Stones To Stories: Before the Word “Dinosaur” with Natalie Lawrence (author of Enchanted Creatures)

Charles Dickens opened Bleak House with a megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill. This episode traces the stories we told about the bones in the rock before we knew what they were. I’m joined by Bexhill Museum curator Julian Porter and author Natalie Lawrence.

For the extended interview with Natalie Lawrence, you can hear it by subscribing to the Plus version of the podcast in Apple Podcasts or clicking the ‘support the show’ link below.

A huge thank you to Guy Adams for the opening narration!

Guests

Julian Porter
Curator at Bexhill Museum and author of Bexhill on Sea: A History
https://amzn.to/4wL8eQ6 (affiliated link so I might earn commission on items bought)
https://www.instagram.com/bexhill_museum?igsh=ZXh5Mm12c2R6Z2pu

Natalie Lawrence
Author of Enchanted Creatures, a history of the monsters we have made from the natural world
https://amzn.to/4dQqtuK (affiliated link so I might earn commission on items bought)
https://www.nataliejlawrence.com/
https://www.instagram.com/natalie.j.lawrence

Links

Mark Witton: Unicorns, dragons, monsters and giants
Natalie references Mark’s work in this episode, picking apart the arguments for mythological creatures being derived from fossil discoveries.
https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/04/unicorns-dragons-monsters-and-giants.html?m=1

Bexhill Museum: Dinosaurs and Geology
https://www.bexhillmuseum.org.uk/access-centre/museum-exhibitions-displays/dinosaurs-geology/

Transcript

Introduction — Bleak House & the Megalosaurus

Guy Adams 0:21

London, Mickelmer's term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's inn aw. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but nearly retired from the face of the earth. And it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus, 40 feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holburn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flicks of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes. Gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Season 2 Overview: Stones to Stories

Roland 1:02

Those are the opening lines from Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and they send an atmospheric shiver down my spine. This appearance of a dinosaur might seem a little out of place to modern readers, but dinosaurs at the time were monstrous and exotic and difficult to reckon with. What no one could have predicted was the effect these long extinct animals would have on how we understood our place in time. Over the next few months, I will be exploring the evolution of the dinosaur story. I'm Roland Squire, and this is The Pirates Don't Eat the Tourists. Season 2, Stones to Stories. And this year, I want to go further back. I want to look at the inspirations that led Michael Crichton to sit down and start writing Jurassic Park. Each episode, I'll be sitting down with a guest to discuss a piece of Dino literature. From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World to hard science fiction novels by the likes of Stephen Baxter. It's going to be a journey of discovery. To see if there are connecting threads that make up the skeleton of how we talk about dinosaurs. I'll also be talking to historians so I can try and understand the times these authors were writing from, and I really hope that you can read along with me. My first book episode will be coming out on the 15th of July, so there is plenty of time to start reading, and

