Deep in the bowels of the world’s greatest palaeontological museum, a hitherto unknown species of dinosaur has been waiting to be unveiled. Concealed behind a black cloth, it has spent the past month placed discreetly at the back of an immense storeroom filled with row after row of fossils. Some lie stored in wooden boxes like the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones films; others, less delicate, are stacked on open shelves. Horned skulls, beaked skulls, armoured skulls: all the astounding variety of late Cretaceous megafauna is arrayed amid the shadows. No more remarkable an ossuary is to be found anywhere in the world – and still the finds keep on being made.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum was founded 30 years ago, to serve as a monument to the wonders among which it stands. Back in the late Mesozoic era, the barren prairie land of the Canadian province of Alberta wore a very different aspect. Lush, steaming and lapped by shallow seas, its forests were as ideally suited to sustaining vast herds of dinosaurs as its muds and sands were to fossilising their remains. When a glacier scored a great gash across the prairie during the most recent ice age, the Cretaceous sediment and all its incomparable freight of fossils were exposed to the weathering effects of wind and rain. What the Valley of the Kings is to Egyptology, the badlands of Alberta are to palaeontology – except that they contain, unlike the Valley of the Kings, a seemingly infinite reservoir of treasures. With every storm, more of them are exposed: everything from the scattered teeth or claws of isolated specimens to the bone beds of entire herds. As a result, our knowledge of the late Mesozoic is improving exponentially, year on year. Much that was mysterious about dinosaurs is no longer so, and much that was misunderstood has been corrected. It is, as a feat of resurrectionism, as dazzling as anything in the history of science.

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Except, of course, that for many of us it still does not go far enough. Next week will see the breaking of a Mesozoic news story monstrous beyond the wildest dreams of the Royal Tyrrell Museum: the release in multiplexes across the planet of Jurassic World. The film promises to make, like the mosasaur shown in the trailer devouring a great white shark, a truly massive splash. It taps into what Michael Crichton, who devised the premise from which the plot derives in his 1990 novel Jurassic Park, identified as a near-universal yearning: to see tyrannosaurs or stegosaurs not merely as fossils, but as creatures of flesh and blood. Crichton’s genius was to identify the first plot twist in the whole of science fiction that could explain how this might be achieved in a way that verged on the almost plausible. That in reality there seems not the slightest prospect of obtaining dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes preserved in amber, let alone cloning it, did not prevent scientists from seriously debating the possibility – and that, for countless millions, was more than enough.

“We’re gonna make a fortune with this place.” So said the lawyer in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Crichton’s novel, as he gazed with mingled stupefaction and greed at the spectacle of a brachiosaur nibbling on a treetop. The sense of awe felt by the characters in Spielberg’s film was shared by all who watched it: Jurassic Park was the first time that CGI had been used to portray dinosaurs that could move freely, without the jerks of earlier screen incarnations. As a result, everyone involved with it did indeed end up making a fortune. That Jurassic World ranks as the fourth film in what has already been a wildly successful franchise suggests that there remains a rich seam of enthusiasm for dinosaurs still to be mined. For many, of course, it is precisely this quality of mass popularity that long made them seem suspect as a topic of inquiry: childish stuff, on a level with superheroes. Dinosaurs, though, have never just been for children. From the time when they were first classified, back in the days of the Napoleonic wars, up to the present, they have served as the focus for fittingly weighty themes: industrialisation, national rivalries, and survival and extinction. Their fascination reaches deep indeed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Jim Stoten

There is certainly nothing new about the instinct to marvel at giant fossils, nor to dream of putting flesh back on their bones. At the height of the Roman empire, during the reign of Tiberius, a devastating earthquake – “the worst in human memory”, according to Pliny the Elder – exposed a series of colossal skeletons. The locals, convinced that these were the remains of ancient heroes, were reluctant to desecrate their graves; but knowing of the emperor’s interest in such matters, they reverently sent him a single, massive tooth. Tiberius, eager to see with his own eyes just how large the man from which it came would have stood, commissioned a mathematician to calculate the hero’s proportions, and then to build him a scale model. The tooth – which we are informed was over a foot long – was not, of course, human, but most likely from a mastodon. Elsewhere, though, in lands where rocks bore the fossils of dinosaurs, ancient peoples were perfectly capable of recognising them as the remains of non-human creatures. In China, they were identified as dragon bones, while in North America, as the historian Adrienne Mayor has convincingly demonstrated, tales told by the Plains Indians of the Thunder Bird were inspired at least in part by the spectacle of pterosaur fossils. There seems never to have been a time nor a culture in which mysterious bones did not captivate those who beheld them.

