We live within a library of antediluvian narratives, with more accessioned every day.
The Social Dinosaur: The Life of the Mesozoic in the Popular Imagination by Will Tattersdill. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. 236 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org
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[E]veryone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge!
—Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867; trans. Ben Fowkes, 1976) The perfect summer is waiting. The perfect summer is Pure Michigan.
—Tim Allen
IT’S THE SUMMER of 1982, and life is picture-perfect for the residents of Flowervale. But things are not as they seem in this fictional Michigan suburb. Just out of frame, parents are on the verge of divorce, kids are acting out, one aggrieved neighbor is threatening to shoot the dog next door. Things are dire long before the prehistoric beasts start wreaking havoc.
The End of Oak Street (2026) begins with the quotidian dramas of the Platt family. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring writer unsatisfied by suburban motherhood. She loves her family but still longs for another life. Her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) struggles as the family’s breadwinner, picking up pizza delivery shifts to make ends meet. Their marriage is on a fault line and, though they try to hide it, the kids feel the fracture. Adding to their worries is Starbuck, the cattle dog, who has a habit of breaking free from his doghouse and causing mayhem in nearby yards.
Summer storms in the Midwest sometimes feel as if they might wash the whole world away. In The End of Oak Street, they do. As thunder rolls, cosmic tremors grow, and an apparent wormhole sends Flowervale back into the deep past. The Platts, cut off from the conveniences of their modern world, find themselves in the fight of their lives against hordes of hungry carnivores whose claws rip away the veneer of suburban neighborliness. Instead of coming together as a community, each household walls itself off, thinking only of its own. They are more vulnerable for it.
Exactly when in time the neighborhood has landed is unclear. As science writer Riley Black notes, the film features an anachronistic mess of monsters. The Platts encounter dinosaurs and other creatures from many different moments in the planetary past, animals that stomped and slithered millions of years apart from one another. How—and why—do they exist here all at once?
It might be that the wormhole brought many worlds together. Or that writer-director David Robert Mitchell isn’t particularly interested in prehistoric precision. Neither answer is wholly satisfying. Paleo-professionals and geology enthusiasts may be justifiably frustrated by the mishmash of creatures rampaging through Oak Street’s environs, but as a cultural historian, I am inclined to hunt for meaning in the muddle. A recent book by literary critic Will Tattersdill, The Social Dinosaur: The Life of the Mesozoic in the Popular Imagination, has proven a useful guide. This monograph on dinosaur narratives across scientific and literary texts makes the geologically incomprehensible world of Oak Street sensible as a cultural object, one that exists within—and because of—a long tradition of paleo-media that disregards scientific and historical exactitude yet cannot exist apart from the discipline through which prehistoric life has come to be known.
¤
After the storm, the Platt family wakes to a world that is somehow even muggier than a typical Michigan midsummer’s day. The water won’t run, the power is out, and that ambiguous emblem of our industrialized Age of Mammals—pasteurized milk—is starting to spoil. And Starbuck is missing. As Greg and Denise head out to look for their errant dog, they leave the kids at home with an order: “Lock the door.” It very nearly comes back to bite them.
Greg soon happens upon a ravenous animal scavenging for scraps in the trash. This suburban dad seems a fresher meal, more suitable to a Paleo diet, and so begins the chase. Greg runs, fast as he can, from as yet he knows not what. The audience has a better idea of what’s after him, even if the animal’s scientific name is elusive. This, according to Tattersdill, is the nature of “the social dinosaur,” a being that is both unknown and utterly familiar.
The End of Oak Street doesn’t spend time on nomenclature, but the animal is something like a Coelophysis, a feathered carnivore, scaled up to be more frightful. This, too, is the social dinosaur, born of fact and fiction alike. Its reality is attested in the fossil record, and it is known because of the circulation of scientific knowledge. It contains traces of something that existed—once—yet its feathers quiver with flights of fancy. The dinosaur cannot exist in our world without “an active cultural imaginary” to bring it (back) into being.
That the CGI dinosaurs in Flowervale are products of this imaginary is manifestly true. Their creators took liberties with design and behavior. These monsters bristle with imagination. But so, too, according to The Social Dinosaur, do the dinosaurs in a geology textbook.
Tattersdill, a literary scholar who specializes in fantasy cultures, argues convincingly that imaginative work is likewise requisite in nonfictional attempts to make sense of our planet’s long-lost worlds. Consider fossils displayed in natural history museums, specimens described in scientific papers, and taxonomic efforts to categorize dinosaurs. These all use literary techniques, such as analogizing, world-building, and speculation, to understand or communicate knowledge about extinct life. “There are non-negotiable scientific (and historical) truths in play,” he allows, but dinosaurs, as we know them, are also animated by “mobile imaginative concepts”—from Hollywood or your child’s toy box.
