost World, as Crichton was known as a science fiction author.

Although animal xenofiction can be approached as a distinct genre, the niche subgenre has foundational connections to broader genres of fiction. Common motifs and conventions connect modern animal fiction to the adventure genre: generally taking place in remote or exotic settings—separated from “civilization”—and allowing a central character to undertake a challenge and become a hero (Green 1979). Like animal fiction, the adventure genre also became more closely associated with children’s literature during the twentieth century. In bookstores and libraries, animal xenofiction is often organized as a subtype of speculative fiction, often shelved alongside fantasy or science fiction. For humans to write animal characters is inherently speculative, of course, but while mythic worldbuilding with animal characters is easily accepted as fantasy, deliberately more naturalist animal stories can come under scrutiny for blurring lines between storytelling and science.

More recent approaches to science communication have problematized the distinction between storytelling and science. While the impacts and ethics of narrative storytelling and anthropomorphizing in science communication remain topics of debate, such affective engagement with science, entertainment media, and “edutainment” may be inevitable (Dahlstrom and Ho 2012; McGellin, Grand, and Sullivan 2021). Patricia Chu (2007) has argued that American animal stories, such as the work of Jack London and Bakker’s Raptor Red, are neither documentary nor nature essays. While Chu (2007) does find Bakker guilty of anthropomorphizing, Bakker’s fiction is what Chu calls a “new anthropomorphism.” In contrast to earlier works such as Sewell’s Black Beauty, which sought to emphasize the similarities between animals and humans, according to Chu, “new anthropomorphism” instead seeks to imagine and portray animals’ “otherness” by looking “through” as well as “at” animal subjects (2007, 86). Nicholas Clark (2020) challenges anxieties over the general public’s assumed inability to discern the difference between dinosaur science and fiction. Clark explains that “Bakker is recreating the raptor in the reader’s mind from scientific data so that what follows in the novel’s story reflects known science, thus creating a plausible raptor” and describes this scientifically informed fiction as “illustrated science” (2020, 212).

Clark (2020) relates Bakker’s Raptor Red to another example of illustrated science from the time: Stephen Bissette’s unfinished comic series Tyrant (1993–1996). Although Bissette is a comic artist, not a scientist or paleontologist, Clark (2020) argues that both Raptor Red and Tyrant sought to tell an imaginative dinosaur story that was engaged with scientific discourses of the time. During its short run, Tyrant included regular features in the back matter of each issue, such as letters (including occasional critiques from paleontologists) and detailed notes on Bissette’s scientific sources and creative choices. Bissette redrew the egg-laying sequence in the first issue based on early feedback (as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2) (Bissette 1994). Similarly, Bissette explained that he redrew nearly all of the third issue (all but four of the original pages remained in the printed issue) after receiving photocopies of a detailed reptile embryology text from a friend and paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada (Bissette 1996).

Figure 1. In the original draft for Tyrant #1, Bissette’s Tyrannosaurus hen was standing far too high over her nest. © 1995, 2022 Stephen R. Bissette, used with permission; S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette.

Figure 2. After receiving early feedback, Bissette redrew his Tyrannosaurus hen squatting low over her nest to lay her eggs. © 1995, 2022 Stephen R. Bissette, used with permission; S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant® is a registered trademark of Stephen R. Bissette.

As with many human endeavors, public understandings of science cannot be neatly traced to a particular point of origin, such as the science classroom or a Scientific American magazine subscription. Researchers in science communication argue that public understandings of science are multifaceted and culturally informed, and, further, have identified different methods for conceptualizing these relationships (Davies et al. 2019; Lewenstein 1995; Nisbet and Scheufele 2009; Schell 1997). Matthew Nisbet and Dietram Scheufele (2009) have argued that public perceptions and understandings of science are informed by contextual frames, or interpretive storylines and common points of reference that are culturally informed. In an earlier study, Heather Schell found that news articles, popular science books, and science fiction are “mutually, minutely entangled” (1997, 98). These contextual frames include cultural associations and stereotypes about animals and what Herman (2018) has called “folk ethologies,” or those understandings of animal behavior that circulate more or less broadly within the culture.