Fossil Hunting on Bexhill Beach

Roland 3:10

that will be on Journey to the Centre of the Earth. This month I want to take you into the Victorian age of fossil discovery. But first, I'm going to do a bit of fossil hunting myself. So I'm currently walking along Vexhill Beach. Across the world there are like remnants of the planet's history. We have Roman settlements, Saxon forts, and even Paleolithic sites filled with arrowheads and uh cave paintings. But I'm interested in going further back, of course, back to the age of the dinosaurs. And that's what I'm trying to look for currently. Evidence of these great, great beasts close to my house. Now what I'm currently standing on is a bit of exposed bedrock. It's sort of grey in colour, but with hints of hints of a lighter blue almost coming through. And it's pockmarked with all of these tiny little holes where limpets and other small creatures have burrowed into it. Because that's important because this piece that I'm standing on has been revealed by the water and then covered daily for millions, millions of years. And it's incredible to be actually just thinking about it, standing on it now. There are pieces here. My goodness. You can see different colorations. I'm now coming across bits of the bedrock where it is brown and much, much smoother. And I just I'm getting glimpses of things that could be, but am I just wishful thinking here? Let's try down here. Oh, what's that over there? That is definitely, definitely something. So this is smooth, really smooth, and there I think I've spotted one. Let's go up here. Well, yeah, actually, if I just turned around when I first stood on it, this bit of rock, I would have seen that. That's incredible. So in amongst all of this grey rock, there is the footprint of a dinosaur. It's incredible because it looks like, you know, I'm just next to the water, it's just stepped out. There are other little now the more that I look, I can see that there's other little fragments of them about, um, if that means anything to anybody. But look on my Instagram as well for these. What I'm interested in this season is looking at the connection between those sorts of fossil finds of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals and how we tell our stories about them. But first, what I'm gonna do is, as lovely as this beach is this morning, I'm going to leave it and I'm going to head up into town, and we're going to go to the Bexhill Museum and speak to their curator, Julian. He's been the curator there for many, many years, and he's got an intense passion about the history of this town.

Bexhill Museum — Meeting Julian

Speaker 7:02

Um Pressown.

Julian 7:05

And that's Dave Rockhurst, who's also speaking, who was uh quarryman, so he's retired now. But he was able to get access to the quarry, so we get the material out. But Dave's always been brilliant. Um so rather than filling his front room up with bones, he bring them in here.

Roland 7:24

This is Julian, and I'm inside Bex Hill Museum, which is packed with interesting items from the town, and importantly for me, a ton of dinosaur fossils and actual footprints taken from the seafront.

Julian 7:41

Um

Reading the Footprints: Theropods & Iguanodontids

Julian 7:42

here.

Roland 7:44

Oh wow, so they're yeah, these are they're massive, aren't they? Well, this is the that is very bird-like, isn't it?

Julian 7:53

Yeah. So if you've got these long, narrow toes, you're dealing with a ferropod of some sort. If you've got a really chunky, rounded toe, you're probably dealing with a iguanodontium. Um yeah, I mean I've got them all over the place. Yeah. Where's a good see this would be theropod.

Roland 8:16

Oh, yeah.

Julian 8:17

And a few of these we've got some impressions or bivalves in the surface, which have been sort of squashed. Well, I suppose they didn't get it, they're probably just pushed into the mud. So that this is on pretty wet material, possibly even with a little bit of surface covering of water. Uh they might have been paddling for some of these. I've got a really weird one over here. Which it looks like the animals slipped.

Roland 8:42

Oh, yeah.

Julian 8:43

Because we have this heel heel slide. But again, it's sort of dimpled with little imprints of a small freshwater bivalve. And that's what shows the life, isn't it? This sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's a dynamic environment. You've got little things living in the water, shallow water. We know from that species that that's fresh water, so we're not dealing with a seaside environment. I mean, the rocks, there's a plenty, there's huge amounts of plant debris beds on the beach as well. So you see the evidence of the greenery that they're eating. And there are quite a few examples of fossilized charcoal as well. Oh, okay. Um, which is not dinosaur campfires, although I can't roll that out completely. It's more likely to be this these are forest fires. So we're dealing with an environment that maybe has got a very wet time of the year and a very dry time of the year, and then it just takes a sort of thunderbolt to come down, catch the woodland on fire, and you've got a forest fire environment, and that charcoal is then falling into the water and getting preserved. So you can sort of imagine herds if they wanted on running around because there's smoke all over the place.

A Cretaceous World: Forest Fires, Floodplains & Flying Reptiles

Roland 9:50

Yeah. I think this changes my view of the seafront, but also of the animals that were there at the time as well. Yeah, yeah.

Julian 9:58

I'd say encountering a footprint on the beach is is something quite special. And we're not the only place where you find them, but it it's it it it we have more luck than most. Yeah. And then we have some pterosaur remains as well that I find quite interesting that we've got things flying around.

