[Text: Museum Experts React]
[Jordan Mallon, Ph.D., Palaeobiologist, Canadian Museum of Nature] So beautiful.
It wasn't all, you know, gore and blood all the time.
There was lots of peaceful moments like this, presumably.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jordan Mallon.
I'm a palaeobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
And in light of the fact that the Jurassic World
Dominion movie is coming out this summer, I've been asked to react
to some of the movies in the Jurassic series.
[Text: Palaeontologist. Botanist. Archaeologist. Zoologist. Ornithologist. Geologist. Our palaeobiologist reacts.]
[Jordan] All right. We're going to start with the first Jurassic Park movie.
I saw this when I was 11 in theatres.
And it's one of my favourites. So let's get into it.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[movie clip – Man] They're moving in herds. They do move in herds.
[Jordan] Well-written music.
All right, that might be one of my favourite scenes from the movie.
It just shows a couple of brachiosaurs emerging from a lake
alongside some duckbill dinosaurs—Parasaurolophus, they're called.
I just love these scenes from the movies where it shows the animals
sort of living their natural lives in their natural habitats.
Not, you know, running from the jaws of a T. rex
or the claws of a Velociraptor.
You know, these brachiosaurs and these hadrosaurs, these duckbill dinosaurs
did not actually live next to one another in real life.
But nevertheless, if they did, this is how I would imagine it going down.
All right, I remember seeing that scene in theatres when I was a kid
and I spilled my drink and my dad got upset at me.
So that one sticks in my mind.
We can see the T. rex in that scene eat a man whole—eats the entire lawyer—and
that reminds me of some research,
a fun bit of research done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Jim Farlow.
He showed that if T. rex was an endotherm, if it had a high metabolism like a mammal,
it would probably need to eat about one lawyer every day
and even less, maybe half a lawyer, if T. rex had the metabolism of a reptile.
That makes you wonder, though.
You'd think at this point, having eaten that lawyer, that that T. rex would be full.
And yet it continues on throughout the movie to hunt people down.
So I think it would have been a much more boring movie if that was the case.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Movie clip – Girl] Go away! [Movie clip – Man] It's ok, it's ok. It's a brachiosaur. [Movie clip – Boy] Veggiesaurs, Lex, veggisaurs. [Movie clip – Girl] Veggie.
[Jordan] OK, this scene is a little problematic for me.
Alan Grant here tells the girl Lex
to think of the Brachiosaurus as a big cow.
And if you watch carefully, the Brachiosaurus is actually chewing its food,
moving its lower jaw side to side, something like a cow would.
Now, I do some work on dinosaur feeding and jaw mechanics,
and there's really no evidence that dinosaurs
could chew quite like a cow with those sort of lateral displacements of the lower jaw.
The lower jaw moved in a much more simple sort of hinge direction.
Maybe there is a little fore and aft movement, but we're quite certain
that brachiosaurs and most other dinosaurs, for that matter,
did not move their jaws like a cow when feeding.
Next, we're going to react to the Pachycephalosaurus scene in the second movie, The Lost World.
[music and sounds from movie]
[Movie clip – Man 1] Stop, stop. Pachycephalosaurus.
[Movie clip – Man 2] Carnivore? [Movie clip – Man 1] No, no. Herbivore. Late Cretaceous.
[Movie clip – Man 1] You see that distinctive dome skull? Nine inches of solid bone. Now careful. See the Pachy's neck attaches at the bottom of its skull instead of the back of its head, as with reptiles. When it lowers its head, its neck lines up directly with its backbone, which is perfect for absorbing impact.
[Jordan] All right, I liked that scene.
[Text] Dr. Burke (Fictional Character). Dr. Robert T. Bakker (The Real Deal!). [Jordan] I thought Dr. Burke, who is basically a play on
Dr. Robert Bakker, an actual palaeontologist,
he describes some of the adaptations of these dome-headed
pachycephalosaur dinosaurs for head butting.
[Text] Bryan Moore. [Jordan] And I actually have a student right now, Bryan Moore, who
defended his thesis looking at the adaptations
behind the skull in what we call the post cranium,
the post-cranial skeleton, for head butting.
And so I thought he did a pretty good job of capturing that.
One little nitpick in the scene maybe: this is clearly not an adult Pachycephalosaurus.
They were quite a bit bigger, taller than a human maybe.
And and yet this one was young.
And yet we know that the young pachycephalosaurs
had a lot more ornamentation sprouting off the back of their heads.
They had these big long spikes, as opposed to these
low, rounded little nodes that you see in this scene.
So maybe I'd nitpick the scene for that reason, but on the whole, pretty good.
All right. We're moving on to Jurassic Park 3.
And we're going to start with one of the opening scenes in the movie.
OK, this is one of those "Jordan loves it" scenes
showing some brachiosaurs living alongside
some stegosaurs, living alongside some ankylosaurs.
I think I might have seen a duck-billed hadrosaur in there, too.
In this case, actually, Brachiosaurus did live alongside Stegosaurus,
so all the better as far as I'm concerned.
Again, I work a lot on dinosaur palaeoecology.
