The Sheer Wrongness of Jurassic Park

Most people are familiar with dinosaurs in what they see in movies and popular culture, as tomes on paleontology are heavy and use vocabulary too difficult for the average reader. Steven Speilberg’s movie Jurassic Park is one of the most influential movies on the public’s image on dinosaurs. There’s many inaccuracies, which have given the public a false view on these extinct creatures.

The movie is based off the novel of the same name, written by the now-deceased Micheal Crichton. Crichton worked with Spielberg in writing the screenplay, agreeing where certain elements would look better in film (like falling through a tree in the Jeep), but some dinosaurs were “embellished” to look better. The novel as a whole was more biologically correct than the movie, though there were still some errors within.

The Velociraptors were the main antagonist of both the novel and movie, though they were grossly put out of proportion. In the novel, they were as large as a full grown adult, and in the movie , one can clearly see that the terrified children are smaller than the raptors. In real life, they were three feet tall at the shoulder, at most. Crichton wrote the raptors actually as Deinonychus, a much larger raptor-like species. At the time of writing, scientists thought that they were both raptors, though by the time the movie came out, no one corrected this fact. The fossils of the raptors were also found in Montana in both book and film, though Velociraptor lived in Mongolia. They were also shown without feathers, but that fact wasn’t known at the time, so one cannot place as much blame there.

The Diloposaurus can be remembered as the cute little dinosaur with a frill that killed the fat programmer by spitting a sticky poison in his eyes. These dinos were actually much larger in real life, and sported neither a frill nor venom; all the changes were done just for looks.

The Tyrannosaurus was ultimately the savior of the human characters, and also one of the most immediately recognizable dinosaurs before the movie came out. One of the earlier scenes of the movie is when the paleontologist tells everyone to stand still, so that the T. rex could not notice them, as it can only see by movement; most scientists today say that that is false. Another part of the scene is when they are chased by the dino while driving in their Jeep. The sheer amount of energy and muscle mass to move such a large dinosaur that fast and for that long would be biologically impossible, and a fall would mean they would never get up again.

Many other minor inaccuracies in the films give false ideas about what certain dinosaurs could do, but nowhere near like what happened with the species listed prior. Brachiosaurus was shown rearing, though that would have been physically impossible, Pteradons were shown with teeth, though they had toothless beaks, and Spinosaurus had improper teeth.

The movies and books sparked a new interest in dinosaurs and paleontology with the public, and brought Velociraptors from near obscurity to one of the most recognizable dinosaurs out there. Unfortunately, such media as films and novels need to stretch the truth in order to make the ordinary more fantastic or terrifying, though dinosaurs are amazing enough that they don’t need embellishing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_issues_in_Jurassic_Park