Roland 10:14

It sort of completes the kind of Victorian image of a dinosaur landscape. There's always a ter pterosaur in the background.

Julian 10:21

Yeah. And presumably quite a noisy place as well. Yes. They're all going to be making noises of of some description. Probably not the Hollywood version of what they're going to apply.

Roland 10:31

Would you call yourself a dinosaur fan before you started?

Julian 10:36

I wouldn't. Yeah, since since childhood, I wouldn't say I was a great expert, but the enthusiasm is there. I don't think the expertise possibly is not there. Because it I mean the science is is amazing and requires a lot of work and a lot of study. Because I mean we sort of see students coming up and saying, Well, I want to get involved with this. And I'm sort of saying, Well, geology is good, but this is really biology. This is you know, knowing about rocks is great, but this is not what you're going to be studying. Uh, you're going to need to know anatomy. Because I mean the great paleontologists are anatomists.

Roland 11:08

Right. Yeah.

Julian 11:09

Um, they know about bones and they know about muscles and all that kind of good stuff, um, which you're not going to get in a geology class. No. Um But then I don't know. We're dealing with Victorians who seem to be able to do everything very well, which is Yeah, they didn't have a lot of F to do.

Roland 11:24

They didn't think.

Julian 11:26

They could you they they can scientifically describe it and then they could do a bit of beautiful watercolor object.

Roland 11:30

Yes.

Julian 11:31

They'd probably write a bit of music to go with it. Um, we're not quite up to that these days.

Roland 11:37

Aaron Ross Powell

The Victorian Fossil Record of Sussex

Roland 11:38

The first scientific paper on a dinosaur footprint from Sussex was presented to the Geological Society of London by the Reverend Edward Taggart in 1846. In 1851, local geologist Samuel Beckles reported the impressions of huge birds' feet in the cliffs to the east and west of Hastings. In 1852, he described similar footprints found on the beaches in the St. Leonard's area, and in a third paper to the Society in 1854, a further sixty impressions found at low tide here in Bex Hill. However, it wasn't until 1862 when Beckles described footprint castes from the Isle of Wight that fitted the foot of an iguanodon that the scientific community began to accept what had been dismissed as accidental concreations were in fact the footprints of dinosaurs. Is there anything in the archives from that time that kind of tells the story of Bexhill and its relationship to that discovery of the first footprints?

Bexhill Before the Seaside: Smugglers & Early Finds

Julian 12:54

If we go back to 1846, Bex Hill is completely different from the resort that we know today. There is no on-sea to Bex Hill. Back then it's what we know as Bexhill Old Town. So it's a village on the top of a hill. Uh it's not coastal. This is a farming community. Um I'm a little bit suspicious of some of the finds ascribed to Hastings may actually be Bexhill finds because the border would be fairly it would be fairly difficult to work out when you'd left Hastings and Silancia in Bexhill because you don't you wouldn't hit a promenade. Yeah. You would just be a little bit further west. Right. Um and of course we're going right back. I mean, smuggling was only stamped out locally by about 1850. So some of there might have been a few dodgy characters hanging around when Taggart was looking at dinosaur footprints, people thinking what's what's he up to?

Standing on Ancient Ground — What the Footprints Tell Us

Roland 13:45

Yeah. People walking the coastline, maybe listening to this. Is there something that you'd like them to think about it in a different way?

Julian 13:54

I think when you when you stand on a bit of exposed bedrock on the beach, you've just got to try and imagine this very, very alien world. Because you tend to think, oh, these are footprints or these are bones by the beach, so that there was a beach there when these animals were running around. And of course, that's not true at all. The the whole landscape around you would have been completely different. If you look around, you know, none of the things that you'll see, none of those hills, they're not there when these this rock is being laid down. You've you're on a sort of muddy floodplain with tropical vegetation all the way around. There's water, but it's not open sea. And you've got these some huge animals wandering around. And when you come across those footprints, you're actually meeting some of those animals from 135, 140 million years ago. And um, you know, it's unlike the bones, you're not you're not dealing with a dead animal. This is a footprint that looks almost as fresh as the animals just wandered off.

