Devouring Dinosaurs

If dinosaurs were alive today, would you be fleeing? Or feasting?

From the 1925 movie adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to the Jurassic Park franchise, dinosaurs have traditionally been imagined as voracious man-eating monsters.¹

The cover of the January 1949 issue of Amazing Stories illustrates a sensationally antagonistic and anachronistic relationship: the dinosaur as a hungry predator and people as its prey. (Ziff-Davis Publishing / J. Allen St. John, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

But in the midst of this long history, a few intriguing counterexamples stand out: Sam Moskowitz’s short story “Death of a Dinosaur” (1956), Isaac Asimov’s “A Statue for Father (1959), and the comic series “Flesh” (1977) by Pat Mills and the artist Boix. In these three stories, humans are the ones feasting on dinosaurs. What should we make of this swapping of roles? What inspired these authors to imagine dinosaurs as food? And if humans are consuming creatures long represented as fearsome fiends, does that make people the more ferocious monsters? 

Together, these stories constitute an unexpected record that reveals prevailing fear and fascination with the new forms of food that consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom encountered during these decades. These somewhat forgotten fictions about humans eating dinosaurs are, in a sense, like the fossilized dung that allows paleontologists to reconstruct past ecosystems and the diets of extinct animals.² While coprolites shed light on lost landscapes, speculative stories — when read in historical context — reveal popular attitudes to fast-changing foodscapes.³

Sam Moskowitz is mainly remembered as an early historian of science-fiction. He penned numerous biographical essays on pioneering figures of the genre, including Arthur Conan Doyle.⁴ So, when he tried his hand at writing a dinosaur story of his own, Moskowitz knew more than most about how dinosaurs had traditionally been portrayed. His “Death of a Dinosaur,” published in a 1956 issue of Amazing Stories, is set in a future where humans have established lunar colonies that rely for their subsistence on a food supply chain operated exclusively by Spaceways Frozen Food Company, Inc. But a mysterious competitor selling a delicious frozen meat marketed as dinosaur steak threatens Spaceways’ monopoly.⁵ Jackson Grimes, chairman of the Spaceways board, decides to investigate the matter himself. Perhaps he can buy out the competition… 

Grimes and his assistant Ludlow locate the competitor, travel to their headquarters, and sneak into the meat warehouse where they stumble, literally, into another world. For there, in the warehouse, they find a portal onto the prehistoric past: a verdant and swampy place where roam creatures that look reptilian. Beside the portal, 75-mm guns — the standard caliber mounted on U.S. tanks during World War II — tell the story. The dinosaur steaks are no marketing gimmick; the competitor is selling freshly hunted dinosaur meat! While Grimes and Ludlow process their discovery, a ten-ton monster “nonchalantly” crosses the portal threshold, destroys the time machine, and devours Ludlow.⁶ After a contracted safari hunter kills the predator with three blasts from a bazooka, Grimes leaves the warehouse certain that his competitor’s supply chain is irredeemably interrupted. He didn’t notice the freezer holding “row upon row of greenish-brown eggs.”⁷

Moskowitz’s story blends space age and prehistoric imaginaries, but its main themes are the frozen food industry and household technology. By the mid-1950s, when Moskowitz published his story, more than 90% of homes had a refrigerator and millions owned freezers as well.⁸ Fictional frozen dinosaur steaks encapsulate both the enthusiasm for and early concerns over the lightning success of the frozen food industry since World War II. Frozen food technology offered American households a variety of food unmatched in human history. And yet, despite enthusiasm for the convenience, there were anxieties too. Moskowitz’s frozen dinosaur steaks betray the fear that a fast-growing and poorly regulated food industry could become a black box that delivered monstrous products and, furthermore, alienated consumers from their food.

The cover of the 1959 Satellite issue that features both Isaac Asimov and Sam Moskowitz. (Renown Publications / Alex Schomburg, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Isaac Asimov published “A Statue for Father” in the February 1959 issue of Satellite. It appears to start where Moskowitz’s story ends.⁹ A theoretical physicist, who has dedicated his entire life to time travel research, eventually succeeds in opening a time portal (for a few minutes) with the help of his son. Out of that portal fall fourteen dinosaur eggs that hatch into baby T. rexes. The father and son team soon run out of funding for their time travel research but everything changes when one of the juvenile dinosaurs accidentally roasts himself by stepping across an unprotected energy field in the lab. As they “sat there in seventh heaven” devouring dinosaur, father and son smell an opportunity.¹⁰ With a bank loan secured, they open a “dinachicken” business to fund their efforts in replicating a stable time portal. While the father dies without succeeding, the business turns into a worldwide sensation. So much so that grateful customers erect a statue to honor him as “The Man Who Gave Dinachicken to the World.”¹¹

Asimov’s story is a humorous fable about serendipity and the (unintended) benefits that theoretical scientific research can yield. At the time Asimov published it, he had also been writing a series of scientific biographies reflecting on the historical connections between theory and practice, method and chance, disinterested research and business. In “A Statue for Father,” the son compares his father to William Henry Perkin, the British chemist known for having discovered the first artificial dye process while vainly attempting to produce quinine from coal tar. Summarizing Perkin’s legacy, Asimov (elsewhere) wrote that “out of his failure at that task, he snatched fame for himself and gave the world an Aladdin’s lamp of chemical wonders.”¹² 