We live within a library of dinosaur stories, with more accessioned every day. Embracing The Social Dinosaur’s proposition that the dinosaur is a text helps to explain how the idea of the dinosaur has come to carry so many connotations: a metaphor for obsolescence, a critique of the capitalist excesses that are hastening mass extinction, a symbol of trans-affirmation, on and on and on. Dinosaurs are “many-meaninged things” Tattersdill cautions, and “anyone who offers you a single, easy meaning of the dinosaur is selling something.”
Cut to the chase: Greg races through a backyard, freshly mowed. The dinosaur, in hungry pursuit, is almost near enough to take a mouthful—but for the wooden fence, which protects prey from predator and keeps the latter out of sight. What we see of the dinosaur is what happens in its wake. As it hurtles through clotheslines, it launches sun-dried laundry into the sky.
This sort of obfuscation is an established monster movie technique: it engages the imagination and sharpens suspense. There is, however, more than a touch of sitcom in the execution (imagine the unmentionables on the clothesline!). It brings to mind a recurring gag in Home Improvement (1991–99), another family story set in greater Detroit, where the neighbor’s face is always partially kept from view—usually by the fence that marks his property line. The Coelophysis would never be mistaken for that worldly, barely seen eccentric Wilson (Earl Hindman), who doles out wisdom to Tim the Tool Man (Tim Allen). But Greg’s new neighbor is also strange, also unknowable, also compelling. It just prefers a burger raw.
Drawing on literary scholar Derek Attridge, Tattersdill explains that “every literary text, however intended by its author, carries within itself the possibility to be read differently.” This particular reader—a Midwestern millennial with commanding memories of Tim Allen’s Pure Michigan tourism campaign—finds the Coelophysis shelved beside a 1990s family comedy. Other readers will bring their own interpretations to the very same text.
The social dinosaur won’t be “pigeonholed,” Tattersdill charmingly observes. It chews up our efforts to categorize, bounds over the white picket fence of binaries, trespasses any and all boundaries. A backyard won’t protect the Platts for long.
¤
“Is that a fucking dinosaur?” Greg asks, awestruck at the sight of a lumbering sauropod. The immediate and irrefutable in-film answer is Yes, Greg, that is a fucking dinosaur.
And yet the question is not so easily answered. What we know of dinosaurs today is thanks to the efforts of scientists, artists, and technicians who together have reconstructed and revised what a dinosaur is. Verb tense is important here. We’ll never know all of what a dinosaur was—there are limits to our knowledge of the deep past. We can, however, deepen our knowledge of what a dinosaur is—which is to say, we can have an evolving present-tense understanding of this clade based on state-of-the-art science, a knowledge invested with further meaning by the dinosaur’s many iterations within popular culture.
Tattersdill explains that the dinosaur is a provisional thing that has undergone mammoth revisions across the two centuries since 1842, when the category of Dinosauria was coined by comparative anatomist Richard Owen. Today’s dinosaur is different from the Platts’ dinosaur of 1982, and as scientific consensus shifts, it will be different from the dinosaur of tomorrow.
Say that paleontologists of 2042 determine the armored Stegosaurus used its dorsal plates to glide like a kite. (This is, in fact, a published, though probably humorous, hypothesis from 1920—see Riley Black, again, on this.) If paleontologists of the future reach consensus on the gliding Stegosaurus, then the earthbound one we know today would suffer what Tattersdill calls a “second extinction.” And yet, the now scientifically invalidated Stegosaurus wouldn’t cease to exist. We who knew it would carry its memory with us, even if we accepted the revision.
When Greg wonders if he’s looking at a dinosaur, his question is informed by all the versions of a dinosaur he has ever seen, including outdated or liberal interpretations. As a child he might have watched the “Rite of Spring” segment of Fantasia (1940). A version of that animated evolutionary story, retitled A World Is Born (1955), was shown in science classrooms across the United States in the 1950s and ’60s despite “certain liberties” taken “with chronological progression” (one of those liberties being a chronologically impossible fight to the death between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex). Greg probably knew The Flintstones (1960–66) and the titular family’s purple pet Dino. Maybe he took the kids to see some fossils at the Field Museum of Natural History while visiting Denise’s family in Chicago. Dinosaurs such as these, absorbed through education and popular culture, together give Greg reference enough to pose the question.
Were Greg to take a closer look at the dinosaurs terrorizing his neighborhood, he would notice that they had plumage. Feathered dinosaurs are in keeping with 21st-century science, but in the 1980s, they didn’t yet exist in the popular imagination. They could only come into being after science and art aligned to represent them as such. Would a person living in 1982 see this birdy-beast and think dinosaur?
