Althouse: How true-to-life are Hollywood movie dinosaurs?

June 19, 2022

How true-to-life are Hollywood movie dinosaurs?

15 comments:

gilbar said...: with teeth that big, no wonder Noah didn't allow them on the boat! They would have torn it up!; 6/19/22, 5:25 PM
chuck said...: I rather like this David Hone interview. It's different, it's personal. You'll see.; 6/19/22, 5:45 PM
Rabel said...: I'm 14 minutes in and I'm wondering if he's going to get to Dino and that brontosaurus shovel that Fred operated.; 6/19/22, 6:03 PM
Rabel said...: So disappointed.; 6/19/22, 6:09 PM
Lurker21 said...: Bah! Another Jurassic Park movie. I'm waiting for The Andromeda Strain II: COVID 19. Crichton would have had the guts to make Fauci (or a fictional character unmistakably like him) the villain.; 6/19/22, 6:17 PM
tcrosse said...: How true-to-life are Hollywood movie people?; 6/19/22, 7:03 PM
Richard Aubrey said...: Old, old timies used iguana up close on mini sets.; 6/19/22, 7:26 PM
Creola Soul said...: One of the best museums to visit is the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming. It’s an outstanding, world-class dinosaur facility. One of the unique aspects of the museum is it has several active quarries where they are actually excavating dinosaurs. We worked on excavating a 35’ camarasaurus, a large herbivore. The striking contrast is that the area used to be a tropical jungle, yet today it’s a dry high desert plain. When Lewis and Clark crossed the area in the winter of 1805-1806 they too faced an arid, treeless plain with temperatures as low as 20 below zero. Which begs the question: who was responsible for changing the climate? No one was driving big Ford SUVs around or burning coal then, yet the climate changed.; 6/19/22, 7:50 PM
Michael K said...: That was a great video. I was living alone in the country in New Hampshire when Jurassic Park was on TV. Scared the hell out of me.; 6/19/22, 7:51 PM
narciso said...: They did write a sequel with the robot rebellion guy, but it was substandard; 6/19/22, 7:52 PM
gilbar said...: The Andromeda Strain II: COVID 19

That would be pretty good, as a fantastic voyage; but WHO would Believe, that the Entire Earth would just "lock down".. For TWO YEARS??; 6/19/22, 8:03 PM
Quaestor said...: Many animation artists seem uninterested in dinosaurs as real animals, instead, they're just props for the same adventure story -- humans fighting for survival against monsters. The sympathetic characters execute one close shave escape after another, while the unsympathetic ciphers (insert mercenary lawyer, greedy capitalist, callous big game hunter here) are chewed and digested.

The first Jurassic Park film was adapted from the novel by Michael Crichton, who substituted the genus name Velociraptor (approximately Latin for "speedy thief", coined by Henry F. Osborn in 1924) for the animal described by John Ostrom in 1969, Deinonychus, ("terrible claw") because it sounded sexier. Crichton imagined his dinosaurs in terms consistent with the so-called dinosaur renaissance of the late 1970s promoted by Ostrom and his students, most notably Robert Bakker, i.e. as animals more like birds than lizards. However, Crichton did not anticipate the fossils that were just beginning to emerge from Liaoning Provence, China just as the film adaption of his book reached the cinemas. By 1996 it was becoming clear that "dinosaurs have more in common with birds than reptiles", as Crichton's Dr. Grant puts it, is quite mistaken. Firstly, if biology is a science, then birds ARE dinosaurs, no question, and secondly, as dinosaurs, birds are members of the high order clade Archosauria ("ruling reptiles"), along with the crocodilians and the Pterosauria, and consequently reptiles themselves. However, the current owners of Micheal Crichton's "Jurassic Park" franchise have ignored virtually everything discovered about the extinct dinosaurs species since the novel was published 32 years ago.

For example, look carefully at the hands of these JP "velociraptors". The hands are pronated, i.e. held "palms" downward. The radiocarpal joints of the Eudromaeosauria have been among the most closely studied subjects in modern paleontology, and one result of those studies is the certain fact that those animals could not pronate their paws. Anatomically, the forelimbs of Velociraptor are wings, yes, WINGS. The current supposition is the entire Eudromaeosauria clade are secondarily flightless and much larger descendants of a small flying or gliding ancestor generally similar to Archaeopteryx. If seen in life, a Velociraptor would impress a human observer as some type of ground-dwelling bird of prey, like a long-tailed secretary bird or hawk, except with a tooth-filled snout rather than a keratinous beak. But for some reason, Hollywood wants them to be lizards. Fuck 'em.

I haven't seen any of the "Jurassic Park" movies since the third installment because I am utterly and irreparably bored with the same preposterous shit time and time again. Except for the nouns, the same script would work for a zombie movie, another genre I have no patience for. "Run! The T. rex is following us!" Search and replace T. rex with undead ghoul and you're done.; 6/19/22, 8:05 PM
traditionalguy said...: We’re not the Dino’s egg laying like birds? The mammals came later and took over. Frankly , I don’t give a damn about them.

Mammals Uber alles.; 6/19/22, 9:06 PM
mikee said...: The concept of Jurassic Park's geneticists - in the first movie - splicing in amphibian DNA to replace missing sections of dino genes left me to wonder when the sequel will have a long-buried frog jump out of a long-buried box, pick up a tophat and cane, and sing "Hello, My Baby!" as it dances across the stage. It would be worth a fortune, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfnnujU1DUk; 6/19/22, 9:21 PM
Quaestor said...: traditional guy writes, "The mammals came later and took over."

Mammals probably predate the dinosaurs.; 6/19/22, 10:04 PM