Caroline Winterer: Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul
Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet Productions
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone.
Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation.
Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide.
This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.
—
- Caroline’s website
- Caroline’s book "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America"
—
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:20 Dinosaurs and the Deep Time Revolution
00:10:10 Darwin and Fundamentalism
00:16:10 The Shadow Side of Wonder
00:29:00 Deep Time Today
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strange Champs. And I'm Steve Paulson. Imagine hiking in one of those |
| 0:08.2 | red rock deserts in Utah on a scorching afternoon. So hot and dry, there's nothing moving for miles. |
| 0:16.3 | Once this was lush green land flowing with water and once a giant sauropod walked right here. |
| 0:23.3 | Its feet sank into the mud. |
| 0:25.9 | Its footprints dried and baked into rocks. |
| 0:29.4 | And today, 150 million years later, they're still here. |
| 0:33.9 | Yeah, they're huge. |
| 0:34.8 | You can go off into the scrubby desert, and for literally millions of |
| 0:40.1 | years, this journey of not just one dinosaur, but multiple dinosaurs have been kept intact, |
| 0:47.3 | and those footprints are really, really, really big. |
| 0:52.9 | Carolyn Winterer is one of millions of people who've made the trek to marvel at dinosaur tracks. |
| 0:59.1 | In places like Utah and Texas and Wyoming and Colorado, places where you can feel the wonder |
| 1:05.8 | of deep time. |
| 1:07.6 | Which is such an American experience. I mean, we've stood and looked out at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley. |
| 1:14.5 | And you're looking at hundreds of millions of years of geology. But Carolyn Winter has a special |
| 1:20.2 | perspective on all that wonder. She's a historian at Stanford, and she wrote a book that is one of the |
| 1:25.9 | best things I read this year. It's called |
| 1:28.1 | How the New World Became Old, the Deep Time Revolution in America. So it links dinosaurs and the |
| 1:35.6 | geological strata and time itself to American identity. The story begins in the late 1800s, |
| 1:43.3 | when people in the U.S. first began digging up dinosaur bones. |
| 1:46.4 | They didn't even have names for them yet, but they fell in love with them. |
| 1:50.0 | And we're still in love with them, right? |
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