I never realized the timeline of the reemergence of dinosaur studies in academia until reading this passage from paleontologist Paul Barrett at the Browser:

“It’s really only from the 70s onwards that we start to get this change in view and only from the 80s that we had a crystallisation of this view that dinosaurs were very exciting animals. For most of the 20th century dinosaurs were viewed as a dead end – an evolutionary dead end that was kind of interesting because they were big and odd-looking, but that never really went anywhere. It was the recognition in the 70s that dinosaurs and birds were closely related, and that dinosaurs were more like birds than like other reptiles, that suddenly led to a new burst of interest in them and new research programmes. If you spoke to a student in the 1940s or 50s they would just view dinosaurs as curiosities, but these days they’re viewed as an integral part of a greater knowledge of how animals are related to each other and how animal behaviour has changed through time, not just as a side-show oddity.”