Okay, so Jurassic Park doesn't exactly sell itself on historical accuracy, and nobody
expected Spielberg to know everything about dinosaurs.
But if you're genuinely dino-mad, some aspects of the film might seem particularly difficult
to swallow.
"Welcome to Jurassic Park."
Gonna have to stop you right there, John.
Maybe "Cretaceous Park" doesn't roll off the tongue in quite the same way as "Jurassic
Park" does, and let's face it, it's not the easiest thing to pronounce, either.
But that doesn't change the fact that the title of the entire franchise is totally backwards.
Some of Jurassic Park's most iconic dinosaurs, including the T-Rex and Velociraptor, lived
during the Cretaceous era, which is the geologic period that came just after the Jurassic era.
So what sorts of dinos would you find in a truly Jurassic "Jurassic Park?"
Well, the Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Megalosaurus were all Jurassic dinosaurs, and let's give
credit where it's due, the first two did show up in the franchise, so it's not like the
films were devoid of all things Jurassic.
Still, the two biggest stars from the first film were clearly the T-Rex and Velociraptor,
and both those species were solidly Cretaceous.
So "Jurassic Park" is somewhat misleading, but then again, "Cretaceous Park" wouldn't
have been precisely correct either.
Of course, it doesn't help that Michael Crichton's original novel included a few dinosaurs that
lived during the Triassic era.
Maybe it was best to stick with Jurassic Park, it does look better on a marquee, after all.
Sourcing decent sound effects for a movie is not as easy a job as you might imagine.
After all, it's not like they can just put some dude in a sound studio and ask him to
screech like a T-Rex.
For a start, no one really knows what a T-Rex sounded like, so the film's sound effects
team, known in the industry as foley artists, would just have to improvise.
Unfortunately, no matter how enthusiastic the foley team were, there's just no way they
wouldn't end up making a noise that sounded a little bit lame.
They're only human, after all.
So the filmmakers had to go elsewhere for sound effects.
In the end, the main basis for the T-Rex in Jurassic Park is a baby elephant.
There were a couple of other animals in there, too, including the snarl of a tiger and the
gurgling of an alligator.
Sadly, nobody will ever know for sure what T-Rex sounded like, because the tissue inside
an animal that's responsible for making sound isn't preserved during fossilization.
The best scientists can do is look at the dinosaur's closest living relatives.
Bad news for Jurassic Park's foley artists, though, because birds don't make sounds like
tigers or elephants.
They just sound like birds.
So in reality, the T-Rex probably sounded more like a hawk than anything else.
Or maybe it even chirped like a sparrow.
Heck, one study in 2016 suggested they may have honked like a goose.
But…
Yeah, maybe not.
Interestingly, what seems like the most science-based aspect of the Jurassic Park franchise is,
as it turns out, total bunk.
The sad truth is that literally no one has ever recovered dino-DNA from a piece of amber,
or from anything else for that matter.
In fact, the closest they've ever come is some weird, unidentified DNA someone found
in a dinosaur bone.
But even that might not necessarily have been dinosaur DNA; it could have just as easily
been the DNA of something far less interesting, like bacteria or an earthworm.
And even if scientists knew where it came from, it wasn't in any kind of usable state.
Scientists couldn't even identify it, much less recover and sequence it.
DNA, as it turns out, is just as fragile as skin and muscle, meaning it starts to decay
as soon as the animal it belonged to dies.
What's more, scientists have actually tried to extract DNA from insects preserved in amber
a la Jurassic Park, and have learned that amber in particular is an immensely bad DNA
preservative.
Oh, and here's a nitpick and a half, for you, the mosquito that is pictured in the movie's
chunk of amber is Toxorhynchites rutilus, a species that doesn't actually feed on blood.
So it wouldn't have fed on dino-DNA anyway.
Early in the first Jurassic Park movie, it's explained that the DNA found inside those
ancient mosquitoes was incomplete.
So the geneticists responsible for cloning the Jurassic Park dinos just handily filled
in the gaps with frog DNA, because, well, why not frogs?
Anyway, the end result is that the frog DNA lets the all-female population of dinosaurs
change biological sex, giving them the ability to reproduce.
"Life found a way."
Aside from the fact that DNA splicing across species is nigh-on impossible, there's one
big problem with this.
Doesn't it seem like maybe the geneticists should know which genes they were splicing
into that T-Rex they're making, and maybe avoid the gender-bending ones?
Science Direct believes that this plot point would have been a lot more believable if the
gender-switching had happened as a result of temperature or external stresses, instead
of the use of frog DNA, since biological sex isn't determined by genetics, but by environmental
factors.
In the end, an incubator set to the wrong temperature might have been a more plausible
cause for the presence of male dinos in Jurassic Park.
In the first Jurassic Park film, Dennis Nedry encounters a Dilophosaurus in the forest as
he's attempting to escape with a pack of stolen dinosaur embryos.
This particular Dilophosaurus is a tiny little dinosaur with a fancy neck frill that spits
venom all over poor Dennis, who is then devoured for good measure.
And let's face it, that makes for a pretty dramatic, terrifying, and arguably well-deserved
death for the movie's key human villain.
