My Yahoo!Forbes Faces: Michael Crichton
NEW YORK - Although a bunch of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton's bestsellers became blockbuster films, the novelist has never received an Oscar. But now he's got something better: his own dinosaur.
"For a person like me," Crichton said at a recent ceremony, "this is much better than an Academy Award."
Celebrated Chinese paleontologist Dong Zhiming, who has found more dinosaurs than anyone, named a dinosaur species after Crichton to honor him for bringing the thunder lizards to life in his books and movies. And you have to admit: Crichton's dinosaur is a lot cooler than the tick species named after Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson.
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| Author Michael Crichton | |
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Besides, Crichton's been commanding eight figures for his books and seven for their movie rights for years. Crichton sold 1969's The Andromeda Strain to Hollywood before he finished Harvard Medical School. Since then, he has written 11 more novels, including Jurassic Park, Rising Sun and Disclosure, all of which were transformed into box office hits.
While books and movies may be old hat for Crichton, having his own dinosaur species satisfies dreams he barely knew he had. "Believe me," Crichton said in a statement, "when I was a kid staring up at those huge skeletons in the museum, I never imagined that one would be named for me."
Crichton's dinosaur is an early member of the plant-eating variety called ankylosaurs. It ran around on two legs 180 million years ago, at the height of the geologic period known as the Jurassic. Scientists have found only the creature's head, but they believe its bony ridges sprouted from its back; these evolved into the armored plates ankylosaurs boasted in their prime, 60 million years later in the middle of the Cretaceous period.
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| Crichton's ankylosaur probably resembled this Scutellosaurus, drawn by John Binden. | |
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Russell says Dong wanted to pay tribute to Crichton's vivid portrait of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World. "What Crichton did," he says, "was bring dinosaurs to life for so many people. All of us who work with dinosaurs are indebted to Crichton for publicizing our work."
See:
Michael Crichton on the Forbes Celebrity 100
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