The allure of the dinosaur

Gone, but by no means forgotten

By BBC News Online's Jonathan Duffy

In terms of lasting popularity, you can't beat old Tyrannosaurus Rex and friends.

Wiped off the face of the Earth 65 million years ago, dinosaurs possess an audience pulling power greater than even the best-paid Hollywood star of the moment.

After Jurassic Park and last year's Walking With Dinosaurs, their box office potential is about to be proved once again with Disney's latest blockbuster, Dinosaur.

The $200m movie opens in the United States on Friday (UK audiences will have to wait until October) a day after Chicago's Field Museum unveiled its own spectacular "dino draw" - a T Rex called Sue.

Sue, the largest, most complete and best-preserved T Rex

Named after the fossil hunter who discovered it, Sue - its sex is indeterminable - is the world's largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton.

Sold to the Field for $8.36m, it is probably also the world's most expensive dinosaur. But the Field is confident of a good return on its investment, as are McDonald's and Disney which have teamed up with the museum for promotion deals.

Dr Angela Milner thinks the appeal of these prehistoric beasts, is, in large part, down to their extinction.

"Many psychologists put it down to this thing of 'safe monsters'. These are frightening and threatening creatures but they are no longer around to do us any harm," says Dr Milner, of the Natural History Museum.

Dinosaur on screen

Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956)

One Million Years BC (1966)

The Land that Time Forgot (1975)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Walking With Dinosaurs (1999)

"One of the other reasons is simply that of scale - the fact that they are so much larger than living creatures today."

"But there are also intriguing similarities between them and animals today that make it easier for us to relate to dinosaurs. There are similarities of parental care and nesting."

Dr Neil Clark, palaeontology curator at the University of Glasgow, says when it comes to dinosaurs, size matters.

"It's more the awe and the size than anything else. People aren't really interested in the small dinosaurs, unless of course, they are particularly fierce."

Children, it seems, are the biggest fans but adults also have a healthy interest, although they tend to try and hide it, says Dr Clark.

Fifties fave - Godzilla, King of the Monsters spawned 14 sequels

But it hasn't always been like this. Two-hundred years ago, nobody even knew dinosaurs existed - the fossil find which opened our eyes was in south-east England in the 1820s.

Dr Clark says there was a surge of interest in the 1950s, when scientists began to piece together the way dinosaurs moved.

The current wave of fascination owes a lot to Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winning epic, Jurassic Park. The film made $350m profit and was followed by the sequel The Lost World.

The BBC co-production, Walking With Dinosaurs, picked up where Spielberg left off. The first episode notched up nearly 19 million viewers in Britain - making it the most watched science programme.

The programme boasted cutting-edge special effects to bring dinosaurs "back to life".

This time they talk

But while the commercial approach has won a global audience of dinosaur devotees, not everyone approves of the terms on which this love affair was forged.

Talking with Dinosaurs - a clip from Disney's latest offering

Richard Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, criticised Walking With Dinosaurs for its "human interest" approach.

"We need to go even further in the direction of writing humans out of the script," he said.

In which case Mr Dawkins will not be a big fan of Disney's new offering, where the cast of Velociraptors, Brachiosauruses and Styrathosauruses have folksy names and actually speak.

But while the purists and populists slog it out, the dinosaur allure shows no sign of abating. The BBC is planning a one-off Walking With Dinosaurs special at Christmas and a second series is in the pipeline.

Given that dinosaurs were a dominant life form on Earth for 160 million years - 40 times longer than our current tenancy - what are the chances they will be making motion pictures about humans 65 million years from now?