Franceinfo asked paleontologists to compare the representation of dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s cult film with the state of scientific knowledge, past and current.
Jurassic Park not only revolutionized special effects in cinema. Released thirty years ago to the day in France, Steven Spielberg’s film also awakened its millions of spectators to the vanished world of dinosaurs. Despite the criticism that greeted it, the Hollywood blockbuster even aroused many vocations for paleontologists, as some confided to France Inter. The feature film, hailed by researchers as a faithful reflection of the level of knowledge at the time of filming, nevertheless took some liberties with reality. Starting with the fact that the overwhelming majority of creatures appearing on screen come from the Cretaceous and not the Jurassic. Three decades later, research has made giant leaps, to the point where it is questionable whether the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park have aged really well.
Velociraptors were smaller and covered in feathers
“You created raptors?”, wonders Professor Alan Grant, holding in his arms a dinosaur just out of its egg. Jurassic Park’s chief geneticist, Henry Wu, nods in agreement. This answer deserves some clarification.
Michael Crichton’s “techno-thriller” and Steven Spielberg’s film refer to the book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World by Gregory S. Paul. However, this American paleontologist grouped different dinosaurs under the same name. So there was not just one variety of raptor, but several. “What Michael Crichton refers to as raptors in the novel are the deinonychus, whose skull measures the width between my two shoulders”says Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland and consultant for a BBC documentary series on dinosaurs.
The film not only maintains the confusion between raptors and velociraptors, but offers a false representation of the latter. “Velociraptors, literally, have a skull no bigger than the palm of my hand”describes Thomas R. Holtz Jr. In Jurassic Parkthey were force-fed steroids. “It’s a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger being cast as Abraham Lincoln.”compares Steve Brusatte, consultant on the last Jurassic World. Or an Austrian-American bodybuilding champion lending his features to a slender American president. During the production of the film, paleontologists discovered the Utahraptor (in the US state of Utah, as its name suggests), described by the University of Utah Museum of Natural History. He has the template of the raptors from the film.
Three years after the release of Jurassic Park, in 1996, a velociraptor fossil with traces of feathers was unearthed in China, recalls the University of Michigan museum. However, in the following films of the franchise, we do not see the slightest feather on the thick leather of these predators. “If Steven Spielberg had added more to his velociraptors, people would have found it ridiculous, undercut dinosaurs like Liberacelaughs Steve Brusatte. The result would have been the opposite: the public would have found them much less realistic.”
The image of the velociraptor forged by Jurassic Park persists. In Jurassic World, released in 2015, a scientist slips, as a wink to researchers around the world: “If we modeled them as they really are, people wouldn’t believe it.” The consultant Steve Brusatte still managed to slip a feathered dinosaur into the saga. “Millions of people were able to see what a velociraptor really looked like.” To do this, we had to be cunning by offering the viewer a new species of raptor, the pyroraptor, and adorning it with feathers as in reality.
Tyrannosaurus Rex Had Much Better Vision, But It Didn’t Run As Fast
With two or three anatomical approximations, the synthetic tyrannosaurus of Jurassic Park is considered convincing by the specialists interviewed by franceinfo. Except his behavior on screen, when things go wrong in billionaire John Hammond’s animal park. When the T-Rex escapes from its enclosure, Professor Alan Grant warns mathematician fatalist Ian Malcolm, specialist in chaos theory: “Don’t make a single move again. His vision is based on movement.”
A major factual error to blame on Steven Spielberg and David Koepp, his screenwriter, who moved away from Michael Crichton’s original material. The novelist took care to explain that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park having been recreated using frog DNA, the T-Rex reconstituted by park scientists had inherited this major trait from amphibians that he did not actually possess. This is not explained in the film, although Professor Grant deduces it during the attack on the Jeep in the novel.
“When you think about it for two minutes, it would be a real problem if an animal that big, that makes that much noise, could only detect its prey when it was moving.”underlines Thomas R. Holtz Jr. The study of the cranial cavities of tyrannosaurs has long established that they had perfect binocular vision and an excellent sense of smell.
Another problem: when “Rexy” starts running to chase the 4×4. “With a top speed of around 20 km/h, a T-Rex would be unable to catch up with a running human, let’s not even talk about a vehicle”, points out Romain Pintore, paleontologist attached to the Natural History Museum. The T-Rex sprinting on screen is not only unrealistic, but it was also a challenge to stage. “The great specialist in dinosaur locomotion John Hutchinson told me about his visit to the premises of ILM, the company responsible for special effectsrelates the expert. Even the animators admitted that they had all the trouble in the world getting a T-Rex to run.”
