Dinosaurs rule the box office.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES include an image of a set of crudely made plastic dinosaurs perched on a cardboard platform atop a window seat that usually was the resting place for household plants. Before I knew the words Jurassic or Cretaceous, these toys were the center of a fantastic imaginary world in the quiescent days of the early 1950s. Based on the sales of various vinyl simulacra of the fabled prehistoric creatures, similar scenes will recur in memories 40 years from now.

Dinosaurs continue to find a special niche in the popular imagination, best evidenced by the Steven Spielberg blockbuster "Jurassic Park," a very watered-down film version of the Michael Crichton best-seller, itself very close to a reworking of the author's "Westworld," another tale of an amusement park gone awry. "Jurassic Park" is a continuation of Spielberg's catering to that "family audience" prepared to spend its money on a deluge of spin-off junk, but the film's particular success is the tapping into a preoccupation of mass culture.

Dinosaurs have created their own genre within science fiction, in part because they are science fact. They make viewers consider the thin boundaries between reality and fantasy, the possible and the improbable, like no other phenomenon. Audiences have enjoyed dinosaurs because they open the door to the fantastic in some compelling ways. Considering their eon-long hegemony (and the suddenness of their demise) on the planet, they put in perspective the arrogance of the human adventures, mankind's yearnings even for immortality.

Yet, they seem to mark a moment when the fantastic, the apocalyptic, actually was manifest. Monsters several stories tall, larger than any having creature currently on the planet, represented the sum and substance of consciousness in the domain humans now think of as theirs. From the earliest dinosaur excavations of the last century, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops always had a metaphorical function connecting them to more prosaic problems of the everyday human world.

Dinosaurs' relationship to dragons is apparent enough, but beyond their association with storybook fantasy is a closer, more primal link to the Leviathan, the great beast of the unconscious, the dark bull of the corrida, and other manifestations of the malevolent forces raging within each of us. The various screen versions of "The Lost World" or the 1960s "Journey to the Center of the Earth" seemed to have this in mind, as the journey to find these...