I came across this interesting article the other day:

Pop Culture Mentions Of Global Warming Have Plummeted Since 2007

which leads people to a program where users are able to put in a set of words and see how many times they have been mentioned in movies (and in various other mediums) in the past 100 years (or so). This got me thinking about how references to geology and paleontology have varied through time.

The following graphs are made with a 2 year rolling average of the points, that way the mentions didn't show up as individual points, and general trends could be easier to discern. They also show the percent of the words for each particular year since just producing straight number of words would show an increase just because more TV and movies are produced now than they used to be.

Here is a link to the Movies version: http://movies.benschmidt.org/. There are other links accessible from the website which can give you scientific article searches and the such. A future post will do these same searches in different mediums to compare the results. Unfortunately I can't seem to save the images any larger. If you do the search you are able to see the specific references in each year. Very fun game.

Dinosaurs and Fossils