The Way of the Dinosaurs
Elephant in the Room and Other Fables, 2023
Project Team:
Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy
Monica Hutton, Anhong Li, Kelly Koh
Kathryn Yusoff (Narrator), Jabari Canada (Soundtrack)
The Way of the Dinosaurs is a four-act DESIGN EARTH fable that stages Diplodocus carnegii, later nicknamed “Dippy,” across the sites of Andrew Carnegie's empire. In 1899, scientists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History exhumed the dinosaur at Carnegie Quarry in Wyoming, on land whose fossil bones were known to Native Americans long before the Great Dinosaur Rush. The bones were shipped in 130 crates to Pittsburgh, the “Steel City,” and mounted on Carnegie steel, and plaster casts of the skeleton were given to heads of state around the world. Act by act, from exhumation to assembly to reproduction, the fable arrives at the greenhouse gas emissions and extinctions of Carnegie's world today. The dinosaur becomes a medium for storing and storying environmental narratives, told in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and some poignant humor. The animation was screened at the Carnegie Museum of Art in October 2023, as part of “Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground.”
Watch the animation.