Darwin et al. in new 2002 book

[Stephan Pickering <stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com>]

Darwin, incidentally, did mention dinosaurs in his
1859 tome (parts hurriedly rewritten and plagiarized
from Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 mss.])...but, in the
1800s, it was "Man" who was the vortex of the
scientifiction of AmeriEuropean biological thought,
the anthropomorphizing of reality (e.g., insects
became "fairies" in Victorian dreams). I heartily
recommend dino students obtain the Matthias Doerries
volume Experimenting in tongues: studies in science
and language (Stanford University Press), 208pp.
Therein is an excellent paper by J.A. Richards, The
linguistic creation of man: Charles Darwin, August
Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and the Missing Link in
19th-century evolutionary theory. 
I would recommend one study another volume (difficult
to obtain but still in print, I believe): Ape, man,
apeman: changing views since 1660, published in 1995
by Leiden University's Department of Prehistory, eds.,
Raymond Corbey and Bert Theunissen. Peter Bowler's
paper is worth the price of the volume: The geography
of extinction: biogeography and the expulsion of "ape
men" from human ancestry in the early twentieth
century. Another interesting paper is Marina Warner's
Cannibals and kings, although her scinematic data re:
1933 is inadequate and in error (on the same plane
with the George Turner egregiousness).
Having defined dinosaurs into extinction, deifying in
art and poetry swell-brained flying theropods called
"birds", the history of paleoanthropology became a
pre-Al Jolson parade of choreographed embarassments,
skull fragments and teeth on the one hand and
metaphysical "design" on the other. To be sure, it has
been during the past 20+ years that hominid
paleontology studies have begun to produce specimens
equal in scientific interest to the feathered
theropods from China. What is needed is the use of
bifurcation theory/fast-slow dynamical systems to
understand extinction processes as the result of
natural selectiion. In the 1800s, paleontology was
crippled by the "missing link" search in different
clades -- the singularity never existed, of course,
only transitional stages, stasis marked by sudden
periods of punctuation.

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