On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes

the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Most colossal animal ever on earth just found out west.

The man of wealth must succumbing the mere just the invasion for his fooder brothers.

First on our list of things to avoid on dark nights are the stucco models of prehistoric animals at London's Crystal Palace.

America is the proper sphere for such unreasonably developed monsters.

Over the last century and a half, the dusty old bones of prehistoric creatures have been brought back to full-blooded life in the world of entertainment, the natural history stars of a new national obsession.

At the time of their introduction, these creatures felt almost paranormal, almost alien, when paired with the sudden realization of deep time, of their previously impossibly ancient existence.

But prior to their careers on the stage on the screen and in the exciting exhibits of the World's Fair,

these long extinct animals needed to actually be discovered, dug out, studied, and finally displayed.

And so, for part two of our series, we're going to look at the quirky, rambunctious,

and surprisingly political history of paleontology

in England and the United States. We'll hear stories about a young girl's revolutionary

prehistoric discoveries, the Wild West Gold Rush of Fossil Hunting, the bone-based competition

between two haughty academics, the raucous creation

of the first prehistoric park, and the most famous dino skeleton of all time that became

an international symbol of American exceptionalism. It seems inevitable that dinosaurs, these massive, powerful beasts that reigned for 165 million years as

tyrant kings of the earth, would become potent metaphors for so many things uniquely American, and something that somehow the reigning gilded

age proto-billionaires could use to their own advantage. Because as Dr. Ian Malcolm said in

1993's Jurassic Park... Life, uh, finds a way.

And I guess so does capitalism.

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