Contextual frames, cultural associations, and folk ethologies carry over to dinosaurs as animals as well, which inform, and are reflected in, fiction and popular representations. Imperialist and patriarchal values such as rugged individualism, a skewed notion of “survival of the fittest” overly focused on individual strength, and conquest through violence and physical prowess have become largely accepted conventions of dinosaur images. The construction of contemporary dinosaur images and narratives can be traced to early images of paleontology expeditions and scientist-adventures in the field in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Western explorers traveled to far-off lands to make scientific discoveries and excavate specimens to be shipped back to their funding institutions. Specimens such as Tyrannosaurus rex were presented as the ultimate predator, an aggressive hunter and killer—both a symbolic ideal and worthy opponent for Man the Hunter. The values held by these scientist-adventurers and their peers inevitably became deeply intertwined with broader understandings of natural history, evolution, and survival.

The narrative conventions of the wildlife film genre were developed concurrently with modern constructions of dinosaur images. Roy Chapman Andrews, an American naturalist who led a series of paleontological expeditions in Mongolia in the 1920s, traveled to Central Asia to discover dinosaur fossils, which he sent back to the United States for further research. Andrew’s “new conquest” to the region established Mongolia as an overseas department for American learning. Andrews was well known in his own time and frequently put on lectures and multimedia programs, often including film shows (Chapman and Cull 2009; Preston 1994). Similar wildlife films, newsreels, and documentaries and travelogues (“scenics’’) of the era played a key role in the celebration of empire among audiences at home (Chapman and Cull 2009). These films, then, significantly influenced the development of juvenile fiction and the adventure genre, the Disney “True-Life Adventure” nature documentaries that emerged in the late 1940s, as well as the square-jawed hero explorers that appeared in 1930s and ’40s movie serials (Chapman and Cull 2009; Chris 2006; Green 1979; “True Stories Indiana Jones” 2008). These cultural frames have influenced popular understandings of the natural world, and, in turn, associated stereotypes and genre conventions have become embedded into adventure and animal stories alike. Andrews’s colleague in New York, Henry Fairfield Osborn, claimed to have made the word dinosaur into an American household word, which is more than simple braggadocio (Sommer 2007). In particular, Osborn constructed the “now-canonical” image of Tyrannosaurus rex as a “bloodthirsty killer” (Noble 2016, 71). While Barnum Brown is credited with discovering the first fossil remains of the creature, Osborn gave the animal its name “tyrant lizard king” (Rieppel 2020, 774).

In her discussion of anthropomorphism and animal perspectives in graphic narratives, Suzanne Keen notes that animal stories of all kinds rely on cultural associations of animals; that is, readers “know perfectly well where to place the fox, tiger, and the shark, just as we recognize the traditional vulnerability of their prey” (2011, 137). Though Keen also notes that these animal stereotypes can be challenged as new scientific understandings become integrated into new narratives. While the cultural histories of the fox, tiger, or shark can be traced across generations, back hundreds, even thousands of years, dinosaurs are distinctly modern animals. Even among extant animals, an animal’s cultural context frequently comes to supersede its natural context (Malamud 2012). Unlike extant nonhuman animals that evolved on an earth that was home to humans, dinosaurs came into human consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and exist now only as human constructs.

The distinction between cultural context and natural context becomes even more muddled with dinosaurs than with other nonhuman animals. W.J.T. Mitchell (1998) argued that the two can never truly be separated, and Brian Noble (2016) has argued that scientific discourses and fiction narratives are in ongoing conversation with one another. Bakker’s Raptor Red and Bissette’s Tyrant are uniquely literal examples of this discourse: Bissette exchanged letters and correspondences with scientists and experts in the field; and in the preface and epilogue for Raptor Red, Bakker provided readers with a broad overview of the discovery and naming of Utahraptor and the fossil evidence provided by Utahraptor and related species. From Clark’s analysis, Bakker provided readers with “necessary schemata and stereotypes” for the animals in Raptor Red (2020, 209). Later graphic works from Jim Lawson, Ricardo Delgado, Ted Rechlin, and Tadd Galusha utilize these same schemata and stereotypes.

