Palaeontologist Breaks Down Everything Jurassic Park Got Completely Wrong About Dinosaurs
Many people's idea of what dinosaurs look like comes from the Jurassic Park movies.
When it comes to showing us dinosaurs, there's nothing quite like the Jurassic Park series to bring them to the big screens.
While there have been plenty of sequels to the 1993 movie, none have come close to the original when giving their audience a sense of wonder at dinosaurs.
From the moment Dr Alan Grant realises 'they do move in herds' to the terrifying attack from a T-Rex that 'can't see us if we don't move', Jurassic Park burned an iconic image of dinosaurs into the minds of a generation.
However, it turns out that this image isn't as accurate as we thought as a paleontologist has explained in a deep-dive on dinosaur movies where he breaks down just what they got wrong. Take a look below:
Reviewing a slew of dinosaur movies for Vanity Fair, paleontologist Mark Loewen gets to don his movie geek hat and flex his knowledge of the creatures that once roamed the earth at the same time.
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As it turns out, the Tyrannosaurus Rex would almost certainly have been able to see Dr Grant in that iconic Jurassic Park scene.
Loewen explains they had 'an overlapping field of view of about 60 degrees', which is better than what the hawks flying around today have, meaning the ferocious T-Rex would have easily gobbled up our heroes.
Meanwhile, the scene where the villainous Dennis Nedry gets killed by a Dilophosaurus would have been even more scary.
Nedry gets killed by the dino after attempting to flee the park in the wake of stealing a bunch of dinosaur embryos and switching off the security fences, an act which gets several other characters killed and kicks off much of the disaster.
In truth, the filmmakers made the dino smaller than it actually was, as Loewen says it was 'really about 25 to 30 feet long', so there's no way anyone would have tried to play catch with it.
On top of that, they also didn't have the neck frills or poison spit the dinosaur in the movie used to scare and take down Nedry, with Loewen saying it was 'literally the worst' portrayal of any dinosaur in the whole franchise.
That being said, it is an incredibly cool moment and seeing a villain get his comeuppance in such a way was far more satisfying than just seeing him get gobbled up by another big dinosaur.
While some dinosaurs worked better by being made smaller, the velociraptors broke from reality by being much larger than their real life counterparts.
The raptors of Jurassic Park were terrifying predators, those that really lived millions of years ago were much smaller and Loewen suspects a person with a good pair of boots and a stick could probably fend them off.
All that being said, while the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise aren't the most accurate you'll ever see they are incredibly scary and that's the real thing that matters to audiences.
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Topics: Jurassic Park
Joe Harker