Dinosaurs in the settler imaginaries: Henrik Jaron Schneider, The Truth in These Rocks: Fossil Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and the Dinosaur in the American Imaginary, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Dinosaurs in the settler imaginaries: Henrik Jaron Schneider, The Truth in These Rocks: Fossil Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and the Dinosaur in the American Imaginary, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2026

17Aug26

Abstract: From the Bone Wars of the late nineteenth century to the Jurassic Park franchise, dinosaurs have maintained a persistent place in the American cultural imaginary. Historians of science and culture have developed an extensive body of scholarship on the extraction of dinosaur fossils during the long Gilded Age. Cultural historians have examined the allure of these prehistoric creatures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. This dissertation synthesizes these historical perspectives, asserting that settler colonialism functions as a systemic, infrastructural, and epistemic logic that connects the cultural representation of dinosaurs to the material contexts of fossil excavation. In doing so, this intersection yields an ideological and material project that perpetuates settlercolonial land use policies into the twenty-first century. Accordingly, my dissertation posits that the cultural significance of dinosaurs and the excavation of their fossils are rooted in their capacity to bolster temporalities of deep time, thereby naturalizing the extraction, management, and ownership of mineral resources as settler-colonial doctrines. In this context, deep time is made intimate within settler-colonial frameworks, fostering affective bonds with prehistory that legitimize fossil extraction, territorial sovereignty, and resource management as self-evident truths. The integration of the cultural history of dinosaurs, science and technology studies, and the environmental history of fossil resource extraction constitutes the primary historiographical intervention of this project. Employing close reading, discourse analysis, critical historical inquiry, and media analysis, I analyze archival sources—including paleontological field notes, legislative documents, correspondence between industry actors and scientists, scholarly articles, visual culture, and museum exhibits—to uncover the persistent extractive logic underlying vertebrate paleontology and the dinosaur in the American imaginary. This project draws on new materialist perspectives to conceptualize the fossil record as a contested domain of competing knowledge regimes. Across four chapters—focusing on Dinosaur National Monument, Sinclair Oil’s promotion of dinosaurs, Young Earth Creationism, and paleontology in Antarctica—I identify the scientist-observer as the agent who collapses situated knowledge into authoritative truth claims, thereby rendering the fossil record legible for settler-colonial extraction through the dispossession of Indigenous lands.

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