Roland 15:00

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And the immediacy of of of the footprints, I think, is is is important to people.

Julian 15:08

And if you have more than one, it gets very interesting because you can you can start making some inferences about how the animal behaved in life. Yeah. Which um is something from the bones alone is is a little bit tricky. So that then we sort of straight to stuff that isn't dinosaur. Yeah. Um and then we well, everybody's got lepidotus.

Roland 15:27

Lepidotus is an extinct rayfish of the Mesozoic era, primarily found in Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks. But they also provide a nice piece of fossil folklore.

Julian 15:40

This is a particularly interesting beech find. Oh, okay. Because that is actually the face of Lepidotus. A concretion has grown and actually held the scales in place over the skull.

Roland 15:52

Incredible.

Julian 15:53

Um so yeah, we've got about probably a metre, maybe, maybe slightly less, and that's not a massive example. And then you've got its little teeth, which we've got some lovely examples. These are the sort of toadstones of folklore. People used to think they had protective qualities that would would would greatly value those. Um so they're little weird, they just look like shotgun pellets. Um, because it's got lots and lots of them, so there's actually quite a lot to find. And it's a rather beautiful, shiny black, they would have thought of them as gemstones.

Roland 16:28

Gemstones, yeah.

Julian 16:29

Um so they they've always been prized. And again, it's this thing that people have always been finding them, but the interpretation changes over time. And the interpretation will change again. Yeah. No doubt. I mean, it's not going to stop being a big fish. I think we've got that. We've got that.

Roland 16:43

But um,

Toadstones & Lepidotus: Folklore Before Science

Roland 16:44

you know, over time I think just people's relationships to things like this and what it kind of inspires as well.

Julian 16:50

Yeah. And I think those early stories as well is just as interesting as the news. We don't we don't throw that all out. No. Uh that still remains really, really interesting.

Interview: Natalie Lawrence — Enchanted Creatures

Roland 16:59

All the way through that conversation we kept coming back to the same question about what do you call something before it has a name? The toadstones are the lepidotus teeth and the giant bird footprints of Taggart. To understand a little bit more about the stories we tell, about the fossils and animals we find, I spoke with author Natalie Lawrence, whose book Enchanted Creatures, is a fantastic look at the history of monsters. I started by asking how she began this journey.

Natalie 17:31

My background is actually it was initially in natural sciences. I was I um specialized in zoology, so I was very much a science enthusiast to begin with. And um after my undergrad, I went on to look into history and philosophy of science. So I did a master's and PhD in history and philosophy of science. And the projects that I found myself drawn towards in that were all about how we had crystallized strange and novel animals when we first encountered them in the early modern period. I was very I was very drawn to the early modern period for um for some reason, so sort of renaissance enlightenment. And I looked into animals like the birds of paradise, the pangolin, the dodo, the walrus and how naturalists had constructed them from pieces of travel logs, pieces of ancient scripture, pieces of body parts. And what they did with a lot of these animals was to turn them into something monstrous, partly because they didn't fit the categories and partly because it made them into uh symbolically valuable entities and often commercially valuable as well. That project really got me thinking about how it is that we relate to the natural world, the subjectivity that is inevitable in our interactions, even in s even in science, even in science today, and what it can tell us about us and our relationship to nature.

Tiberius, Cyclops & the Fossil Imagination

Roland 18:56

Was there was was there one like fascinating story you you came across that that you just couldn't let go of when you when you were writing the book?

