The Brooklyn Rail

In the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the dinosaur exhibition is composed
largely of specimens excavated between 1906 and 1913 at Tendaguru, a site in
the former colony of German East Africa (today Tanzania). Of these dinosaurs,
the most iconic is Giraffatitan brancai. Coincidentally, European and other
major world powers met in Berlin, some twenty years prior to the dinosaurs’
excavation, at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), where these powers
negotiated their claims to regions of Africa for colonial expansion.

At the feet of a precipice-tall skeleton,
we wonder about the horrors of the Jurassic,
predators stalking, then slicing into, their prey.
Walking among Berlin’s exhibited bones
embodying bridge-span necks and column
limbs, lance-point armor and knife-lined jaws,
we try to picture a world beyond our ken,
subject to claws evolved as killing
personified, laws of unremitting savagery—
Imagine on an over-muggy Earth, a head
towering above in the domain of treetops
and dogfighting pterosaurs, imagine
the head-crowned neck crashing down
like a felled alder, the impact thundering
as if a deposed god was hurled to Earth;
in final moments, would the aged Titan be able
to imagine scavengers biting into its cold skin,
its bones swallowed by tidal mud? Could
it then possibly imagine a world beyond its ken
hundreds of thousands of millennia later
in which twenty men in Berlin would carve
its continent into plantations, mines, and ivory-
hunting grounds, their talons manifest in
massacres charring within burning villages,
famine’s gaunt ribs slowly quelling rebellions,
black skin in the mouths of ravenous empires?
Even if so, why try wondering at all?
A predator is a predator after all, regardless
of the time in Earth’s history—they simply
differ in their habit and the hunt: some
sink their honed teeth into a scaly hide,
a roar professing their territory; others
convene over a landmass map, howling
false claims in English, French, and German.