Welcome... To Jurassic Park!

Barley, a dog, stands in front of some mossy rocks that have a prominent outgrowth of ferns.

If you’re of a certain age, than your childhood was substantially changed by the 1993 release of Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs, already respectably positioned among “topics about which kids have strong opinions,” rocketed up the charts, and with them came a whole aesthetic. Artists of the time heavily favored depicting dinosaurs living in lush, primordial forests and jungles, in the style of Land Of The Lost. Since flowering plants didn’t come on the scene until the early Cretaceous period, artists instead filled their foregrounds with a much older variety of foliage: Ferns. To this day, every day I come across a yard with a big fern motif, I hear the Jurassic Park theme.