Natalie 19:03

I really when I was writing the dinosaurs chapter, I really enjoyed hearing about ancient interactions with fossils and what they had done with them. So, for example, there's a story about the Emperor Tiberius who got sent a gigantic tooth, which was probably a mammoth. Apparently thought it was the head of a Cyclops or a giant, and he commissioned a mathematician to make the bust of this giant. Now, the evidence for this is a little squawk. We're talking about very secondhand evidence here for this story, so it might be completely made up. Um and there's also a lot of fabrication about Tiberius' personality in general. But I think I just I just find this I I find this idea of these images of monstrous beings being present already in our imaginations, and then people finding evidence of them and using the the evidence or the you know the the f the fossil pieces or the body parts of ancient creatures to reinforce these images. I find that it sort of typifies what I'm interested in in a way. It's it typifies the fact that we've got a lot going on in our imaginations and what we take from the real world is filtered through that view to a large degree.

Did the Myths Come Before the Bones?

Roland 20:16

Did the myth arrive with the bones, do we think? Or are the legends it's I I mean, we're talking about a very long time ago, so I'm sure it's quite difficult to unpick that.

Natalie 20:25

It's very it is, you almost can't unpick the past in quite that way. And also these are things that developed over such long periods of time that it probably there probably isn't a simple truth to it either, even if one could access it. I mean, there are certainly people like Adrian Mayer who have made arguments that you know the griffons came from Protoceratops skulls um that were unearthed. I mean, while a while an animal while a monster like a griffon doesn't really have necessarily that rich a symbolic uh depth, uh we don't really need we don't we can we can easily take elements of the ex the world of experience, the uh animals that we see around us and and things that we see around us and create wacky as hell images from them without the need for explanations like dinosaur bones. A lot of the arguments for uh mythological creatures deriving from fossil findings are quite weak. Mark Whitten has done a really good blog series on this. Um he's gone into great depth, sort of picking apart the different arguments. Um, and I think I'm fall more on that side of things. I don't I don't think that the mythological creatures were generated by fossil findings. I don't think they were an empirical derivative. I think if anything, fossil findings happened to fit or happened to accord with images that already exist, already existed culturally. And especially if you look at the the ubiquity of some images, like for example, dragons. Dragons exist in every culture across the world. And how there's been an There was a an interesting study in 2013 where they tried to create a taxonomy of the dragon myth and pin it down to an original common ancestor, like a sort of evolutionary history. An original sort of out of Africa myth that was based on a gigantic snake, for example. And I the evidence just doesn't quite accord with that, especially when you look at how diverse dragons are. So I don't think we need we don't need to rationalise these stories. I think we can we can see them as originating from us and our connection with and our experience of the world in a way that doesn't need like a a single focus.

Why We Need Monsters

Roland 22:41

Why do you think we need monsters in our society or in our imagination?

Julian 22:46

There's something about the idea of monsters existing that, you know, we we can see it in small children. They love the idea of monsters or dinosaurs existing and they love to play act and imagine that they're there. You know, we go and see monster films and you know, King Kong, etc. All of those films like we love experien we love the experience of play acting that for a short period of time. It's quite latent, I think, in modern life. You know, when you go about your day, especially if you're sort of sitting in the city or doing your your your bits and bobs during the day, you you kind of can lose connection with that. But I think we all have this capacity to feel incredible wonder and awe at the world. And monsters give form to that capacity. They ignite it uh when we when we imagine them and think about them. There is also the fact that monster making is an inherent process. It's it's it's a it's a human activity that we actually find very difficult not to do. Because you could take, well, it depends what your definition of monster is, but you could one definition is that they are just boundary-breaking things that reveal hidden hidden fears, hidden anxieties. So we are, as as we live our lives, we we are always trying to kind of suppress the things that we're anxious and worried about and deal with the things that we we kind of want to focus on. So there is a there's a degree to which just living your life as a human, you're going to create monsters subconsciously, because you're going to try and suppress things you don't want to face about yourself or about things you're experiencing or your past. And we also have a tendency, you see this in the media even, we have a tendency to split between good and bad, which is actually, I mean, if you look at the politics at the moment, it's very evident. There's very black and very black and white splitting of good and bad. It's very satisfying to do that because it makes the world seem simple. It makes one seem, you know, like you can be on the side of good and then everything else is bad. But so we have this, we have this tendency to monster even other humans, you know, make other groups of humans into monsters. So I don't think that's actually something that we can get away from very easily. And it's something that it's not it's not just that we need them, because they what they do for us is they allow us to externalize stuff we want to get rid of psychologically. It is it's that we actually can't help but make them.