And what of us with our more evolved understanding of dinosaurs? Scientists and artists may bring us ever closer to an accurate representation of what once existed, but how can we be certain when we have it right? Can any of us shake off the influence of outdated and sensational iconography fossilized in the popular imagination? Countless images work together and against one another to produce the dinosaurs in our mind. Would we recognize a real dinosaur if we saw one?
“One thinks of the apocryphal story of Elvis Presley,” writes Tattersdill, “entering his own lookalike competition and coming third: an actual Mesozoic dinosaur, timeslipped into our hubbub of images and ideas, might not even make the podium.”
¤
The Platts’ irascible neighbor Mel (P. J. Byrne) is aggressively protective of his home. He casually talks of shooting Starbuck for violating the sacred boundaries of his backyard. How would a dog know about private property? Later, Mel climbs up to his roof, rifle in hand, to dispatch the flying beasts that are laying siege. He articulates a kind of suburban paranoia—your neighbors are out to get you!—that the dinosaurs exacerbate. Once the nature of the danger becomes clear, Denise and Greg swiftly sign on to Mel’s vision of the subdivided world.
While the Platt parents tear the doors off kitchen cabinets and pull wood paneling off walls to transform their family home into a fortress (hardly home improvement!), their kids are thinking about the innocent beings locked outside. Brian (Christian Convery) is 13. He reads Playboy by flashlight beneath his Superman covers and, more than anything, loves his dog. He is devastated when his dad tells him that Starbuck must fend for himself.
When Brian catches sight of the dog, on the run from an oversized Coelophysis, he sneaks out of the house to save him. His big sister Audrey (Maisy Stella) has her head in the cosmos—on the roof outside her bedroom window, she reads books about astronauts and dreams of studying astronomy with Carl Sagan. But she comes down to earth when it counts. Audrey sees Brian set out and follows him into the predator-infested streets. Ill-advised? Absolutely. But it’s only because the kids are bold enough to pursue their beloved pet that the family learns of a possible way back to their present day.
Will Starbuck make the return journey? If precedent means anything, then things aren’t looking good. Herman Melville drowned the Platt family dog’s namesake in the sinking of the Pequod; Steven Spielberg dared to kill off a dog in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). Nor is this film afraid to dispatch characters. People and other animals suffer grisly on-screen ends in The End of Oak Street. Pets are not spared this carnage—presumably Mitchell doesn’t care too much for orange cats—so why should one cattle dog be any different?
“[L]et the boy hang out with his dog,” Greg says to Denise at the start of the film. The parents had agreed to leave the unruly herder at home so as not to cause trouble at the block party, but Brian begged, and his dad folded.
There is reason to be anxious about Starbuck’s fate, but the film’s cast and creators have reassured nervous audiences that everything will be okay on this score. Take just one example: “Movies that kill dogs should automatically be rated R,” Hathaway said during a press junket. It’s something of a spoiler, then, to note that this movie carries a PG-13 rating.
Precedent be damned. The dog cannot die in this film because the dog surely dies in reality, always too soon. The Social Dinosaur shows us that all dinosaur stories, from scholarly articles to science fiction, contain elements of fact and fantasy working together. So let the dog do battle with dinosaurs and live. Let the boy hang out with his dog.
¤
Starbuck paws at the boundaries of modern life—he is not all that tame. Still, setting a domesticated dog at the heart of this story exaggerates the difference between the safe world the Platts knew and the dangers they confront in the past.
There’s an antiquated adjective that helps to describe this particular past—antediluvian. It means before the deluge. Though initially used as a literal reference to the biblical flood—let Martin Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (2008) be your guide on this—the adjective also functions metaphorically: before mass extinction, before our downfall, before the world is made again. Deluge means death, and also renewal. For better and for worse, it’s only because of the figurative flood that our kind evolved, that our world exists, that we tell stories about dinosaurs. In a more speculative sense, we humans are antediluvians too. Someday, our world will be washed away and known only for the fossils left behind.
In dinosaur stories, the antediluvian world is not any specific moment in geological time but an imagined place where the past is flattened (all before is just before, after all) and the whole prehistoric world exists all at once. Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) is a prominent example of this temporal collapse. The Platt family name, it’s worth a mention, evokes the plateau on which Conan Doyle’s adventurers discover their own anachronistic mess of monsters. In defying geological chronology, The End of Oak Street joins a long tradition of literary revisions of the planetary past.
As Tattersdill writes, “So often when a work of popular literature needs to think about time and the relationship between times, the dinosaur is waiting to help.” He isn’t talking about The End of Oak Street, but he could be. The prehistoric monsters that menace our hapless Michiganders are a more extreme manifestation of temporal collisions that happen throughout the film, which places prolonged and repeated emphasis on framed photographs.