In reality, however, Dilophosaurus was nothing like the creature in the film.
The real Dilophosaurus was actually more than 20 feet long, which means it wouldn't have
needed venom to be an effective predator.
And that fits with the evidence, since nothing seems to indicate that the real dinosaur ever
spat venom.
Jurassic Park's Dilophosaurus also had those vibrating neck frills, which are similar to
the frilled-neck lizard that's native to Australia.
This little creature uses its elaborate neck frills, along with its yellow mouth, to intimidate
larger animals.
For the frilled-neck lizard, this tactic is merely a bluff, if it's not successful in
frightening its foe, it simply turns and runs away.
In the Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus, however, it's unclear what this strategy might be for.
Surely this Dilophosaurus doesn't want to scare its prey away, and in real life, the
20-foot beast would have been scary enough without the extra bizarre and unnecessary
bells and whistles.
But hey, this means the smaller movie version gets to show a little teeth.
And who could blame a dinosaur for wanting to show off every now and again?
Birds of a feather
When you read your dinosaur picture books as a kid, you didn't tend to see a lot of
feathers, so it's kind of hard for most people to reshape their ideas of how dinosaurs looked.
The T-Rex presents a special problem here, because most people imagine T-Rex as an animal
that looks exactly like the one in Jurassic Park.
That's the power of cinema for you.
But scientists now think that the T-Rex really did have feathers.
Granted, adult T-Rexes may not have been completely covered with feathers, but they probably at
least had patches of feathers on their heads, backs, and tails.
Juveniles were likely to be even more feathered.
In fact, there's a good chance you'd be better off describing them as "fluffy."
Feathers weren't unique to just a few species of dinosaur, either.
Scientists now believe that nearly all non-avian dinosaurs had feathers.
This means that all the dinos in Jurassic Park really should have been rocking the peacock
look.
To be fair, though, the whole dinosaurs had feathers theory wasn't really a done deal
in 1993.
It wasn't until 2007, in fact, that scientists found "quill knobs" on the forelimb of a Velociraptor
fossil, and by then the Jurassic Park dinos were already established as featherless, so
it would have been kind of weird to change that in the follow-up movies.
If you're ever unlucky enough to encounter a T-Rex in the wild, or in, uh, San Diego,
you might be tempted to follow the advice of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park.
"Don't move!
He can't see us if we don't move."
Unfortunately for Dr. Grant, T-Rex could see just fine, and standing very, very still would
have been a great way to get eaten.
How did scientists figure that out?
Well, they built scale models of a T-Rex and did experiments involving glass eyeballs and
laser pointers, and from there were able to discern the visual field, binocular range,
and depth perception of the king (or queen) of dinosaurs.
Based on their results, T-Rex had a binocular range that was likely broader than that of
a hawk.
Calculations also seemed to suggest that T-Rex's eyeball had visual clarity between three and
four times better than a hawk's, which is the equivalent of 13 times better than a human.
So, yeah, standing totally still might not have been quite as good a tactic as, say,
running away as fast as you possibly can.
This is a cheetah.
Cheetahs are incredibly fast, but they only have access to their top speed of 75 miles
per hour for roughly a quarter of a mile or so, after which they have to decelerate.
On average, a cheetah can really only run about 40 miles per hour for any length of
time, and even then it needs to catch its prey pretty quickly, or risk running out of
fuel.
T-Rex was, scientifically-speaking, way, way bigger than a cheetah.
And, as you might expect, bigger animals tend not to be the fastest.
In fact it's the medium-sized animals, like the cheetah, that rule when it comes to achieving
top speeds.
So a cheetah might have been able to keep up with that Jeep for a few beats, but even
then it would have pretty quickly fallen behind.
A T-Rex, however, wouldn't have stood a chance, in fact, scientists now think T-Rex's legs
were too long compared to the rest of its body for it to be capable of running at all.
If it tried, its legs might have snapped under the weight of its body.
Instead, it probably walked everywhere, although, to be fair, it was a pretty fast walker, reaching
a top speed of around 25 miles per hour.
Fast enough to catch a human on foot, sure, but not fast enough by far to keep pace with
a Jeep, even for a few seconds.
In the first Jurassic Park, the Velociraptors hunt their young victims through the park's
visitor center, leading to a pretty amazing revelation: they're smart.
Like, smart enough to figure out the mechanics of a door handle and let themselves into the
kitchen in which the kids are hiding.
In fact, later on in the franchise, it becomes clear that they're smart enough to actually
be trained and given orders.
So how smart were they, really?
Well, the University of Arizona says they were at least as clever as a rabbit, but probably
not quite as intelligent as a dog.
But just because they were as smart as certain modern animals doesn't necessarily mean they
were smart in the same way.
Since their brains were so primitive, their intelligence could have been confined to the
development of their senses, meaning they probably weren't capable of developing strategies
or opening doors.
T-Rex, however, might have been an exception.
It had a pretty big brain, and some scientists think it might have been genuinely intelligent,
even as smart as a chimpanzee, which means opening a door handle could have been well
within its capabilities.
If it could reach one, that is.
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