I preferred King Arthur, with its stories of knights and dragons. It was not until I saw Jurassic Park that I realized it was the culture surrounding the dinosaur that was interesting. Science has its version of the dinosaur, but the dinosaur is also fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Totems are a particularly relevant example for the cultural study of dinosaurs. In traditional societies, totems are multi-purpose symbols, usually of animals, although sometimes of vegetables or minerals.
Totems perform many functions.
They can be religious icons, ancestral figures, or symbols of social identity as when, for example, the bear, eagle, or elk becomes the emblem of a tribe. They are also involved with sex, gender, and reproduction. Jurassic Park uses the dinosaurs to tell a tale of male hysteria in this new world. All the dinosaurs in the movie are female, and the most exciting ones are the velociraptors, which are small, quick, agile, and travel in packs. So you have all these females that you can't control wrecking havoc in a place created by men.