---
title: "Don’t Denigrate The Dinosaurs"
description: "Thomas Moynihan's August 2023 Noema essay is a history of the idea that extinction is deserved, and of the slow discovery that it is not."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Thomas Moynihan"
published: "2023-08-10"
original_url: "https://www.noemamag.com/dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs/"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/noema-dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Don’t Denigrate The Dinosaurs

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Thomas Moynihan
- **Published:** 2023-08-10
- **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Essay
- **Venue:** Noema Magazine
- **Original:** https://www.noemamag.com/dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs/
- **Length:** 3.7k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan)'s August 2023 Noema essay is a history of the idea that extinction is deserved, and of the slow discovery that it is not. It is the precursor to his Antikythera work on planetary stupidity and to The History of Now, and it supplies a concept those works rely on: the historical thing, an entity that can exist only because a specific and unrepeatable past occurred. From a Greenpeace rally with a dead tyrannosaur to a 1916 papier-mâché stegosaurus protesting militarism, Moynihan shows that dinosaurs became totems of deserved obsolescence at the moment their bones were dug up, and that the same reasoning excused the extermination of species and peoples in the present. The asteroid impact hypothesis of the 1980s broke the pattern by showing that even the most successful lineages die by accident. Moynihan's conclusion is that contingency, which makes extinction a loss and humans a fluke, is also what makes culpability and agency possible.

## The argument

The essay opens with two protests a century apart that used dinosaur carcasses to mock something obsolete. Moynihan's first claim is that this habit is old and was never innocent. Victorian reviewers of the first illustrated books on "extinct monsters" regretted only the lost sport of hunting them, then moved without a pause to applauding the disappearance of African big game before Cecil Rhodes's railways. Extinction, on this view, is what happens to things that did something wrong.

The second section explains why such an attitude was thinkable. Until about three centuries ago there was no settled account of where species came from, and the prevalent one, going back to Augustine, held that they pre-exist as indestructible seeds that bloom whenever conditions allow. A French naturalist of the 1720s argued that vanished species "certainly survive" in seed and could reappear; Lorenz Oken in 1819 derived the first humans from sea slime. If complex things can arise without histories, nothing is lost when they die.

Moynihan then states his central distinction. Some things can begin to exist at any moment regardless of the past; they tend to be simple and abundant, like hydrogen. Historical things require specific prior events and will never be found outside the region where that history unfolded; they tend to be complex, remarkable, and rare, like kangaroos, cities, or satellites. Darwin showed that species are historical things, "descendants" rather than "creations," and that once the chain of generations breaks the same form never reappears. Since Earth's species are unique to Earth, each extinction is a loss to the whole cosmos.

Yet attitudes stayed callous, for two reasons Moynihan traces in parallel. Orthogenesis held that lineages age and die from within, so paleontologists read coiled ammonites and stegosaur spines as symptoms of "racial senility." Darwin himself, while admitting chance at the level of individuals, held that species are mostly driven extinct by fitter competitors, dismissed evidence of mass extinctions as artefacts of incomplete data, and wrote in 1860 that reptiles alone could re-evolve into something as intellectual as mammals. Either way, extinction was bad design or old age, never bad luck, and the same logic was applied to Indigenous peoples "improved out of existence."

The turn comes with the Alvarez iridium layer and the impact hypothesis. Dinosaurs died by accident, so a comet could not be the handmaiden of progress. Moynihan draws three consequences: humans are contingent, as Lem said in 1983; humans are precarious, and impact research fed the first models of nuclear winter; and human effects on the future are not inevitable, which is what allowed Richard Leakey to name a sixth mass extinction and assign responsibility for it. Culpability requires that the perpetrator could have acted otherwise, which is exactly what the older outlooks denied.

The close applies the lesson to ourselves. Human societies are historical things, built on precedent but open to change, so there is no congenital destiny for them, neither a doom nor an innate evil. We were the first animal to blame others for dying and the first to recognise the wrong of it, and we no longer have the excuse of ignorance.

## Section by section

### Jingo and the totem of deserved extinction

Greenpeace's tyrannosaur with the nuclear symbol on its belly; Jingo the stegosaurus touring American cities in 1916 under the slogan "All armor plate, no brains, now he's dead!" Moynihan dates dinosaurs' role as symbols of deserved obsolescence to the decades when their bones were first displayed, and uses the Victorian reviewer who slid from sauropod hunting to Rhodes's Africa as the link between prehistoric spite and contemporary extermination.

### Seeds, slime, and effortless creation

Human-caused extinction is at least 10,000 years old, but recognition of it is about 300. The section explains the seed theory and spontaneous generation, the naturalist who ran a thought experiment of universal death and predicted nature would briskly replace itself, and Oken's slime babies. Belief in effortless creation, Moynihan argues, defanged the consequences of eradication.

### Historical things and Darwin

The two-kinds-of-things distinction, Darwin on species as ennobled descendants, and the inference that Earth's species are cosmically unique. Then the persistence of callousness: Lyell in 1868 celebrating the "sword of extermination" as no exclusive prerogative of humans, orthogenesis and its paleopathology of decadent genera, and Darwin's own confidence in progress toward perfection. The section ends with the laundering of genocide as "cosmic process" and a 1930 author calling both dinosaurs and unlovely humans "necessary waste."

### From buffoons to bad luck

Will Cuppy's quip that the Age of Reptiles "was all a mistake in the first place," the 1959 Darwin centenary panel asking why man evolved from primates rather than kangaroos, and Glenn Jepsen's 1964 list of extinction hypotheses ending in "no one knows." Then the 1970s and 80s revision of dinosaurs as active and social, birds as their descendants, and the Alvarez discovery with its three consequences.

### Closing

The application to human societies as historical things, the refusal of both innate evil and inevitable vandalism, and the call for a planetary civilisation that enters symbiosis with the planet rather than parasitising it.

## Key concepts

- **Historical things** — Entities whose existence depends on specific prior events and that cannot arise elsewhere or again; species, cities, satellites, and civilisations, as against hydrogen. [Historical Things](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/historical-things)
- **Deserved obsolescence** — The assumption that whatever went extinct did something wrong; Moynihan's name for the attitude that dinosaurs were made to symbolise.
- **Orthogenesis** — The theory that lineages are propelled along an internal path from youth to senescence, so that extinction is death from within rather than from the world.
- **Contingency** — The role of accident in macroevolution, established by the impact hypothesis; for Moynihan the condition of both loss and responsibility. [One Shot (No Cosmic Replays)](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/one-shot-no-cosmic-replays)

## Connections

The essay is the direct precursor of [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) and its print companion [Are We Accidentally Building a Planetary Brain?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain), which extend the same method to the history of the world-brain idea and reach the same conclusion about errancy as the condition of wisdom. [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow) is the full-length version of the argument: there Moynihan treats Lyell's steady-state Earth, in which dinosaurs might one day return, as the outlook that the discovery of deep time and irreversibility overturned. The three works agree throughout.

The contingency thesis underwrites Bratton's [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) and [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene), which assume that intelligence is a rare and unrepeatable planetary achievement. [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) tells the history of life as a sequence of major evolutionary transitions driven by symbiogenesis, a pattern-seeking account; Moynihan's emphasis on the accident that cleared the way for mammals is a complement rather than a contradiction, but the two place different weight on chance.


## Terms used

- [Historical Things](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/historical-things)