Even in early 19th-century Britain, where dinosaurs were first dated correctly and classified, flights of imagination were at least as important to the project of conceptualising them as painstaking anatomical study. The rocks of England were not, as those of Alberta would prove to be, rich in articulated skeletons. When, in 1824, an assortment of fossilised bones and teeth discovered in the depths of various Oxfordshire quarries were assembled in one place, it was not immediately apparent from what kind of animal they had come. William Buckland, a clergyman who was also a professor of geology at Oxford University, identified them as having belonged to a massive lizard, which produced the decorous Greek translation Megalosaurus. Meanwhile, at much the same time, other no less revelatory finds were being made along the length of the south coast. In Sussex, a local doctor uncovered the fragmentary remains of what appeared to have been two more species of colossal, extinct land-reptiles: Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, as they were named. Simultaneously, in Lyme Regis, a professional fossil hunter named Mary Anning was busy demonstrating that the seas and skies of prehistoric England had been no less the haunt of remarkable monsters than had been its swamps. Many, when they inspected the long-necked plesiosaurs, the shark-like ichthyosaurs and the bat-like pterosaurs discovered by Anning, found that only the language of epic was adequate to the primordial vistas that opened up before their gaze. The family likeness of Anning’s monsters, so her biographer declared rhapsodically, was “to the evil spirits who beset Aeneas or Satan in an old illustrated Virgil or Paradise Lost”.

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Hardly the language of science – and yet even the most brilliant naturalists might find it difficult to keep their imaginations in check when contemplating the reptilian monsters that seemed once to have roamed the home counties. Richard Owen, a man as notorious for the venomous quality of his feuding as he was celebrated for founding London’s Natural History Museum, was the most lauded anatomist of his day; in 1842 he coined the term “terrible lizard” – “deinos sauros” in Greek – to describe Megalosaurus and its land-based kin. Long extinct though these creatures were, separated from the age of steam trains and power looms by vast aeons of time, they were also thrillingly cutting edge. No less than all the many wonders of engineering showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851, they seemed the very embodiments of British ingenuity and know-how. This was why, when the Crystal Palace that had been the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition was shifted from Hyde Park to the southern outskirts of London, it marked its move by commissioning scale models of dinosaurs, with the sculptor taking scientific advice from none other than Owen. The world’s first Jurassic Park was duly unveiled in 1854, with the terrifying centrepiece of the diorama a Megalosaurus. Scaly like a crocodile, squat and bulky like a rhinoceros, its menacing grin bore witness to just how well, as Buckland had observed decades previously, its teeth and jaws were “adapted to effect the work of death most speedily”.

Unsurprisingly, then, dinosaurs had already begun to escape the limits set on them by fossil collections and sculpture parks. Dickens, in Bleak House, imagined a megalosaur wandering up Holborn Hill: a fitting denizen of the monstrous, fog-wreathed metropolis that was his abiding theme. Victorian science had helped to enshrine London as the most modern city in the world. It had also opened up to the British public the dizzying immensities of geological time, giving dinosaurs a contemporaneous quality. Indeed, the fantasy that they might be brought back to life was older than the name “dinosaur” itself. In 1830, Charles Lyell had published the first volume of his groundbreaking Principles of Geology, in which he argued that the rhythms of climate change over the course of the Earth’s immeasurable history had been cyclical – and that what had been might therefore come again. “The huge iguanodon,” he wrote, “might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” Less than a decade after Buckland had named the Megalosaurus, dinosaurs were already on their way to becoming poster boys for all that was most futuristic in science.

Except that, as with railways and factories, so with dinosaurs: the British lead did not last long. In 1859, the same year that saw Darwin publish On the Origin of Species, the fossil of a dinosaur no larger than a chicken was found in Bavaria, and given the name Compsognathus – “Dainty Jaw”. Although a fraction of the size of Megalosaurus, it recognisably belonged to the same order of predator; and it suggested, to the delight of his many enemies, that Owen had got some things badly wrong. Carnivorous dinosaurs, it seemed, had not been quadrapeds, and had not been built like steam engines; rather, they had been bipedal, and with a closer physical resemblance to birds than to elephants. Another fossil found in Germany two years later brought this home to a startling and unanticipated degree: for it revealed a dinosaur much like Compsognathus, but framed with the unmistakable imprint of feathers. Owen, who promptly snapped up the specimen for the Natural History Museum, named the creature Archaeopteryx: “Primeval Feather”. It was, as one palaeontologist observed, “a strange being à la Darwin”. Darwin himself, privately exultant, was more restrained in public. Nevertheless, his sense of wonder was palpable. “Hardly any recent discovery,” he observed in a reprint of On the Origin of Species, “shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Teeth of a Megalosaurus. Photograph: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis

