There Are No Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
“They’re not monsters, Lex. They’re just animals.” – Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park (1993)
A new Jurassic Park sequel is once again upon us. This one is titled Jurassic World: Rebirth and much of the marketing for the film has revolved around it featuring a monstrous mutant creature which is being referred to as the “Distortus Rex.”*¹ I think it’s a fine looking movie monster, but this creature has no basis in reality, and looks like it would be more at home in a Star Wars sequel or Alien prequel than a film intending to portray dinosaurs, animals that really did live on Earth. In many ways the inclusion of such a movie monster seems antithetical to the original film that successfully brought new scientific concepts about dinosaurs to the public and insisted that they were just animals even when the posed a danger to the human characters, and yet, it could also be regarded as the inevitable trajectory of the Jurassic Park franchise. How can that be true?
In the years leading up to the making of the first Jurassic Park film, there had been a quiet revolution in the study of dinosaurs. Now called the “Dinosaur Renaissance,” it represented a dramatic reassessment of the understanding of dinosaurs, challenging the long-standing view of dinosaurs as being ectothermic (cold-blooded), sluggish, tail-dragging, lizard-like creatures of low intelligence. Instead they were proposed to be endothermic (warmblooded), active, bird-like creatures, some of which could be considerably intelligent. In Matthew P. Martyniuk’s 2012 book, A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and other Winged Dinosaurs, he elucidates that, “Today, a vast majority of scientists hold the opinion that birds are the dinosaur’s direct descendants, and therefore are considered to be a sub-group within Dinosauria. Birds are as much dinosaurs as the long-necked elephantine sauropods were.” He also wrote, “… we now know that Mesozoic birds were incredibly diverse, and discoveries since the late 1990s have shown that some of the most popular and well-known dinosaurs, including the “raptors”, may be included among them.” The bulk of these ideas were put forward in palaeontologist Robert T. Bakker’s 1986 book, The Dinosaur Heresies, and while radical to what had long been accepted, many of these new ideas were quickly adopted and built upon in the paleontological establishment. Michael Crichton would draw on these new ideas about dinosaurs in writing Jurassic Park, and of course Bakker would be acknowledged in the novel and name-dropped in the film.*²
While the film adaptation of Jurassic Park is a world away from dry edutainment, it managed to successfully communicate those new scientific ideas to audiences in a way that was easy to grasp, with its paleontological heroes Dr. Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler occasionally acting as mouth-pieces for these concepts. For instance when they’re introduced to a herd of long-necked sauropods upon first arriving at the island, Grant comments, “Ellie, we can tear up the rule book on cold-bloodedness. It doesn’t apply, they’re totally wrong! This is a warm-blooded creature,” followed by Sattler adding that, “This thing doesn’t live in a swamp.” There was also the focus on the ruthlessly intelligent and deadly pack-hunting velociraptors of the film being particularly bird-like. Of course the velociraptors of the novel and film were modelled on their larger cousin, deinonychus, rather than the authentic doggy-sized velociraptor, but Michael Crichton believed that the name “velociraptor” was better, and despite having the heart of a stickler for scientific accuracy, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think his instincts were correct. With their meteoric rise in popularity that came with the film’s blockbuster success, velociraptor would in many ways come to symbolize the new ideas of the Dinosaur Renaissance in many.
Of course the sort of massive popularity achieved by Jurassic Park can be the opening of a Pandora’s Box. The film left such a strong impression of these prehistoric animals that it has proven difficult to shake in the minds of many, and that impression has been proliferated through films and other works inspired by it or seeking to ape its success in the boom of oft-dubious dinosaur media that it spawned.*³ I say this as someone who enthusiastically watched every Prehysteria! multiple times as a child. Of course that trend of dinosaur media has ebed in the time since, but all you have to do is look to the shoddy Jurassic Park-ey looking monster dinosaurs of the 2023 Adam Driver vehicle, 65, or the trailer for the upcoming American-Vietnam era soldiers vs. dinosaurs movie, Primitive War, to see that that trend has continued in some capacity to this day. That’s created a certain tension as the scientific understanding of dinosaurs has continued to develop and enrich in the time since the film’s release. It’s a lot of little taxonomic discrepancies, but also a few big ones, and there has proven to be an irrational resistance to ideas that contradict the cinematic image of dinosaurs. For instance that Tyrannosaurus had extra-aural tissues (lips), or that velociraptor was covered in feathers and were unable to pronate their wrists (turn them so their palms would face downwards) like they do in the sequence where they turn a door handle to prey on a pair of terrified children.