Roland 25:05

Right. Yeah.

Natalie 25:06

I think animals like dinosaurs play into that archetype that we have in our minds. So they they played the same, almost the same mental or symbolic role as dragons for us. And it's that I think is a coincidence. I think almost it's it just happens that there were creatures that existed that were very like the dragons that we had imagined.

Deep Time, Religion & the Monster as Category

Roland 25:28

Yeah, and I suppose at the time there was the issue that finding these fossils and actually getting into the anxiety of deep time that was being brought up while these fossils are being found, and actually how that clashed with the politics of the day, the religion of the day, and so turning them into monsters might made them easier to deal with at that time.

Natalie 25:53

Yeah, the category of monster itself, well, while it's it's hardly a homogenous category, is a way of putting things it's like it's like a silo that you can put difficult things in. Saying something was a monster wasn't necessarily to make it a problem. It was saying, this is problematic, so I'm gonna call it a monster, and that sort of deals with it. Because if it's a monster, it doesn't need to, it doesn't need to fit. Yeah. So by its very definition, that makes it some that kind of handles the issue.

Roland 26:21

There's a quote

"Carnivorous Automata Spawned by Satan" — Thomas Hawkins

Roland 26:22

that I found that was uh by somebody called Thomas Hawkins, who called them um carnivorous automata spawned by Satan. Machines contrive from an unimaginable end worthy of a god. I'm like, good grief.

Natalie 26:38

I mean That's great. That's really good.

Roland 26:41

It's really good, yeah. And that whole thing just sums up that time, just that one phrase is just just fear, I think, as well.

Natalie 26:53

And also this idea that they are somehow like Behemoth and Leviathan, sort of creatures that have been sent by God to show that we're really not what we thought we were. Or we we really don't quite quite exist in the position we thought we existed in the natural order. And not as animals with some kin that we have some kinship with, but this kind of rate, but sort of this mechanized alienness. Um it also it's it's very much from a was it was this in the 19th century Thomas Hawkins was a 19th century yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean that's it's also from the an industrial imagination, isn't it?

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs & the Industrial Imagination

Roland 27:31

Yeah.

Natalie 27:31

This sense that you've that the world is becoming mechanized, and this is one of the fantastical things that has emerged from the change that is is happening. And because I think that's that's what you can really see with the with the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The the they're called kind of kind of like big truckey, like gigantic steam train kind of dinos that you can imagine sort of chugging along. We now have sort of Apple Mac ergonomic dinosaurs.

Godzilla & Eco-Anxiety

Roland 28:00

Yes. Exactly. I I I was interested that as kind of like the science settled, we still spin the myths around fossils and I mean just looking at something like Godzilla, w what purpose does Godzilla serve us as as as a monster?

Natalie 28:22

I think he sho he shows very much how how the the the the monster role that dinosaurs have taken, despite all of the developments in the science, the monster role that the dinosaurs have taken on, and the way that the dinosaurs are like monsters in history, are constructed beings. There's so many layers to their construction from you know the the initial paleontology, all the kind of the modelling of of how they worked, and all the all the imagination that has to feed in and fill the gaps.

Roland 28:50

Yeah.