The dilophosaurus was much stronger and had neither frill nor venom
Like many movie-loving paleontologists, Thomas R. Holtz Jr. almost swallowed his popcorn wrong when he saw the dilophosaurus open its frill and settle the score with the crooked computer scientist Dennis Nedry with a well-placed jet of venom. “At this point in the film, in the cinema, I couldn’t help but say to myself: ‘Ah, they missed this one!'”slips the specialist.
In the film, the creature appears almost slender. However, it was already established when the film was released that it must weigh 750 kg and measure six meters long. “It’s an artistic freedom, we’ll say”, smiles Romain Pintore. According to Adam Marsh, the dilophosaur specialist, author of an article on this species in the journal National Geographicresearch carried out at the time established that the dilophosaurus had weak jaws and a fragile crest, which may have influenced the film’s designers. New studies have refuted this previous work: the dilophosaurus was much more muscular and capable of hunting large prey. On the other hand, the fossils provided no evidence of the existence of a collar or any venom.
Stan Winston, the man behind the film’s animatronics – the larger-than-life dinosaur robots – has always prided himself on having “do [s]homework, read all the literature, seen all the representations, studied the existing data. We owe it to the film to have closed the debate on the representation of dinosaurs as warm-blooded animals, closer to birds than to cold-blooded lizards. The same Stan Winston, however, recognizes it in the book retracing the making of the film: “But of course there is an element of artistic license in what we have achieved.”
Dinosaur DNA preserved in a mosquito is a theory not bitten by cockchafers
“100 million years ago, there were mosquitoes like today. And like today, they fed on the blood of animals. Even dinosaurs. Sometimes, after biting a dinosaur, the mosquito would placed on a tree branch and got stuck in the sap.” Thousands of years later, a Jurassic Park scientist drills into the fossilized amber and manages to recover the blood, continues the short presentation film for visitors. “And bingo, there’s dino DNA!”
As luck would have it, the day before the American release of the film, in June 1993, the review Nature publishes a study where scientists explain having discovered fragments of DNA from a 120 million year old weevil trapped in amber.
“The idea is credible on paper”, concedes Romain Pintore. Equivalents of the mosquito with its hardened steel proboscis to pierce the thick skin of the dinosaur existed during the Cretaceous period. But things go wrong in said mosquito’s stomach. A blood soup being the strong kind, the insect adds enzymes to facilitate digestion. This has the effect of accelerating the deterioration of DNA. “The oldest DNA ever discovered dates back a million years, for an almost complete mammoth genome, and was not from an insect”, insists the specialist. We are missing a good sixty million years to recover that of the last T-Rex to have scampered in the meadows.
Science fiction? You should never say never, tempers his American colleague Thomas R. Holtz Jr., who does not rule out that one day, machines will make it possible to recover older DNA. But geneticists would not yet be at the end of their troubles. “If we have a small segment of DNA here, and another there, we will not necessarily be able to reconstruct a genome entirewarns the expert. If we discover sequences that dinosaurs have in common with birds or crocodiles, which we already know, that will not necessarily advance science much. Let’s not even talk about bringing one back to life.” Until now, apart from cloning frogs or sheep that disappeared a few years ago, with intact tissues under the elbow, man has not succeeded in making many species reappear (a Pyrenees ibex close). There are many projects to develop certain ancient genes in birds (preventing the metatarsal bones from fusing, pushing their tails to develop), notes the specialist. “But the scientists who handle these embryos don’t let them reach term. It’s a question of ethics.”
Who knows ? In 2043, when Jurassic Park will blow out its fifty candles, perhaps it will be seen as kitsch as the formidable nanar A million years BC, with cardboard lizards and Raquel Welch wearing an animal skin bikini. Spielberg’s film succeeded in making all previous works outdated, if not scientifically impeccable. A reference status which remains fragile. “The whole film is built on many gray areas, underlines Romain Pintore. Take raptors: we don’t know exactly how they hunted or what their social behavior was. All we can do is extrapolate from existing animals.” The paleontologists who embraced this profession thanks to Jurassic Park will perhaps be the ones who send it to oblivion.