Through the Eyes of the T. rex: Animal Behavior in Dinosaur Fiction

Animal point-of-view fiction (also sometimes called “xenofiction”) is a niche genre that emerged in the modern era. Both prose fiction and comics told from an animal point-of-view can offer unique insights into cultural understandings of animal behavior, nature, and the environment more broadly. This article delves specifically into dinosaur point-of-view fiction, which at times has even been written by or with support from professional paleontologists. Through several popular examples of dinosaur fiction and comics published from the 1990s to the 2010s, this article will examine how these texts illustrate how fictional representations of scientific understandings conform to or challenge dominant narratives around the natural world, gender, and power. These stories, including Stephen Bissette’s unfinished comic series Tyrant (1993–1996), and Robert Bakker’s novel Raptor Red (1995), and most recently Tadd Galusha’s graphic novel Cretaceous (2019), use creative storytelling techniques to entertain readers, while also representing and participating in scientific discourses of paleontology and animal behavior.