But let’s begin with velociraptors, which were not particularly famous dinosaurs until 1990, when Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was published. The novel, about a theme park containing dinosaurs created from cloned DNA samples, became a runaway bestseller. And then, three years later, Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation brought the novel’s dinosaurs to awe-inspiring life with computer generated animations the likes of which moviegoers had never seen before. Even twenty-five years later, Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs still look astonishingly lifelike, including the velociraptors, which are portrayed as scaly creatures, about six feet in height, from present-day Montana. 

Chrichton’s velociraptors are the kind of scary, intimidating animal you might want to name, say, a professional sports franchise after, and indeed when the National Basketball Association expanded into Canada in 1995, Toronto chose as its team name the Raptors. Today, the velociraptor stands alongside T. Rex and stegosaurus as among the best-known dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous period some seventy million years ago have very little in common with the velociraptors of our contemporary imagination.

If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” As a paleontologist recently pointed out to me, if you ever see at picture of a large bird without feathers, your first thought will be, “Huh. Look at that. A dinosaur.” I don’t recommend looking at pictures of birds without feathers, by the way. Pretty disturbing stuff.

Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the Deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors, although Deinonychus was also feathered, and, you know, not smart enough to open doors or whatever. Crichton took the name velociraptor because he thought it was “more dramatic,” which presumably is also why the theme park is called Jurassic Park in the book, even though most of the dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic Age, which ended 145 million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous Age, which ended 65 million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.

As with so many things, the way we think about velociraptors says more about us than it does about them—ultimately Jurassic Park is about humans who cannot resist the urge to do what is possible, even if the creatures we resurrect end up killing us. It’s a story of unintended consequences, and those consequences could not arrive in the form of, like, knee-high carnivorous turkeys.

Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect.

In ancient China, dinosaur fossils were believed to be dragon bones. In 1676, the first dinosaur bone to be described by European scientists, a piece of thigh bone from a Megalosaurus, was believed to have come from the kind of giants described in the Bible; that bone, incidentally, was named Scrotum Humanum, which is a reasonable description of its approximate shape.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t named until 1905. The first velociraptor fossil was discovered in 1924. Scientists have been debating for over a century whether the long-necked brontosaurus of the Jurassic Age even existed or is just a misidentified Apatosaurus. The brontosaurus was real in the late 19th century, only to become a fiction for much of the 20th, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. And prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

The weird thing about velociraptors is that even though I know they were basically flightless predatory birds not much larger or smarter than a swan, I still can’t help but see them as bipedal, featherless lizards of human height when I imagine them. Knowing the facts doesn’t really help me picture the truth. That’s the wonder and terror of computer generated images for me—if they look real, my brain isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to understand that still they aren’t real.

Like the velociraptor, I have a large brain for my geologic age, but maybe not a large enough one to survive effectively in the world where I find myself. My eyes still believe what they see, long after visual information stopped being reliable. I give velociraptors two and a half stars.

After the break we’ll turn our attention to Harvey, but first ...

[Ad break]

The movie Harvey stars Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic whose best friend is a six foot three and a half inch tall invisible white rabbit named Harvey. The film, based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, was an immediate critical and commercial success when it was released in 1950.

But my story of Harvey begins in the early winter of 2001, shortly after I suffered what used to be known as a nervous breakdown. I was working for Booklist Magazine at the time, and living on the near north side of Chicago in a small apartment that I had until recently shared with a woman I’d thought I would marry. At the time, I believed that our breakup had caused my depression, but now I see that my depression at least in part caused the breakup. Regardless, I was alone, in what had been our apartment, surrounded by what had been our things, trying to take care of what had been our cat.

It was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating. The psychic pain overwhelmed me, consuming my thoughts so thoroughly that I no longer had any thoughts, only pain. Susan Sontag wrote that depression is melancholy minus its charms.

I had become for some reason unable to eat food, so instead I was drinking two two-liter bottles of Sprite per day, which is approximately the right number of calories to consume but not an ideal nutrition strategy. Every day, I would come home from work and lie on the peeling linoleum floor of what had been our kitchen, and I would look at the green parabolic rectangle of the kitchen window through the Sprite bottle, and I would look at the bubbles inside that bottle clinging to the bottom, trying to hold on, but inevitably floating up to the top, and I would think about how I couldn’t think. All I wanted was to be separated from the pain, to be free from it.

Eventually, a day came when I could not pick myself up off that linoleum floor, and I spent a very long Sunday thinking about all the ways that the situation might resolve itself, and then that evening, thank God, I called my parents, and, thank God, they answered.

My parents are busy people with demanding lives. And they were at my apartment within twelve hours of that phone call.

A plan formed quickly. I would leave my job, go home to Florida, get into daily counseling or possibly inpatient treatment. They packed up my apartment—there wasn’t much left. My ex-girlfriend kindly agreed to take the cat. The only thing left was to quit my job. I loved working at Booklist and I loved my coworkers, but I also knew that my life was in danger. I tearfully told my supervisor that I was quitting, and he told me to talk to the magazine’s publisher, Bill Ott.

I always thought of Bill as a character out of a noir mystery novel. His incisive wit is both thrilling and intimidating. When I went into his office, he was surrounded by proof pages of the magazine and he didn’t look up until I closed the door. I told him that something was wrong with my head, that I hadn’t eaten solid food in a couple weeks, and that I was quitting to move home to Florida with my parents. He was silent for a long time after I finished. Bill is a master of pauses. And then at last he said, “Ah, why don’t you just go home for a few weeks and see how you feel.” And I said, “But you’ll need someone to do my job,” and he paused for a long time again and then said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but I think we’ll get by.”

For the last 44 years of his life, he was married to the actress Peggy Moran, who appeared in single every movie Koster made during their marriage, but usually in the form of a statue. Moran’s sculpted face appears in the longest shot in Harvey.

And a special thanks to Bill Ott, who has just retired after more than 30 years at Booklist. Bill is -- dare I say it -- a five star mentor and person and I am so grateful to him.