Even as he wrote, though, scientific knowledge of the former inhabitants of the world was on the verge of a quantum leap; for with the opening up of the western prairie lands of North America to white settlement, fossil-beds of a richness and variety beyond the imaginings of European scientists were rendered accessible to eager prospectors. As industrial supremacy began to ebb from the Old World to the New, so too did the lead in palaeontological research. The dinosaurs uncovered in the Wild West were quite as vast and earth-shaking as the ambitions of the youthful republic. Palaeontologists were borne west on the same flood of immigrants as had begun to wipe out the traditional way of life of the Plains Indians, and leave numberless herds of bison as carrion; they would think nothing of dodging Sioux war bands in their quest for fossils, nor barely contemplate the irony of picking their way through bison skeletons in their quest for Mesozoic bones. The two leading prospectors, professors Cope and Marsh, pursued one of the most vicious personal rivalries in the history of science, as their rival gangs stole or smashed up each other’s hauls. Eventually their struggle to establish a monopoly led to the ruin of both their fortunes; in a parody of his customary ruthless business practice, it was left to that arch-monopolist Andrew Carnegie to step in and take over the funding of the hunt for dinosaur bones. It was size he was interested in, colossal specimens that would match the monstrous scale of his own ego and business interests. The skeleton cast that still, for now, dominates the main hall of the Natural History Museum was a gift from him, and bears enduring witness to Mammon’s appropriation of the dinosaur: the cast of the longest animal ever to have walked the face of the Earth, its scientific name is Dipolodocus carnegii.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Barnum Brown examines dinosaur bones found in a dry lake in Wyoming in 1934. Image by Bettmann/Corbis

As the power of the United States, in the opening decades of the 20th century, took on ever more titanic proportions, so the potency of the dinosaur as metaphor kept steady pace with the country’s rise to superpower status. In 1902, a palaeontologist by the name of Barnum Brown (“Mr Bones”), famed for his showmanship, flamboyance and taste for long fur coats, discovered the first documented remains of the ultimate terrestrial predator: Tyrannosaurus rex. Brown also first revealed to the world the astonishing richness of the fossil beds of Alberta, and he didn’t let the minor detail that they were actually in Canada stop him from exploiting them for all he was worth. By 1930, thanks largely to his labours, the American Museum of Natural History in New York had assembled the largest collection of dinosaur bones on the planet – a sizeable proportion of which had been hauled all the way from Alberta. Funding for his expeditions came from the Sinclair Oil Company, which saw in the monstrous scale of Brown’s most celebrated finds a fitting image of its own corporate ambitions. Adverts adorned with dinosaurs declared, in a nod to the whiskey industry, that its premium motor oil had been “mellowed 80 million years”. As a logo, it sported a Brontosaurus.

It was a provocative tempting of fate. At least as much as for their size, dinosaurs were already celebrated for being extinct – condemned by the same processes of Darwinism that both capitalism and imperialism invoked to justify themselves. As excitement at the first great wave of discoveries faded, so public wonder at dinosaurs grew increasingly tempered by contempt. Sauropods, the long-necked, long-tailed behemoths that had appealed to both Carnegie and the Sinclair Oil Company, came to seem to an America mired in the Great Depression epitomes of ponderous failure: dun‑coloured, tail-dragging, pea-brained lumps of flesh. The word “dinosaur” itself became – and remains – a term of abuse. Although Theodor Adorno identified it with totalitarianism, and declared that the public fascination with dinosaurs, “like the repulsively humorous craze for the Loch Ness monster and the King Kong film, are collective projections of the monstrous total state”, their public image was increasingly as far removed from that of a Nazi Leviathan as could be imagined. Creatures that had made the Victorians shudder in awe ended up, in the consumerist world of the postwar west, emblematic totems of children’s appetite for kitsch. Bywords simultaneously for ferocity and evolutionary failure, they made for perfect toys. The Tyrant Lizard King was transmuted into Barney. There no longer seemed anything remotely serious about dinosaurs. In 1985, Gary Larson made witty play with their dysfunctional reputation when he drew a cartoon of an assembly-hall full of despondent saurians. “The picture’s pretty bleak, gentlemen,” a stegosaur admits from behind the podium. “The world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.”