In her discussion of Pride of Baghdad, the 2006 graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Keen argues that while the story shows some sympathy toward victims of “imperial adventures,” the story nevertheless comes out of the imperial romantic tradition of animal tales such as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). According to Keen, by convention, these traditional animal stories sort animals into sympathetic and unsympathetic categories, often based on racist stereotypes, which are “kept fresh” through repeated cultural representations (Keen 2011, 138). Although Pride’s narrative focuses on characters displaced by war and features updated knowledge about animal behavior, Keen argues that this does not “erase the fundamental imperial adventure conventions. Long-memoried tortoises possess superior wisdom but resist precipitous action. Monkeys are untrustworthy. Lions are still noble even when removed from their natural habitat, even when injured or aged” (138).

By the end of the twentieth century, these early influences along with new scientific discoveries, such as John Ostrom’s description of Deinonychus as a “warm-blooded,” intelligent, and fast-moving predator shaped the narrative conventions and stereotypes of dinosaur characters in fiction (Cummings 2015). The protagonists in these dinosaur stories are large theropod predators, noble and commanding deference, but still savage and driven by hunger. Smaller theropod predators are thieves and tricksters, stealing prey, snatching eggs or nestlings, or waiting to pounce when the large predator is injured or weakened. Large herbivores are slow and dumb-witted and exist primarily to die and be eaten. Flying reptiles, such as Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus, are aloof observers of the drama unfolding below. The marine carnivore Mosasaurus is a deus ex machina, surging from the seas at just the opportune narratively climactic moment.

In Derek Bousé’s 2000 monograph Wildlife Films, he argues that “given the pervasive media image of nature as a site of action and excitement, it is not surprising that a common complaint heard in national parks is that the animals don’t seem to do anything; they just lie there” (2000, 6). Bousé observes that wildlife films are packed with Darwinian principles exaggerated or misconstrued for narrative purposes. Narratives apply “survival of the fittest” to individuals rather than the species at large, and use phrases such as “kill or be killed” and “only the strong survive.” Similarly, Cynthia Chris observes “a view of nature that revels in the survival of the fittest with the liberal ideology of individualism” in postwar wildlife films (2006, 37). Like Keen’s comparison of graphic animal narratives to the conventions of romantic imperialist adventure, Bousé connects the narrative conventions of wildlife films to the broader tradition of animal literature.

Graphic narratives in particular offer unique modalities for imagining and communicating nonhuman characters (Herman 2012; Varis 2019). Essi Varis argues that “even if one cannot truly know what and how nonhuman animals feel or think, it is always possible to depict them accurately from a behavioristic viewpoint, that is, to produce mimetic representations based on the knowledge gained by observing real nonhuman animals ‘from the outside’” (2019, 83). By loosening strict reliance on textual storytelling, readers have a new opportunity to not only look at animal characters but to imagine an animal character’s thoughts and feelings within a distinct lifeworld.

Animal xenofiction in comic form generally takes one of three narrative approaches: in some cases, animal characters communicate with each other through speech balloons, just as human characters would. Creators taking a more naturalist approach may opt to use a third-person omniscient textual narration, akin to voice-over narration common in nature documentaries. This narration can both move the story forward as well as provide opportunities to inject scientific understandings into the story. An even more nuanced approach in through “silent comics.” Silent comics include no text, but rather tell their story exclusively using visual narrative conventions of comics. Silent comics leave a greater portion of the narrative open to interpretation and allow the reader to take on a greater role in constructing meaning (Junqua 2015; Postema 2017).

Bissette’s Tyrant series, and similar titles such as Lawson’s Paleo comic book series (2001–2004) and Rechlin’s graphic novels,¹ include textual narration that provides educative details about the setting or animals featured and at times imbue the dinosaur characters with thoughts and feelings. Issue three of Tyrant takes place almost entirely within a developing T. rex egg. The issue begins by explaining, “The egg incubates in a humid oven of sand and decaying vegetation. This subsurface cradle stabilizes temperature and minimizes dehydration, but there is little oxygen in this environment” (Bissette 1995, 1), and later, as the hatchling emerges from the egg, the narration describes the mother T. rex as clearing “the confining earth away with infinite patience and care” (20).

