When people think of dinosaurs, they still think of them as reptiles, cold-blooded monsters. Even with the hundreds of new studies from the past two decades that give people the latest information and look at these extinct creatures, people still think of dinosaurs in this way. The movies that have shown dinosaurs to the largest audience are Jurassic Park and Jurassic World.
From the late 1800s through to the early 20th century dinosaurs were depicted as bloated swamp lizards, with a tail that drags behind them. This was purely the artist’s representation of the bones. Whatever is the most popular or entertaining depiction of dinosaurs, is the one most viewed by the public. No matter how many bones a paleontologist will show you and explain, your perception will always be the drawing that you see on someone’s wall or a depiction in a movie.
Jurassic Park was the first of its kind. It depicted dinosaurs as bird-like animals with upright tails. They also showed them as actual animals, not just brainless monsters (Unlike other media like King Kong and Godzilla). Jurassic Park was heavily based on a book by Michael Crichton. The book was not as popular as the movie, but it had most of the interesting “new” information that the Jurassic Park movie provided; even when the book was released three years before the movie (The movie released in 1993, and the book published in 1990). Even if most of the ideas were taken from that book, the arguably more entertaining movie was known for developing these new ideas about dinosaurs.
The movie was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. An example of this is the speed of the tyrannosaurus rex. This speed was estimated in the movie (relative to the cars that they used onset). This estimation was about 15 mph which was not yet proven. Years later the speed was proven to be around 15 mph. This movie wasn’t just a dinosaur fighting dinosaur film, it was trying to stay true to the current findings and research while still giving the audience an interesting story.
The latest Jurassic World movies have not kept up with scientific discoveries at all. Jack Horner, whose job was to help make the dinosaurs as accurate as possible for the new Jurassic World movie, said “As we made each one, we had to keep the consistency of how they looked. We couldn’t evolve them as we learned new things. Considering how we brought them back from the past, we couldn’t really change things.” This is completely false, the writers are not completely tied down to reality. In other words, the writers do not need to follow exact science, especially when the entire movie is based on made-up technology. One of the many ways they could write in the new dinosaurs is to have the scientists use bird DNA instead of frog DNA which in turn gives the dinosaurs a more bird-like appearance, including feathers. You then have this very interesting aspect of how we thought dinosaurs looked and how they actually look like. It gives the audience something educational and it is far more interesting than what they actually went with. Saying that it wouldn’t fit in the plot is a straight-up lie.
If they were copying the dinosaurs exactly from the previous movies then why did they even hire Horner in the first place? Instead of introducing a new generation of kids to accurate dinosaurs, they introduce to them what people thought was accurate twenty years ago. We have come to a reality that whatever the Jurassic franchise releases immediately becomes how people think dinosaurs look like.
The reason for giving people the most accurate information in movies like Jurassic World is because it is introducing people to paleontology and the world of dinosaurs. When the first Jurassic Park was released it caused a renaissance period for dinosaur research. By putting the latest information into the latest movies, people more importantly children will be more interested in dinosaurs, and maybe in the future be interested in paleontology.
MOOSE PRINTS 