HUMOR OF PALEONTOLOGISTS

Abstract

It is well known that sense of humor is closely connected to person’s creative potential. Many scientists showed it in their professional activity and literary works. It is true about the professional paleontologists. Humor is undesirable in two main cases. First is the books for young readers, who cannot be expected to understand author’s joke, and encyclopedias and dictionaries, which present the material in objective form. Second case is the strictly scientifictexts, which should be devoid of any ambivalence. Still, there are some examples of the comic effect even in the scientific naming of the extinct organisms, such as Hallucigenia, or Irritator. However, most paleontological jokes are to be found in popular science. They range from slight irony or wry choice of epigraphs to the extensive usage of various jokes. One of the notable examples are books by A. Zhuravlev, who widely uses wordplay in chapter titles. In one of his works, the theoretical material is interlaced with the “paleontological fables”. Quite often these jokes make use of philosophical, philological, and culturological material. That is why they can be seen not as just a way of easier presentation of the complex material, but also as a method of creating a new scientific and cultural context.