By contrast, Delgado’s The Age of Reptiles comic book series (which includes several arcs between 1993 and 2015)² and Galusha’s graphic novel Cretaceous (2019) are silent comics. As seen in Figure 3, Delgado uses comic conventions to depict motion, gesture, and sound. In the first panel, the three heads of the singular T. rex is a recognizable comic book convention, which readers will interpret as the animal moving its head back and forth. Similarly, Delgado uses lines to depict the T.rex’s movement, and a visible cloud to show the Triceratops’s threatening snort, and lastly, a scribbled line from the Tyrannosaur’s mouth, representing the animal’s unhappy sound as it retreats to the forest. However, meaning in comics is created not just from individual images; the sequence of these images from panel to panel. Scott McCloud ([1993] 2007) has argued that comics create meaning in the “gutter,” or the blank space between panels, similar to montage in cinema. The reader mentally constructs continuity by interpreting the relationship between one image and the next, a concept McCloud calls “closure.” In the scene from the story “The Journey” in Figure 3, Delgado alternates between subjects from panel to panel, and between wide shots of the broader scene and close ups of the Tyrannosaurus and an individual Triceratops. This cinematic-style sequence allows the reader to imagine the perspective and feelings of the steadfast Triceratops and the frustrated T. rex, and further discern that the T. rex has evaluated the situation and opted to retreat when faced with the stubborn line of the Triceratops herd.

Figure 3. Ricardo Delgado depicts a confrontation between a Tyrannosaurus and a herd of Triceratops in the “The Journey” arc of Age of Reptiles. Age of Reptiles © Ricardo Delgado 2011. Used with artist permission.

Both narrative styles—those with omniscient narration and silent comics—allow creators to blend elements of creative storytelling with both specific scientific details and broad understandings about the natural world and animal behavior.

Varis argues that storytelling through these visual devices and narrative conventions allows for “subjective experiences without verbalizing them, which is especially important when aiming for mimetic depiction of the experiences of creatures that do not think or communicate in written or spoken language” (Varis 2019, 90). However, this strategy may not allow for complete departure from anthropomorphizing or reliance on cultural associations. Varis notes that because human readers are “fine-tuned by the evolution to infer mental states of other humans,” some anthropomorphizing is likely unavoidable (83).

Adventure genre motifs of action and excitement, and specifically violence and competition, have been attributed to the dinosaurs depicted in the selection of narratives I have selected. The violence and killing is strangely anthropomorphized to the degree that the animals do not hunt or kill just for survival, but out of revenge or even spite. In Delgado’s first arc of The Age of Reptiles, later published as “Tribal Warfare” in the collected edition, a Tyrannosaurus steals the kill of a pack of Deinonychus, prompting both groups to become engaged in an ongoing quest for revenge until both packs are almost completely annihilated.

These texts both showcase and inform folk ethologies, or popular understandings of dinosaur behavior. Narrative motifs have grown out of discourses between scientific understandings and fictional narratives, which may be viewed as folk ethologies in the naturalist dinosaur xenofiction texts examined here. For example, infanticide is a plot device repeatedly featured in these narratives. In Bakker’s novel, the titular character must worry about her new mate threatening her sister’s chicks:

Raptor Red is close to loving her male consort. But she knows the young male might kill her sister’s chicks. And if he tries to, Raptor Red will kill him.

The crime of infanticide is built into the Utahraptor family system, as it is throughout nature. Male genes demand it. What’s a male to do if his consort already has young from a previous mating? Those chicks don’t carry his genes. The cruel arithmetic is this: The male will help his own genes by killing the young that aren’t his, so he and his mate can get started raising a new brood. (Bakker 1995, 134–35)

Bissette’s unfinished series features only the female Tyrannosaurus hen caring for her nest with little reference to the males of the species. Infanticide by males is alluded to Lawson’s Paleo stories, notably “Loner,” a new story for the 2016 collected edition. Delgado dramatically depicts the male Spinosaurusaurus killing his mate’s offspring upon arrival to her nest (Figure 4 and Figure 5) in the 2015 Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians. Galusha’s Cretaceous is a notable exception; Galusha’s silent comic features both Tyrannosaur parents caring for their nestlings, which is more in line with current understandings of Tyrannosaur behavior.

Figure 4: A male Spinosaurusaurus comes to his new mate’s nest to discover nestlings from a previous coupling. Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians © Ricardo Delgado 2015. Used with artist permission.

