dinomania on the decline

[dyno77]

Unless you a particular type of dinosaur fan ,these type of things probably never come to mind ever...
Back in the late 1980s dinomania was huge,and into the early 1990s ....It was a huge deal and the closest comparison now is anytime jurassic world films get released...
There was so much books,videos,toys,documentaries,news reports ,interviews,and exhibitions ect,and all this was before the first jurassic park....
In this era the hype for jurassic world films is nowhere near how big dinomania was or even the hype around the first jurassic park at least in my view and i was around back then...The overall hype is way less despite the amount of merchandise being greater....
Dinomania was huge ,because before then the last time dinosaurs were popular was the early 20th century...and it shows in the lack of documentaries and reports in particular,which have declined in recent years and i mentioned that earlier....
Unless im missing something i dont see dinosaurs being as popular as they once where ,there is next to no new docs or features and the short videos made by fans and enthusiasts are all fine and well...its only when jurassic world 2 or 3 comes around and even then the hype is nowhere near as big as even jurassic park 3....Even around that time the hype was far greater than any jurassic flim now and that shows me dinosaurs arent big of a deal as they once where,it doesn't matter if they making 100 discoveries every week ,the funding the museums get is next to nothing...
With this said i know elsewhere outside of europe they are bigger deal but nowhere near as big as they once were...

[Newt]

Public enthusiasm for any topic will wax and wane. Remember when everybody was talking about the Higgs bosun and particle colliders? Now you don't hear anything about particle physics unless you seek it out. I'm 40 and I've already seen multiple waves of interest come and go in such areas as paranormal topics (UFOs, cryptids, psychic powers); film and literature genres (vampires, high fantasy, superheros); and of course clothing (though we can hope the comically oversized pants popular when I was in high school don't come back around again).


I think it's also possible that no topics will again achieve the kind of mass enthusiasm that dinosaurs, among others, achieved in the 1980s and 90s. Mass media in those days had massive influence, but there were still only a relative handful of media outlets, so it was easy for a topic to blow up. These days people have more choice in what media they consume, so the influence of each media outlet is lessened and "mania" is harder to achieve. Similarly, if you look at a list of the best-selling albums of all time, they are virtually all from the 70s, 80s, and 90s (Adele's 21, from 2011, is the sole representative from this millennium). There are more music consumers than ever, but they have more choice about what music they consume and how they consume it, so it is increasingly difficult for one record to move 20 or 30 million copies.

[ceratopsian]

I was in my 20s in the 1980s and interested in dinosaurs (as I had been from childhood).  Frankly as far as my recollections go it wasn't such a big thing generally.  Far fewer palaeontologists working in the field.  Far fewer dinosaurs being described.  Yes, books etc came out occasionally - but few enough that the appearance of one was pretty special and one snapped it up.  I belonged to the Dinosaur Society in the UK and it struggled to find members, though I went on a couple of excellent field trips with them.  My friends in the 1980s and 1990s were no more interested in dinosaurs than my friends are now (and no, they are not all the same people as then!)  There were not wall-to-wall exhibitions.  Of course I went to the NHM's Dino-Birds exhibition based around the discovery of feathers (and indeed I own some original artwork from that exhibition).  But in general there weren't readily available temporary dinosaur exhibitions being staged at museums.  By comparison, in the last few years in the UK we have had the Dinosaurs of China exhibition in Nottingham, the Trix exhibition in Glasgow and the current Tyrannosaurus rex exhibition in Nottingham, plus I went to the Luis Rey egg/nesting exhibition at the Horniman.  The NHM also bought "Sophie", of course.  There wasn't wall-to-wall dinosaur coverage in newspapers or on the TV.  And of course the choice of models for model enthusiasts to buy was much more limited compared to the present day.  I've travelled in the last few years several times to France/Germany on holidays organised to include dinosaurs by geology societies.  I've travelled on commercially available holidays to the USA and China that were organised round dinosaurs.  But for Covid, I'd have been travelling to  Argentina this autumn on a commercially available holiday based around dinosaurs.  You wouldn't have found such things offered in the 1980s and 1990s.