One of the things that interests me is how these dinosaurs
lived alongside one another, how they competed with one another,
or how they avoided competing with one another via niche partitioning.
This scene sort of shows some of that in action.
So A+ from me.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Jordan] This scene here shows the Spinosaurus swimming in the water.
And there's some debate right now as to whether or not it could actually do that.
We know from good isotopic data and bone-density data
that Spinosaurus had a good close association with the water.
But the debate is whether or not it actually lived in the water,
something like a crocodile, or whether it just waited
along the shoreline like a heron. And what I like about this scene is
it shows Spinosaurus taking the plunge in the water, swimming efficiently,
which lines up with with one popular idea right now—that Spinosaurus swam
much like a croc through the water.
And yeah, is it true or not?
I don't know. Hard to say at the moment.
But I think it's cool to see in action anyways.
Now we're going to watch one of the more ridiculous scenes in Jurassic Park 3 if you ask me.
So we saw earlier that Grant had a replica
made in the field of one of these resonating chambers of Velociraptor.
And here Grant pulls that resonating chamber out of his backpack
and uses it to to basically scare the raptors away.
I think that's just ridiculous on the face of it.
How in the world would Alan Grant know how to use that thing
and let alone speak the language of a Velociraptor?
But let's set that aside.
I think the more important point to make scientifically is that Velociraptor,
as far as we know, didn't have these resonating chambers
in its skull—certainly not as sizable as the one that Grant is showing here.
There's no way you could even fit that in a Velociraptor skull. So
there is something left to be desired there.
The new Jurassic World Dominion movie is dropping in June
and I'm going to be reacting
to the second trailer that just dropped, which I have not yet seen.
So this is my first time seeing this and my reactions will be off the cuff.
[Movie clip – Girl] Blue had a baby. That's impossible.
[Movie clip – Man] Hey, girl.
[Movie clip – Girl] You look just like your mother.
[Jordan] OK, so here's something I'm going to say.
The opening 20 seconds here.
We learned that Blue, the star Velociraptor from the Jurassic World movies—Velociraptors aren't scary anymore,
they're pets, basically—Blue had a baby
And we know that dinosaurs laid clutches of eggs,
and they had many babies at once.
Here, it seems that our friend Blue had one baby, which strikes me as a little off.
I would think that Blue would have had many babies, but let's roll with it.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Movie clip] What's going to survive matters.
[Jordan] I'm trying to gather my thoughts on this one.
We just saw a scene basically
where it's theropod world, where it's just "Here's a Velociraptor,
here's what looks like an Allosaurus, here's
a Carnotaurus, here's a Tyrannosaurus."
And they're going around the city eating people.
I don't know how I feel about that.
I feel, like I mentioned earlier, they would probably eat one person
and then they'd probably be good for a few days.
So I don't know that if dinosaurs got loose like this, that
it would be quite the carnage that we're seeing in this movie so far.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Jordan] I don't know if you saw that.
If you saw what I just saw, but I saw a scene showing these big hands
with these big claws on a big feathered dinosaur.
I'm happy to see feathers on dinosaurs in the Jurassic movies, first of all.
And secondly, I'm happy to see this animal,
which looks to be Therizinosaurus.
When I was a kid growing up, all we knew about
Therizinosaurus was basically its arms.
And I remember the books that I would see,
all you would see is drawings of its arms, maybe swiping out from behind a tree or something like that.
We didn't actually know what those dinosaurs looked like.
But now in recent years, we've found skeletons and
and more and more fossils of Therizinosaurus and its relatives.
And so we have very good idea now of what these animals were.
So it's pretty cool to me to finally see these things brought to life in a movie.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Jordan] All right. This one sticks in my craw.
I remember seeing this in the first trailer.
I think this is supposed to be a Pyroraptor, one of these
new feathered raptors that they're bringing into the movies.
Looks OK.
Diving into the ice to swim through the water leaves a bit to be desired.
We don't think that these dinosaurs were particularly good underwater swimmers.
I have no doubt they could swim,
but to glide through the water effortlessly like a penguin.
I don't know about that.
All right, that was the second trailer.
Lots of theropod action, lots
of blood and guts and teeth and claws.
I mentioned earlier that my favourite scenes in these movies
are the peaceful scenes showing the dinosaurs
living alongside one another, peacefully eating, going about their business.
I get the impression from watching this trailer that there's probably not going to be a lot of that.
These movies, despite some of their shortcomings, mean a lot to me.
And I always look forward to seeing a new one come out.
And you can rest assured that I'll be there to see the new movie
when it does finally hit theatres.
[Music and sounds from the movie]
[Jordan] The first movie, especially, had a big impact on me as a kid.
I remember coming home that night, having seen that in theatres
and telling my mom that I want to be a palaeontologist.
[Text] All Jurassic Park and Jurassic World clips are property of © 2022 Universal Pictures Pachycephalosaurus illustrations by Ryan Steiskal. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Therizinosaurus illustration by ABelov2014. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Generic license. Therizinosaurus arms photo by Yuya Tamai. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Additional clips: Storyblocks.com