It places the sequels to Jurassic Park in a position, caught in between revising their dinosaurs and a fealty to continuity with the first film (not only with the recurring dinosaur species, but also a stylistic continuity when introducing new species). For example you can see Jurassic Park III pay a tiny bit of lip service to paleontological developments by adding a few quill-like feathers to its Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park III would also make an antagonist out of the spinosaurus, with a powerful and imposing design that has not aged well in regards to our scientific understanding. However in this case that’s not the fault of the filmmakers, so much as each newly discovered part of the animal’s anatomy in the years since the film’s release having thrown a curveball at our understanding of it. It appears to have been a squat-legged, flattened-tailed semi-aquatic creature. Less of an ultimate predator and more of an animal that you’d only have to fear if you were a fish. It’s worth noting that Jurassic World Rebirth appears to include updated spinosaurus designs which are more in-line with the current scientific understanding, though still with some artistic liberties taken. There are spinosaurus’ that look a bit more accurate in the new revival of Walking With Dinosaurs, though if I’m being honest the animation quality of that show leaves much to be desired. It’s also worth keeping in mind that even an up-to-date reconstruction of a spinosaurus like that will likely be out-of-date before too long as more fossils are found of it to answer some of the remaining questions about its anatomy (as is the case with with many other prehistoric creatures).
When the franchise had its soft reboot in 2015 with Jurassic World, you can see some of the previously mentioned resistance to feathered dinosaurs when even the few quill-like feathers were excised from that film’s velociraptor design. The film would prioritize reminding audiences of what they liked about the original film and crowd-pleasing movie monster designs, rather than updating the scientific accuracy of its dinosaur’s anatomy. I’ll get back to Jurassic World in just a moment, but I do want to mention that it wasn’t until 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion that a film in the franchise would get on board with fully feathered dinosaurs. As shoddy as many of the prehistoric animals look in that film, I did appreciate it including a (dramatically scaled-up and disproportioned) pyroraptor, and a therizinosaurus, a very large herbivorous maniraptor, which is showcased in the film’s most exciting and memorable scene, where the character Claire Dearing hides from the territorial creature which is blinded by cataracts. It would still be a stretch to call these renditions “scientifically accurate,” but it’s perhaps a reassurance that that resistance to feathered dinosaurs is gradually breaking down, and more people are willing to accept that many dinosaurs did have that anatomical trait.
Some fans have even gone the extra mile in using digital effects to replace the dinosaurs of the original Jurassic Park with more scientifically accurate dinosaurs for a number of scenes, like in videos on the FilmCore and CoolioArt YouTube channels, which replace the velociraptors. I especially appreciate the the alteration in CoolioArt’s video of having the deononicus that’s replaced the velociraptors use its mouth to turn the door handle to get around its hands not being able to pronate. It’s impressive fan work and fun to see, though I’d never seriously advocate that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park be retroactively altered for scientific accuracy. Largely this is for artistic preservation concerns, but also within the universe of the films there is what is essentially a “get out of scientific accuracy free” card.
Jurassic World would be the first film in the franchise to introduce an entirely fictional genetically engineered monster, the Indominus Rex, which seems like it should be a major turning point, but Dr. Henry Wu, a recurring minor character from the first film that is more significant in the novel, makes a convincing case that the creatures in the park were always as unnatural as that completely fabricated monster. This isn’t out of left field either as it echoes an exchange between Wu and the park owner, John Hammond:
“I don’t think we should kid ourselves. We haven’t re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past-or at least a version of the past. And I’m saying we can make a better version.”
“Better than real?”
“Why not?” Wu said. “After all, these animals are already modified. We’ve inserted genes to make them patentable, and to make them lysine dependent. And we’ve done everything we can to promote growth, and accelerate development into adulthood.”