[RobinGoodfellow]

From a strictly collector point-of-view, we're now living a golden-age :  so many figures, models, toys, resin kits, statues are available nowadays..
It was not so in 1980/1990.

[Gwangi]

I couldn't have asked to grow up at a better time than in the 80's and 90's during "Dinomania", I'm nostalgic for it, and I miss it. That said, I think dinosaurs are more popular than ever and there's more dinosaur content than ever before. Dinosaur popularity is just more low key now, more underground, you could say. Books, collectibles, Youtube channels, video games, conventions, online forums and groups...all those things are flourishing where dinosaurs are concerned. And the Jurassic World franchise is HUGE, for better or worse. Jurassic World was the first film to collect over $500 million in a single weekend. Dinomania is going strong, it's just in a different way. Really the only thing missing are good dinosaur documentaries, that's a niche that needs to be filled. But at the same time we have the Dinosauria series, Your Dinosaurs are Wrong, PBS Eons, E.D.G.E, all of which are probably better than any mainstream documentary could ever be.

[Shonisaurus]

My sincere opinion: that today more than ever there is a golden age in terms of interest in dinosaurs, in the 80s when I asked in toy stores about dinosaurs they took me for a madman or rather for a strange person or extravagant because dinosaurs were not treated in dinosaur stores or they were unaware of such products. Now it is normal to talk about dinosaurs and children and adults are more familiar in the prehistoric world, honestly now adult and children's books and toy or resin dinosaur products are more sophisticated and realistic.

With all due respect in the world, I understand that today more than ever dinosaurs and the world related to them are loved, even the Paleozoic and Cenozoic have taken a leading role that they did not have before.

The BBC has done dinosaur series like BBC's Planet Dinosaur that outperform WWD. Honestly, we are very lucky because of the times in which we live on discoveries and popularity in relation to dinosaurs. Honestly, in my case, I would not want for anything in the world to go back to the 80s or 90s when it comes to the prehistoric world. Now there is much more interest in dinosaurs and the prehistoric world and people are much better informed even those who are not collectors and are not experts. If I had been given the choice to be born between the 70s, 80s or 90s, I would choose now when it comes to the prehistoric world.

[ceratopsian]

And speaking of documentaries, there is a documentary in the works with David Attenborough on the North Dakota Hell Creek Tanis site.  So some are still being produced

[Halichoeres]

I wasn't aware of the Hell Creek doc in the works, something to look forward to. There is a lot of documentary content these days, although it is hard to imagine something as immersive and lushly produced as WWD being released now. Still, in most respects paleo media seems more abundant and accessible than ever. The Dinomania of the 90s has as its fruit a whole generation of paleontologists and paleo-enthusiasts now early in their careers.

Besides major story-type docs, the one thing from around 20 years ago that was arguably a little better was that companies like Kaiyodo and Yowie and Play Visions and Bullyland were making all kinds of weird animals, whereas companies now play it a little safer. But of course 20 years ago I didn't know any of that anyway. It took the blog and forum years later for me to learn of those figures' existence.

[dyno77]

collecta takes a few risks with rare dinosaurs sometimes,but apart from that your right ...but its a very popular niche interest....its sure growing all the time because i notice new collectors here and in other forums joining all the time..loads of video features or updates on yb mostly..and lots of blogspots as well...
Having said that,i do think it will become mainstream again maybe in a few decades,because it was in a similar area back in the 1940s-early1980s.populatiry was down very low until dinomania came because of the dinosaur renaissance.

[Libraraptor]

"Dinomania" comes and goes. I grew up with all the famous Mark Hallett, John Sibbick and Douglas Henderson paleoart, the Original Jurassic Park movie and the feeling I was a freak with this love for prehistory. Then it became "mainstream" and chic, and now it´s on a little decline again. What the hey!

What will stay, however, is the inspiration that deep time will be giving everyone who listens and watches closely enough.