Figure 5: The male Spinosaurusaurus kills his new mate’s nestlings. Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians © Ricardo Delgado 2015. Used with artist permission.

Notably, infanticide as a reproductive strategy as observed in extant animals is specific to mammals, but even among mammals, the practice is far from universal (Lukas and Huchard 2014). In contrast, many species of birds (the extant animals most closely related to the theropod dinosaurs depicted in these stories) frequently raise young that have no genetic connection to one (or in some cases either) parent. In her examination of gender and sexuality in nature, Evolution’s Rainbow, evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden (2013) noted that when male wattled jacanas (a wading bird found in Central and South America) were observed raising the young of other males, the (male) investigators described the birds as being “cuckolded” and wrote that, “It’s about as bad as it can be for these guys” (Dr. Peter Wrege, quoted in Roughgarden 2013, 83). Roughgarden argues that the reverse scenario would be unlikely to elicit such outrage and goes on to critique the moralizing of animal behavior. Roughgarden’s work highlights the ways in which Western cultural values, specifically in regards to gender and sex, have been embedded within natural sciences.

Haraway has written that “the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences” (1991, 8). This principle of domination has emerged in this folk ethology of male theropod dinosaurs practicing infanticide, as well as in patterns in the portrayal of dominance hierarchy in hunting packs. All of the texts mentioned here, to varying degrees, portray dominance hierarchy, including an “alpha” individual, among hunting packs of theropod carnivores. This hierarchical social structure appears to be drawn from the folk ethology of the wolf pack and the “alpha male.” While popular and often repeated, this understanding of wolf or canine social dynamics is effectively pseudoscience and is based upon observations of non-natural assortments of captive wolves (Kjørstad 2021; Mech 1999). L. David Mech, the biologist who popularized the theory in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, has since described this theory as “misinformation” and has published updated articles refuting the previous claim (Mech 1999, 2008).

This narrative convention has become so deeply entrenched that some authors have made attempts to subvert the stereotype through “alpha female” pack leaders. In Bakker’s novel, the titular Raptor Red belongs to a new generation of Utahraptors that have moved away from the male dominance of their forebears. Delgado’s sketches in the 2011 collected edition of The Age of Reptiles include a character sketch of a Deinonychus he names Quetzal. In the character notes, Delgado describes Quetzal as the “pride leader” and “dominant female,” who is “tough, fearless” and “leads in hunting expeditions” (2011, 390).

Lawson and Rechlin seem to be the most explicit in portraying the “alpha female” within the narrative. In Lawson’s “Loner,” the solo male Tyrannosaurus protagonist is shown as being subordinate to his mother and two sisters. As an adult, the lone Tyrannosaurus goes on to kill other dinosaur families, eventually kills his own mother, and briefly adopts another young male Tyrannosaurus before being crushed and killed by a boulder himself (Lawson 2016). Rechlin’s graphic novel Jurassic (2017) is less emotionally fraught in depicting the “Big Female” Allosaurus who eats before the males in her pack.

While there are certainly extant species in which the females tend to be larger than males, the phenomena is uncommon enough that biologists refer to it as “reversed sexual size dimorphism” or RSD. However, one taxonomic group where RSD is common is among birds of prey (raptors). The reasons for this size difference are subject to much debate. One common hypothesis is that females became larger in order to defend themselves against potentially aggressive males (Amadon 1975; Ehrlich, Dobkin, and Wheye 1988). Another hypothesis posits that due to size differences, male and female raptors hunt different prey and thus avoid competing with each other for food (Ehrlich, Dobkin, and Wheye 1988; Ganbold et al. 2019). Yet another hypothesis suggests that if the female bird is primarily responsible for guarding the nest and eggs, then she will be the heavier sex, and her greater size is adaptive independent of the male birds (Schoenjahn, Pavey, and Walter 2020). Keen argued that animal stereotypes could be challenged as new scientific understandings become integrated into new narratives. In this regard, Bakker’s female Utahraptors seem to align with the hypothesis that female raptors adapted to counter the aggression of males. (Although the threat of males to chicks is still questionable, as by the 1970s, male birds of prey had been observed incubating eggs and caring for young [Amadon 1975].)

