We invite submissions for Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

Argument

We invite submissions for Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future, an edited collection that explores extinct animal parks real, imagined, unrealized, or yet to be. Our goal is to bring together multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine parks across time and space, across fact and fiction. We seek to understand how these projects, which reconstitute and enclose long-extinct life forms, intersect with histories of science, capitalism, imperialism, environmental change, and more.

We can’t encounter dinosaurs; not really. Humans have always lived without them. And yet, representations of these extinct beings are pervasive in museums, science education, popular culture, and the consumer landscape. This collection takes inspiration from John Berger, who in “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), identified the implications of animals’ marginalization from modern life. Why look at dinosaur parks, in particular? They have received less critical attention from scholars compared to traditional museum displays. There is good reason, however, to turn our gaze toward such parks, which are deliberate mise-en-scène of the geological past and assemblages of extinct animals with intentions, assumptions, and values designed into them. As such, they constitute strategic places to engage with urgent topics like the place of deep time in modern societies, ongoing mass extinction, and the looming possibility of de-extinction.

Recently, two of the most discussed and influential dinosaur parks in history have been the topic of excellent scholarship. In 2022, paleo-artist Mark Witton and evolutionary biologist Ellinor Michel published a detailed history of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ sculptures of extinct species at the Crystal Palace Park built in 1854 (Witton and Michel 2022). In 2023, at the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, Matthew Melia edited The Jurassic Park Book along with a special issue of Cinergie to deliver a critical and extensive re-examination of the iconic movie and its franchise (Melia 2023a,b). But between these two dinosaur parks, lie almost 150 years of history to be recovered. Around these two parks, stand others around the world to be mapped. Beyond these two parks, future ones await to be imagined. Drawing on a growing, yet scattered, literature engaging with both well-known and lesser-known dinosaur parks (e.g., Nieuwland 2020, Wilson 2020, Laurence 2022 and 2023, Coules and Benton 2023, Melia 2023b, Alder 2025), Lands of the Lost will begin to chart the unexplored histories, geographies, and possibilities of dinosaur parks.

Our definition of “dinosaur” is capacious, as long extinct animals are often displayed in a milieu (dinosaurs along contemporary pterosaurs, for instance, or even anachronistically with Pleistocene beasts). Moreover, while some enthusiasts understand the intricacies of taxonomy, the general public tends to use “dinosaur” loosely. Similarly, our interpretation of “park” is broad. We are mainly interested in outdoor displays in opposition to indoor museum exhibits (and yet outdoor could be inside of a computer, e.g., the Jurassic World: Evolution game). The book’s introduction will define and historicize these terms.

We envision three main categories of dinosaur parks: (1) physical parks that do or did exist; (2) fictional parks that exist in books, TV, film, digital games, etc.; (3) parks planned but unrealized or ones yet to be made. Across these categories, contributions might take a variety of forms, including:

• Traditional essays that offer deep analysis of a single park or comparative analysis of several;
• Braided essays that merge personal reminiscence of park visits with critical analysis;
• Annotated photo essays (dependent on publisher capabilities);
• Speculative essays, grounded in scholarship, that imagine future dinosaur parks.

Themes and Scope

Lands of the Lost seeks to feature a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, science studies, environmental humanities, paleontology, and beyond—as well as insights from heritage workers and interventions of a speculative nature. We are enthusiastic about contributions that engage with the following themes and topics (though this list is not exhaustive):

• The relationship between dinosaur parks, dinomania, and fossil fuel dependence.
• Privatization (efforts to enclose fossils, deep time, resources) and implications of such enclosure.
• Anti-colonial dinosaur parks that resist historical dispossessions.
• The intellectual and manual labor of creating and caring for dinosaur parks.
• Change over time: how parks do or don’t evolve along with changing scientific understandings.
• How novel de-extinction practices change what a dinosaur park is and what it is for.
• Tensions between scientific and sensational; between authenticity and artificiality.
• The connections between dinosaur parks, the entertainment industry, and tourism.
• The role of dinosaur parks in cultural discourse of mass extinction and biodiversity loss.
• Parks as sites of collective memory, narrative construction, place making, inclusion and exclusion.
• The effect of exhibiting extinct alongside extant (e.g., dinosaur parks within zoos).
• Attention to the park environment beyond the top-billed dinosaurs, including the plants, other critters (whether there by design or uninvited), infrastructure, park visitors themselves.
• Anachronistic congregations: what’s the effect (and what’s at stake) when Jurassic and Cretaceous merge? or when Mesozoic and other Eras are reconstituted in one place?
• Dinosaur parks and the Sixth Mass Extinction, natural vs. unnatural extinction events.
• Nostalgia, solastalgia, and other commanding affects.
• How the temporality experienced in an extinct animal park is complementary or contrary to human, colonial, or Western time.

While we do not expect the collection to be comprehensive, we do aim to offer a view of parks across time and space, including both well-known and lesser-known parks. We especially welcome submissions that feature sites outside the U.S. and Europe. 

Submission Guidelines 

We welcome submissions from scholars, museum professionals, speculative writers, paleontologists and paleoartists whose work is informed by scholarship. Kindly submit your interest via email to dinoparkfieldguide@gmail.com,

before January 10, 2026

In your email, include: your proposed title; an abstract (300-500 words) that mentions methodology and key sources to be examined; and a brief biographical statement (~150 words). The editors aim to notify accepted abstracts by late January.

The anticipated deadline for full-length essays (4,000-6,000 words, excluding references) is late 1 October 2026.

This collection will be published with a university press known for excellence in environmental humanities.

Editors

• Dr. Victor Monnin, Associate Researcher, Archives Henri-Poincaré, Strasbourg, France
• Dr. Alison Laurence, Lecturer, University of California, Santa Cruz; Editor, Contingent Magazine

Bibliography 

Alder, Emily (2025). Jurassic Plants: The Botanical Worlds of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 32(2): 398-419.

Berger, John (1980). “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books).

Coules, Victoria and Michael J. Benton (2023). The curious case of Central Park’s dinosaurs: The destruction of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ Paleozoic Museum revisited. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 134: 344-360.

Laurence, Alison (2022). Out of Time at the La Brea Tar Pits: People and Other Animals in a Time Capsule of Ice Age Los Angeles. Museum & Society 20(1): 71-88.

Laurence, Alison (2023). Pleistocene Park, and Other Designs on Deep Time in the Interwar United States. Notes & Records 77: 169-190.

Manias, C, ed. (2025). Palaeontology in Public: Popular science, lost creatures and deep time (London: UCL Press).

Marshall, Nancy R. (2007). “A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell”: The Spatial Time of Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park. Victorian Studies 49(2): 286-301.

Melia, Matthew, ed. (2023a). The Jurassic Park Book (New York: Bloomsbury).

Melia, Matthew (2023b). John Sayles and the Unmade Jurassic Park IV. Cinergie 24: 71-86.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1998). The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Nieuwland, Ilja. (2020). Dinosaurs in the aquarium. Public Understanding of Science 29(6): 655-663. Secord, James. (2004). Monsters at the Crystal Palace. In: Models: The Third Dimension of Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press): 138-169.

Shay, Don and Jody Duncan (1993). The Making of Jurassic Park (New York: Ballantine).

Wilson, Ross J. (2020). Encountering Dinosaurs. The Public Historian 42(4): 121-136.

Witton, Mark P. and Ellinor Michel (2022). The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (The Crowood Press).