Just as the father’s research unintentionally brought dinachicken to the world, Asimov’s story unintentionally recorded an important turning point in American food history. During the first half of the twentieth century, pork and beef consumption far outpaced that of chicken. And yet, by the mid-1950s, U.S. households ate chicken more than any other meat. A number of factors contributed to this consequential change, among which was the rationing of beef and pork, which was reserved for troops during World War II. This, in turn, encouraged techno-scientific advances to produce broilers — that is, chickens bred for meat — faster and cheaper. “The industrial bird was born (or rather, created),” at the same time Asimov imagined dinachicken taking over the world.¹³ 

During the 1960s, the public’s attention was increasingly drawn toward the environmental, health, and moral costs of the post-World War II food industry and its promises of abundance. It wasn’t only American consumers who were concerned about their new foodscape. In 1964, British writer Ruth Harrison exposed the cruelty of the factory farming industry. Of this growing industry she asked, “How far have we the right to take our domination of the animal world — in degrading these animals are we not in fact degrading ourselves?”¹⁴ Harrison’s warning prompted the government to appoint a committee whose report informed new animal welfare legislation in 1968.¹⁵

The comic series “Flesh,” which appeared in 1977 issues of the British magazine 2000 A.D., was inspired by the public’s growing awareness and ambivalent fascination for the out-of-sight cruelties of industrial farming. The story takes place in the 23rd century, when humans, who have driven nearly all animal life to extinction, must survive on synthetic foods. But novel time travel technology opens up another food frontier. The pioneering Trans-Time Corporation sends teams back into the Mesozoic Era to herd herbivorous dinosaurs into “fleshdozers” — enormous machines that turn live dinosaurs into ground meat — and transport them into the 23rd century to be sold as Bronto Burgers and other dinosaurian delicacies. 

“Flesh” follows the adventures of the rugged ranger Earl Reagan, who fights off packs of hypersalivating tyrannosaurs to defend his herd of herbivores for future human consumption. The story culminates with the Corporation’s operating station besieged by packs of tyrannosaurs and flocks of pterodactyls. Taking advantage of the division between the rangers and the Corporation’s management, the prehistoric monsters succeed in destroying the station, devouring everyone.

The comic explicitly portrays carnivorous dinosaurs as monsters.¹⁶ Their mouths, always open and drooling, are ready to close on any human that comes their way. But their apparent monstrosity is a consequence of the Corporation’s actions, starving them by stealing their food source. The gruesome operation of the fleshdozers concealed deep in the prehistoric past from the modern consumer’s eyes echoes the logic of industrial farming, where animals are packed into warehouses, hidden from the sun and the public.

“Flesh” is a cautionary tale against the excesses of such industries and the unruly consumption they encourage. Despite this moralistic ending, “Flesh” relishes in the depiction of violent encounters between humans and dinosaurs. It must have been difficult for young readers to navigate such ambiguity or to identify the dinosaurs as stand-ins for broilers and (to borrow the title of Ruth Harrisson’s 1964 exposé) other “animal machines.” 

Mid-twentieth-century stories of humans eating dinosaurs are, for those who dare take them seriously, unexpected byways into some of the historical turning points that have shaped the relationship (or lack thereof) that Western consumers have with the animals they eat today. In these three stories, imagined over-consumption of dinosaurs — an inexhaustible source of meat removed from any moral imperative — is an extension of prevailing assumptions and persistent worries. Such stories can help us reveal and face this legacy.

So, if dinosaurs were alive today, would you be fleeing? Or feasting?

1. Paul Semonin, “Empire and Extinction: The Dinosaur as a Metaphor for Dominance in Prehistoric Nature,” Leonardo 30, no. 3 (June 1997): 171-182.
2. Liu Yang, Xing Zhang, Xingbo Zhao and Hai Xiang, “The Technological Advance and Application of Coprolite Analysis,” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9 (2022): 797370.
3. Norah Mackendrick, “Foodscape,” Contexts 13, no. 3 (2014): 16-18.
4. Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (Hyperion Press, 1963).
5. Sam Moskowitz, “Death of a Dinosaur,” Amazing Stories 30, no. 8 (August 1956): 111.
6. Sam Moskowitz, “Death of a Dinosaur,” Amazing Stories 30, no. 8 (August 1956): 116.
7. Sam Moskowitz, “Death of a Dinosaur,” Amazing Stories 30, no. 8 (August 1956): 119.
8. Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 171-181.
9. Coincidentally, in this very issue of Satellite, Asimov’s story is directly followed by Moskowitz’s biographical essay on Arthur Conan Doyle.
10. Isaac Asimov, “A Statue for Father,” Satellite 3, no. 3 (February 1959): 35.
11. Isaac Asimov, “A Statue for Father,” Satellite 3, no. 3 (February 1959): 35.
12. Isaac Asimov, Breakthroughs in Science (Scholastic Book Services, 1961), 90.
13. Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (Yale University Press, 2005), 45.
14. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (CABI Press, 2013), 114.
15. Abigail Woods, “From cruelty to welfare: the emergence of farm animal welfare in Britain, 1964-71,” Endeavour 36, no. 1 (March 2012), 14-22.
16. For a detailed discussion on the depiction of dinosaurs in “Flesh,” see: Jeff Liston, “2000 A.D. and the new ‘Flesh’: First to Report the Dinosaur Renaissance in ‘Moving’ Pictures,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343 (2010), 335-360.