Natalie 28:51

And those those models keep getting refined further and further, and we think closer to objective empirical data, but there's there's all you've always got to be aware that there is gonna be that that imaginative element, which scientific method considerably shrinks, but you know, not a hundred percent. He also really plays out the role that the dinosaurs have had in and and dragons have had in our mythological imagination, in that he's a he's very much a kind of an apocalypse monster. He is so he is all of the implacable, irresistible power of nature embodied in this in this creature that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, and the particular role that he plays has shifted in interesting ways over the franchise. There's been so many films, this I think it's like one of the biggest franchises ever, film franchises ever to exist, um, fittingly. Um, he started as this kind of nuclear metaphor and this horrible the sort of war-torn aftermath. Um then he's gone through different phases and been more or less friendly or enemy-like. He's had a son, you know, he's had other other um kaiju as enemies. And I think in the recent films, he really plays out our eco-anxiety and like the fear of what we have done to the world in messing in messing with the power of nature. So I think du I think dragons they represent all the elements, right? They represent water, air, fire, earth, and the kind of the the irresistible nature of fate, the irresistible nature of um of natural power. And there is something dreadful about messing with that order. And I think there's this sort of we have this sort of cultural horror of having done that and having tried to play God. And I think Godzilla, he initially represented that he initially represented what what we had done. I think now it's more the retribution or the the outcome of what we've done. And even in some of the films, the the potential for being saved. So like a kind of god rising from the earth to come and undo what we've done, he's he becomes potentially our saviour.

Jurassic Park, Dragons & the Warning Monster

Roland 31:16

And I think all of that feeds into what Crichton was writing for Jurassic Park. That existential threat of science, you know, even for a scientist, he doesn't he never uh he never comes across as somebody who actually particularly trusts scientists. So he creates monsters, dinosaurs are monsters in his books very much. I think the the connection between dragons, dinosaurs, and particularly the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and then Godzilla, they all fit that same purpose of trying to warn us. You know, they're warning us of our own misdemeanours.

Natalie 31:50

And that is what that is what monsters do. So monsters minere or monstrare to warn, to reveal. So that that is the etymological root of the word monster. Is it is a warning, a revealing warning. I think God Godzilla is in in some ways he's a monster of our omnipotence. He's a he's a monster of our uh sense of power, total power over the world. And he comes in to kind of shatter that illusion that we have. And I think that's what the dinosaurs did in the in the 19th century as well. This this you've got this mechanizing world where it felt feel like it felt like magic was possible that had never been changing rapidly. There's all this anxiety about where we sit in the in the grand scale of things. It feels like we're on top of the world and we're ruling, we're ruling the world in a new way. Um, and then the dinosaurs get unearthed and kind of it turns out that there were these incredible beasts that existed that were far more powerful and terrifying than we could have imagined anything that actually existed. Um and it kind of shook the foundations of that fantasy. And one way of dealing with that was to co-opt them. So, you know, in America, all the American dinosaurs that were on Earth, they became emblems of this new empire. But in other ways, they also became this, they became the monsters that kind of haunted what was happening as well, and this fear of them coming back, this this kind of the idea of cyclical geological time, and the fact that dinosaurs might come back and throw us off this the new throne that we've just sat on.

Roland 33:28

What what

What Do Today's Monsters Tell Us?

Roland 33:29

do the modern monsters tell us about time that we're going through, but also what the future might hold for us?

Natalie 33:36

I mean, I think the the obvious answer is that that the monsters that we're creating now are the ones that derive from our current technologies. That we feel like the world is very explored and much smaller than it is, I think. I think we feel like the world is is much more tractable than actually really it is. But in some ways the monsters are coming closer than they ever have done, and they're they're emerging from our dire our our kind of uh our the activities that we're doing in like genetic modification, etc. Creating chimeras in the lab, or creating new type new types of life with sort of cell assemblies and and uh combinations of biological and artificial minds or or entities that we we don't know where that's going to go. We don't know how much agency it's gonna have, and we don't know where we stand in relation to it. So we still have these despite all the warnings in Jurassic Park, we still have these fantasies of of having power over over other species, and they're they're almost cryptid-like in there. Because the thing we bring back won't be the thing that it was, um, most likely, if we if we manage to. Um, especially if we don't have full genomes. So in some ways it will be constructing a new it'll be constructing a new monster from the pieces that we have and our imaginations of what it should be.