When Denise discovers the mangled corpse of a neighbor, a trail of bloody footprints confirming the culprit to be some sort of animal, she backs away in fright. The camera retreats too. From our vantage point in the sitting room, we can see Denise still, cowering on the kitchen floor, but the corpse is blocked from sight. Instead, we see a wedding portrait of the recently deceased and her late husband. It’s the first of three wedding portraits to hold our gaze.
The visual technique brings past and present together in a single frame: a dissonant collage—matrimonial bliss on the left, abject terror on the right. The image could be interpreted as a before-and-after diptych, a tragic story of happiness, then horror. Read another way, though, this trace of a happier past literally conceals a more complicated and grotesque reality. Presumably, the real past was more complicated too, a truth the camera couldn’t capture.
Family photos have a narrative function in Flowervale. As the Platts board up their house, the camera pans over a wall of happy faces, past selves becoming silent judges of present actions. Later, when Denise takes a kitchen knife to the flesh of a monster that has invaded her home, the same photo gallery seems to smile in approval. Still later, seeking refuge in a neighbor’s home, the Platts find themselves cornered by a host of prehistoric crocodilians. At their backs, there is another photo wall, a moment of mortal peril watched over by the framed memories of some other family.
It is this visual layering of human past and present that makes the prehistoric milieu of The End of Oak Street compelling, not just despite but in many ways because of its scientific inaccuracies. While dinosaurs call attention to “the relationship between times,” the anachronisms (if we notice them) suggest how portrayals of other pasts might be similarly conflated, flawed.
The antediluvian world is chronologically and ecologically incoherent, to be sure. It is a place that never existed. The same could be said for the happy family that exists only in photographs on the Platts’ wall—not a comprehensive representation of the past but a partial, imperfect, and curated trace of things that have momentarily been. Those photos comprise their own antediluvian world, an anachronistic mess that keeps the monsters just out of view.
¤
The End of Oak Street is a tragic story that rewrites its own ending. Once more, Tattersdill offers prescient analysis. “Dinosaurs interact with alternate history especially well,” he writes, “because their provisional nature all but requires us to hold open the possibility of alternateness whenever we are thinking about them.” Dinosaurs allow for a happier ending. Not a happy ending—the film’s tidy conclusion leaves the devastating implications of its twist unexplored—but a happier one.
Denise no longer writes through the night in a damp basement. She has her own home office, thanks to the commercial success of her memoir about their ordeal. Those adventures among the antediluvians were a kind of sweat equity that enabled her family to fulfill a suburban American dream and move on up to a bigger home. The Platts seem satisfied in the film’s final frames, enjoying burgers in their backyard. They would be wise to purchase flood insurance anyway.
Dinosaurs build a “bridge between contradictions.” What had once seemed incompatible is now just reality: a mother can be happy and sad, grateful and devastated, loving and restless. The Flowervale of the film’s conclusion is not a community of perfect neighbors reformed by the ghosts of prehistories past; it is, however, a present where people take care of each other—even that jerk next door. These are neighbors who won’t call down the deluge.
The primary argument of The Social Dinosaur is that dinosaurs connect “disparate spheres of knowledge.” Because Tattersdill is a careful scholar, he keeps this claim narrow, specifically focusing on the shared imaginative work of telling stories about dinosaurs across scientific and literary texts. An immodest extension of his argument might be, simply, that dinosaurs bring people together. The fracturing Platt family finds its way home through this shared trauma. Beyond being a narrative about connection, the telling of this story is a way for filmmaker David Robert Mitchell to connect with his dinosaur-loving father, who died at the time of the film’s production. The End of Oak Street is dedicated to him.
To exist alongside dinosaurs is impossible. Their narrative presence, then, brings other out-of-reach pasts into the frame. In The End of Oak Street, dinosaurs arrive through a cosmic portal. In our world, dinosaurs are the portals drawing prehistoric and human pasts into the present. They merge before and after with the here and now. All times whirl together in the deluge, which cannot separate us from the worlds that came before. Mitchell, the filmmaker, was once and will always be the little boy who sits on his dad’s shoulders in the aging family photograph at the beginning of the film’s credits.
In the end, some monsters do make their way onto the Platts’ wall of family photos. It’s the one portrait that Denise paused to take in that antediluvian world: an impossible Polaroid of Greg, with an obliging grin, standing in front of a couple of fucking dinosaurs.
LARB Contributor
Alison Laurence is a cultural historian of extinction and assistant professor of history at San José State University, where she teaches public history and other topics. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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