Ironically, though, it was Larson who was behind the times. Five years earlier, a father-and-son team of scientists, Luis and Walter Alvarez, had published a paper that would end up turning on its head any notion that the dinosaurs had somehow deserved to become extinct. Thirty-five years on, the Alvarez hypothesis that a huge asteroid had smashed into planet Earth at the end of the Mesozoic era, setting the world on fire, and then leaving it shrouded in darkness for years, has been almost universally accepted. Among all the many wonders to be seen in the Royal Tyrrell Museum, none is more chilling than a small slab of rock that looks for all the world like a late Rothko: two rectangles of enpurpled black separated by a slender line of orange. The line signifies a detonation a billion times greater than the atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima: a trace element of the slaughter that separated the Mesozoic from our own, the Cenozoic. Even though palaeontologists remain divided on the question of whether the asteroid was the sole executioner of the dinosaurs, few doubt its contributory role in the most devastating mass extinction to have afflicted our planet in the past 65m years. The creatures that succumbed to it, far from being failures, seem instead to have been those that had most successfully adapted to specialised niches. The dinosaurs ended up the victims of their own success.

This was certainly the foundational thesis on which the plot of Jurassic Park depended. For much of the mid-20th century, scientists had been no less affected by the decline in the reputation of dinosaurs than the general public. Why waste a career, after all, on an evolutionary cul-de-sac? Nevertheless, there were always those palaeontologists who refused to abandon dinosaurs to cartoonists and children. The beginning of what has come to be termed the “dinosaur renaissance” is customarily dated to the 1960s, and the study of a remarkable predator named by John Ostrom, the palaeontologist who published the first monograph on it, Deinonychus: “Terrible Claw”. The neologism was well chosen: for Deinonychus, alarmingly, was shown to have used a large, sickle-like talon on the second toe of each of its two hind feet to rip apart its prey. Not only that, but it seemed to Ostrom to have operated in packs. Such a creature was patently far removed from the sluggish reptiles of convention, and it helped to trigger a dramatic process of re‑evaluation among palaeontologists. At the heart of what their chief propagandist, Bob Bakker, termed “the dinosaur heresies” was the issue of whether dinosaurs were reptiles at all. If, as Bakker argued, they were warm-blooded, then it was apparent that they would need to be reclassified as a quite separate class of vertebrate: a development freighted with taxonomic implications. No longer dead-end objects of study, dinosaurs had suddenly begun to destabilise the entire Linnaean conceptualisation of life on Earth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Making a splash … A scene from Jurassic World. Photograph: Universal/Guzelian

Among the public, however, the most immediate effect of the debate was to make dinosaurs things of wonder and terror again – fierce, fast and even on occasion smart. For the first time in many decades, popular fascination with them was not in spite of what scholars thought, but thanks to their research. In the world’s leading museums, exhibits that had long been gathering dust began to be flamboyantly remounted. In the American Museum of Natural History, a cast of a colossal sauropod was shown rearing up to protect her young; in London’s Museum of Natural History, Diplodocus carnegii ceased to drag her tail along the ground, but instead swung it over visitors’ heads like a whip. Dinosaurs in illustrations increasingly turned polychrome and active.

Above all, there was Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton, influenced by a book that had wrongly given Deinonychus the name of a turkey-sized predator named Velociraptor, enshrined the sickle-clawed killer as the ultimate pin-up girl of the dinosaur renaissance. One moment of brilliant cinema summed up the revolution: a Velociraptor, peering through the window of a locked door with fearsomely intelligent eye, then snorting on the glass, and misting it with its breath.

Jurassic Park was one of those rare science fiction films that had a profound influence on the science it was fictionalising. Just as stop-motion technology had been perfectly suited to the conception of dinosaurs as sluggish plodders, so the timely development of computer-generated imagery enabled Spielberg to conjure up a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was in keeping with cutting-edge palaeontological thinking. It was, in the opinion of François Therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, “the very best that could be done at the time”. Its influence proved correspondingly enduring. Not only did it inspire an academic boom, with palaeontology PhDs who had seen the film as children now starting to take up research posts in unprecedented numbers, but it provided scholars with a standard against which to test their own theories on how dinosaurs had functioned and behaved. To this day, even in the world’s leading museums, it is Jurassic Park that continues to provide the public with the blueprint of how they appeared.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laura Dern and Sam Neill in Juarasic Park. Photograph: MCA/Everett/Rex Features

Already, though, it is out of date. “The dinosaurs we meet as children,” the science writer Brian Switek has wittily observed, “don’t stay around for long.” Increasingly, the more that palaeontologists discover about prehistoric life, the faster their understanding of it evolves. “Skeletal reconstructions and restorations,” as Switek points out, “are often taken as the last word when they are really working hypotheses, open to change and revision.” In palaeontology, as in so much else, software invariably proves easier to update than hardware. Over the past decade, museums that once served as trophy cabinets for Brown and his ilk have begun to dust off long-forgotten specimens, and subject them to the most microscopic analysis; but their display rooms, not surprisingly, struggle to keep pace with the ground-breaking work being done in the lab. This is why, at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, where the bone beds that surround it are rich beyond the dreams of any comparable museum, the storerooms are so full of treasures. Even the most resolutely unscientific visitor would be hard-pressed to tour them and not feel gripped by the excitement of it all.