The other narratives discussed here as part of the folk ethology of dinosaur behavior have no apparent connection to new or existing scientific theories or hypotheses. The “alpha females” in these texts are not shown hunting different prey than their male counterparts or brooding and guarding the nest. Rather, these creators seem to have fallen victim to the problem of the male author writing the “strong female character.” Rather than deconstructing gender roles and character agency, these creators simply take hypermasculine qualities such as physical prowess, aggressiveness, and domination and apply them to a female character. The principle of domination within the narrative and folk ethologies remains intact.

This analysis is not intended as a criticism or rebuke of the authors’ “inaccurate” dinosaurs or “sham natural history,” as these works are neither documentary or nature essays, but fiction for entertainment. Indeed, the titles and series discussed in this article are quite well loved by readers and book critics alike (Scientific American notwithstanding). The affection that so many have for these texts, as with the popularity of animal stories more broadly, is specifically why such analysis is warranted. The works discussed here illustrate the ways in which animal fiction both represents and informs public understandings of science and the natural world.

Dinosaurs abound within popular culture and have been a staple of public science outreach, such as natural history museum exhibits and pop science articles, since Osborn’s work at the American Museum of Natural History a century ago. The frequently blurred line between scientific paleoart and dinosaur imagery for entertainment purposes has become a point of frustration for scientists, artists, and educators (Witton 2018). Although the impacts and ethics of narrative and anthropomorphizing in science communication are topics of some debate, to a certain degree such affective engagement with science, entertainment media, and “edutainment” may be inevitable (Dahlstrom and Ho 2012; McGellin, Grand, and Sullivan 2021).

Naturalist animal xenofiction, and graphic narratives in particular, allow the creator to explore the imagined experiences and mind-worlds of dinosaurs as once-living animals. While creators may engage with scientific discourses and knowledge to varying degrees, all of these texts are both participants in and examples of the cultural associations, narrative conventions, and folk ethology of dinosaurs. Herman argued that the study of animal comics could “shed light on how the members of a culture or subculture engage in informal theorizing about nonhuman minds, revealing ways in which such theorizing has become entrenched in (and enabled by) the storytelling traditions associated with that (sub)culture” (2012, 94–95). Readers, in turn, can take on the perspective of the dinosaur character and empathize with the animal in a way that is unique to fiction. Graphic narratives, and silent comics in particular, allow the reader the freedom to interpret body language, facial expressions, and other visual cues and construct meaning as the story unfolds panel by panel.

Nonhuman animals are such a common feature across media and literature that their ubiquity often renders them oddly invisible. In the first essay featured in John Berger’s 1980 anthology About Looking, Berger poses the question, “Why look at animals?” While Berger may not have been the first to consider looking at animals, in the intervening decades, significant scholarship has delved into the myriad ways in which human representations of animals reflect cultural values, belief systems, and understandings of the natural world (Malamud 2012; McHugh 2011; McHugh, McKay, and Miller 2021; Molloy 2011). In recent years, further research has specifically examined the roles of animals in comics and graphic narratives (Brown 2011; Chaney 2011; Herman 2017; Keen 2011; Varis 2019). These scholars and others have effectively argued that our animal images and narratives have much to tell us about ourselves. As noted in the introduction, this article was developed from a larger project that looked at dinosaurs in media and literature, and my hope is that this article may, in part, demonstrate that dinosaurs, too, are worth looking at.

I wish to thank both Stephen Bissette and Ricardo Delgado for granting permission to use images of their work in this article. I also want to express my thanks to Aras Ozgun for the ongoing support with this project, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and comments.

¹ Lawson’s Paleo comic series originally ran from 2001 to 2004 and was later published as a collected volume; see Lawson 2016.

² Delgado’s Age of Reptiles comic series ran for three different story arcs (“Tribal Warfare,” “The Hunt,” and “The Journey”) between 1993 and 2010, which were later published as a collected volume; the fourth story arc “Ancient Egyptians” was published in trade paperback in 2016; see Delgado 2011, 2016.

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Luke-Elizabeth (Liz) Gartley is an instructional librarian whose research is focused on the intersections of popular culture, representations of non-human animals, and public engagement with science.