Going back to the first film, the miraculous hurdle of obtaining DNA is achieved by extracting blood from ancient mosquitos preserved in amber. While it is a brilliant science fiction conceit, of course in reality the mosquito in amber method cannot work, partly because mosquitos break down blood fairly quickly, but also because DNA just doesn’t last that long. DNA has a half-life and breaks down over time, and while DNA from hundreds of thousands of years ago and even as much as over two million years ago (recovered from the Greenland permafrost), it might be described as an extremely fragmentary mess with much of its genetic information lost. Michael Crichton was knowledgable enough to include that even in his fictional Jurassic Park world the breakdown in genetic information must be accounted for. There are massive gaps in the genetic code, that the film explains has frog DNA spliced into to complete.*⁴ This ends up being a pivotal detail when it is revealed that the animals are capable of transitioning their gender, which allows them to breed and break out of the confines of the park. So, with that in mind, the precedent for the fictional creatures of the later Jurassic World films was set all the way back in the first film. They’re not true dinosaurs, and they never were. There are no dinosaurs in the park.
So, if they’re not dinosaurs, what are they? There is of course the science fiction explanation involving bioengineering, but I think they might best think of them as a form of paleoart (scientifically informed art that depicts prehistoric life), both within the world of the films and also when regarding the films as a work of art themselves. Paleoart can hold value even after the science it is based on has gone out of date, because it can be understood as a reflection of the science of its time while also being appreciated for its artistry. For instance, Zdenek Burian’s stunning paleoart paintings have continued to inspire, despite the science that informed them being long out of date. From that perspective it might be possible to consider the inaccuracies and embellishments of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to not be faults but rather expressions of the ideas and imagination around dinosaurs of a moment, frozen in time like an insect in amber. And perhaps the misguided desire to continually resurrect that moment from amber long after it has passed will inevitably result in monsters. Of course that’s the sequels’ prerogative, but who knows though, maybe the deformed Distortus Rex will prove to be sympathetic, like the dinosaur version of The Elephant Man? I guess I’ll have to see for myself.
I think a takeaway from all this might be that our understanding of these extinct animals will continue to evolve and no work of art or entertainment will be timeless in depicting dinosaurs, but also that art and entertainment are important for expressing that evolution. There have been so many exciting new discoveries and developments with out understanding of dinosaurs just in the past few years, that it’s been thrilling to see them explored like in the beautifully produced Prehistoric Planet, which is done in the style of a wildlife docuseries, and is narrated by the great David Attenborough (who is, of course brother of the late, great Richard Attenborough). I’ve spent hours repeatedly watching the YouTube series Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong, a show which uses critiques of dinosaur toys to educate about dinosaur anatomy, and which is presented, written and animated by Steve Belletini, and directed, shot, and edited by Elizabeth Stack. It’s presented in an all-ages friendly format, while never condescending or dumbing down. And speaking of toys, I’m amazed at the quality of dinosaur figures that companies like PNSO and Haolonggood have been producing, and haven’t been able to resist acquiring a few for myself. I’ve also spent hours playing the online multiplayer game, Path of the Titans, which allows you to play as a wide variety of dinosaur species. That’s not to mention the plethora of fantastic paleoart illustrations being created by talented artists right now, that can be found all over the internet. These sorts of works that draw on science have really reinvigorated my appreciation for dinosaurs, especially with so many fascinating new insights, many stemming from the new understanding of the relationship between modern birds and other dinosaurs. For example, how the long-necked sauropods were able to grow so mind-bogglingly large because they had the sort of respiratory system with air sacks that allows many birds to fly. Of course this is all with the understanding that this art and entertainment too will one day be out of date as the science will continue to evolve, and as it does our appreciation for these prehistoric animals can be enriched as our understanding of them grows.
So, are there really no dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Well, maybe I was too hasty. At the end of the film when our heroes escape the island, Dr. Grant looks out the window of their helicopter and what does he see, but honest-to-goodness, living, breathing, real dinosaurs.
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*1 – However I haven’t been able to stop myself from calling it “the googoosaurus.”
*2 – I also touched on how Jurassic Park was a watershed moment for cinema in its use of digital effect, in part 3 of my Kong Jubilee series.
*3 – The frill for dilophosaurus is good example of an anatomical detail that was a complete fabrication for Jurassic Park with no basis in reality, that has a habit of appearing in unrelated media, like this stupid mobile game.
*4 – In 2006 it was proven that Komodo dragons are capable of parthenogenesis, which is the ability for females in isolation to reproduce by laying a viable egg without a mate, and I do wonder if perhaps had this been learned earlier, Crichton may have had the dinosaurs of his novels spliced with Komodo dragon DNA rather than amphibian DNA.