When Jurassic Park first came out in 1993, it was a pretty groundbreaking depiction of dinosaurs.
Steven Spielberg certainly took plenty of artistic liberties, but overall,
the movie was so much better than what had come before, in terms of recreating what scientists
knew about how dinosaurs looked and how they moved.
The character Alan Grant was actually a bit ahead of his time.
“Look at the half-moon shaped bones in the wrists. No wonder these guys learned how to
fly…Seriously!” Back then, the claim that birds evolved from
dinosaurs was still controversial. Now it’s widely accepted.
But in the late 1990s, the science started speeding ahead and the movies just didn’t
keep up. Even the latest installment, Jurassic World,
shot in ultra high-definition 3D -- it features dinosaurs that are out of date.
Three years after the first Jurassic Park movie was released, scientists in China uncovered
a feathered dinosaur for the first time -- Sinosauropteryx. It takes very specific conditions for the
earth to record soft tissues like these primitive feathers. The animals had to buried quickly,
before decomposing, in fine-grained sediment. It turned out that this part of China, Liaoning
Province, saw major volcanic eruptions around 120 million years ago, which provided these
very conditions. And more than 30 feathered dinosaur species
have been unearthed there and in some other places since 1996.
These fuzzy dinosaurs were mostly 2-legged meat eaters, part of a group that’s closely
related to birds in the dinosaur family tree. That group includes many of the dinosaurs
featured in the Jurassic Park movies. “Gallimimus” These guys probably had feathers of some sort
for insulation or decoration. And that includes the raptors.
Jurassic Park III sort of nodded to the new research by giving them a little bit of a
hairdo. But their feathers probably looked more like this.
A velociraptor fossil from the Gobi desert revealed bumps on the forearm similar to the
wing attachments on modern birds. That means raptors had wings.
And what about T-Rex? There’s no direct evidence, but a few years ago, scientists
found a 30-foot dinosaur with some feathers - the biggest so far. Yutyrannus is thought
to be closely related to T-Rex, so it’s possible that the most famous and feared dinosaur
might have been sorta fluffy.
It’s not clear how universal feathers were among dinosaurs. But while most of the specimens
are theropods, there have been a few interesting findings from way over on the other
side of the family tree.
These two have bristles of some sort, which may or may not be related to bird feathers.
And this one, found last year, has even more complex feather-like filaments. These fossils
may indicate that feather precursors date back to some of the dinosaurs’ earliest
common ancestors. Jurassic World could have introduced feathered
dinosaurs to a huge audience this year. But it didn’t.
According to Jack Horner, a paleontologist that worked on all four films, the decision
was made for the sake of consistency. But you have to assume they also just weren’t
up for the task of making feathers…into something scary.