Natalie's Book & Bridging Arts and Science

Roland 35:01

So you wrote um Enchanted Creatures. Who did you write that for? And what do you hope people will get out of reading it?

Natalie 35:11

I think I had this awareness that that that there's this there's this cultural split between the arts and the sciences. And I wanted to help help to help to bridge that and show actually how connected they are. And stuff starting my research in the early modern period was particularly important for this because that was a time when you had all these different kinds of truth that existed alongside one another and they weren't mutually exclusive. So you did have empirical, rational, sort of objective truths that existed because that's how people did things, they did amazing things. Um, and they, you know, they built built incredible stuff and sailed incredible distances. But then you also had the this this metaphorical view of the world, this idea of the world as a created one, which has a literal interpretation, tells God created it, but it also is the idea of generated in our experience, in our subjective experience. And I think that's an im that was actually something we've kind of lost, and we've gone fully over to this idea that everything can be scientized and rationalized, and that anything that doesn't fit into that paradigm is untrue. So we've gone to this very narrow definition of truth. And we lose a lot by doing that, and we actually we misunderstand ourselves quite fundamentally by doing that. So that was one thing I wanted that was a sort of fundamental aspect of the book that I wanted to convey, this sense that even now we do still have this uh subjective metaphorical experience of the world that we can't really get rid of, and it's part of being human and it's incredibly important to us. And that connects us to humans, all the other humans that have existed through history. And it is something that we need to be aware of and to pay attention to, and also sometimes to manage. So are you working on anything at the moment? I'm actually working, I'm having a little bit of a break from the conceptually tricky stuff. I'm working on a an anthology of mermaids for a uh one of the Bloomsbury subsidiaries. Um so it's gonna be an anthology of mermaid texts from around the world and looking at what has fed into these these images and and the roles that they play culturally. Um so some some quite a lot of overlap, but a little bit a little bit pared down and and gentler, because um I'm I'm at a stage where I don't want to be I don't want to be getting stuck into a massively complicated project right now.

Roland 37:41

That

Where to Find Natalie Lawrence

Roland 37:42

sounds really fascinating, really interesting.

Natalie 37:44

It's actually is actually really interesting. Yeah, I bet it is, yeah.

Roland 37:46

I bet it is. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat. I was wondering where was the best place people can find you online, if indeed you want them to.

Natalie 37:57

Uh yes, for certain. Um I'm on Instagram, natalie.j.lawrence, or my website is also a good way of contacting me if anyone wants to get in touch. Uh NatalieJ Lawrence.com. And they're my books available everywhere, I think, basically. So wherever you'd like to buy your books. Yeah, so I'd love yeah, I'd love to hear from anybody who's interested.

Roland 38:22

My

Outro & Preview of Next Episode

Roland 38:23

huge thanks to Natalie and to Julian for their incredible insight. If you'd like to know more, then please go to the show notes for this episode. And if you want to hear my full interview with Natalie, then you can by subscribing to the Plus version of this podcast. And each week I will be posting an extended or additional interview. But next time.

Andrew 38:46

And I think the sense of there is there is a tan there is a tangible sense of wonder with the ichthyosaurs that you sometimes pick up more than the other creatures. Because people are looking at this through the lens of creatures that were here before man, creatures that were on an on a you know in a world not fit for man. And these creatures made way because you know they were primal, they were inferior, um, they were not destined to be in the natural order of things. And I think so. A lot of the descriptions of the of the dinosaurs coming into later in the 19th century, quite wretched creatures, quite almost almost kind of almost kind of doomed and hapless.

Roland 39:25

Until then, I'll just say thank you very, very much for listening. It's great to be back and goodbye.