Dinosaur as metaphor

Metaphors are not just poetic frills, they serve an important function in communicating ideas and in innovation. They enable us to bridge the familiar and the unfamiliar. Metaphors provide a frame for making sense of the world, and for giving evaluative connotations. Dinosaurs have become enormously significant as "icons' in our culture, and metaphors based on the images of dinosaur life, and on the explanations of their extinction, permeate many areas of thinking from politics to pollution. At the same time, debates in science depend on the clash of metaphor and analogy; we can see how the history of palaeontology, and in particular the history of theories of dinosaur extinction, has drawn upon the prevailing preoccupations and metaphors of everyday life. Science feeds culture, and culture feeds science; the world of dinosaurs provides many examples of these processes. -Author