It looks, though, as if the makers of Jurassic World have turned down an invitation to the party. The synthesis of science and spectacle that made Jurassic Park so groundbreaking will not be repeated. The latest in palaeontological research, rather than being used to enhance and refine the excitement, has been brusquely set to one side. That the makers of Jurassic World have played fast and loose with the likelihood that the mosasaur had a forked tongue, or that raptors may not in fact have hunted in packs at all, will no doubt be chalked up by most palaeontologists as merely venial sins; but not every missed opportunity can so readily be forgiven. One in particular is so glaring, so palpable, and so regrettable that no one with even a passing interest in dinosaurs is likely to overlook it. At the end of Jurassic Park, the sight of pelicans flying over the sea past the survivors in their helicopter tipped a nod to what would, over the next two decades, prove the single most transformative development in palaeontology. Of the various dinosaurs glimpsed in the trailer for Jurassic World, Velociraptor and Gallimimus certainly and Tyrannosaurus probably were feather-clad. It is possible that many other species sported a down of proto-feathers – “dinofuzz” – though, as I write, the claim is being challenged. What Jurassic Park had been content to hint at is now broadly accepted by most palaeontologists as fact: that birds, rather than simply being the descendants of Compsognathus-like predators, are in fact dinosaurs themselves.

There are plenty of reasons, of course, why the makers of Jurassic World should have ducked the challenge of integrating this conceptual revolution into their plot. Issues with continuity; the difficulty of rendering feathers convincingly in CGI; a feeling (surely wrong) that a feathered tyrannosaur would simply be less scary than one with scales. It is just possible, though, that there is an additional and more intriguing factor at play: a gut suspicion that feathered dinosaurs are somehow un-American. For more than a century now, ever since the buccaneering days of Marsh and Cope, the centre of gravity in the study of dinosaurs has lain along the line of the Rockies: from Alberta all the way down to Utah. Although the wealth of the fossil beds in China and Mongolia has been known to American scientists since the 20s, when a swashbuckling prototype of Indiana Jones named Roy Chapman Andrews made the first discovery of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert, it had generally been regarded as the role of the natives to help out with the digging. All that has now changed. Chinese palaeontologists have taken firm control of their own backyard; and it is the astonishing discoveries they have made there that have done most to fuel the recognition that birds properly rank as avian dinosaurs. Now, in a portentous replay of the loss of Britain’s palaeontological lead to the United States, it is North American scientists who are playing catch-up. In the storeroom at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a pair of crates contain the fossils of two ostrich-like dinosaurs excavated in 2008 by Therrien: an adult and a juvenile Ornithomimus. Both show evidence of feathers; the first specimens in North America to be securely identified as doing so. Nowadays, where Chinese palaeontologists lead, the greatest palaeontological museum in the world can sometimes find itself following.

Meanwhile, even as multiplexes gear up for Chris Pratt and his featherless raptor packs, our knowledge of the vanished world of the Mesozoic continues to come into ever starker focus. Two days ago, the black cloth was removed from the storeroom in the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and the existence of a new dinosaur announced to the world. Regaliceratops peterhewsi was a ceratopsian: one of the multitudes of horned and frilled dinosaurs that once roamed North America. To tread the bone beds of Alberta, where the fossils of entire herds can be found scattered promiscuously across barren rock, is to feel in the most visceral manner possible the wonder of life on Earth – and its fragility. In 50 years’ time, perhaps, people will tread the plains of Africa, and muse similarly on the extinction of the elephant. Nothing in the fantasy of bringing dinosaurs back to life is as astonishing as the fact that they already exist – nor will there be anything as terrifying in Jurassic World as the likelihood that we ourselves are currently precipitating the most lethal culling of species since the end of the Cretaceous. More now than ever before, dinosaurs defy all our attempts to impose a simple metaphorical value on them. Emblems alike of success and failure, of continuity and extinction, of weirdness and familiarity, they are fit objects on to which we can project all our manifold obsessions and concerns: as mutable and contradictory as human society itself. It turns out that Jurassic Park was right: just when you think dinosaurs are pinned down, they are always breaking free.