Allow a paleontologist to ruin Jurassic Park with an appeal to boring old scientific accuracy

Paleontologist Dave Hone discussed a bunch of famous cinematic portrayals of dinosaurs

By Reid McCarter  |  February 16, 2022 | 7:15pm
Film Features Jurassic Park
Allow a paleontologist to ruin Jurassic Park with an appeal to boring old scientific accuracy
Ultimately, any paleontologist would give a limb to watch even the fakest T-rex eat people up close. Screenshot: Insider

Scientists are always trying to ruin dinosaurs for us. It seems a month or two can’t go by without us having to hear about a mighty prehistoric beast actually being a picky eater, covered in feathers, or stomping around the Earth while honking through its big goofy nose.

And now, as part of an entire scientific field’s mission to disabuse us of every cool, scary dinosaur notion we wrongly hold, a paleontologist named Dave Hone has sat down with Insider to tell us how inaccurate most film depictions of the terrible lizards really are.

Right from the jump, you can tell that Hone isn’t going to mess around because he says the video will cover “dinosaur and pterosaur” clips, making an immediate distinction that wouldn’t occur to any but the most serious prehistoric scholars. That done, he gets straight to work by taking aim at how velociraptors look in the Jurassic movies, illustrating that the real creatures were definitely smaller and less cool looking.

As Hone continues, we hear that pterosaurs actually couldn’t lift a person up into the air to rip them apart, and that a dilophosaurus wouldn’t have a cool expanding frill or spit goopy venom at Seinfeld cast members.

Worst of all, Hone says that a fearsome T-rex wouldn’t have stomped hard enough to make bubbles form in a cup of water when it was approaching prey, and that it would rather chase a road flare than a human like some kind of overgrown house cat. He also explains that a T-rex could actually see very well, and that the big terrifying, toothy head we’ve come to know doesn’t really look right. The original Jurassic Park, in the end, gets a six out of ten.

As for The Land Before Time? It’s more accurate than most of what’s shown from Jurassic Park/World and receives, after Hone checks out some of its scenes, an eight out of ten.

If Jurassic World Dominion wants to help rectify the series’ spotty history and get it up to The Land Before Time’s level, we suggest the last minute addition of a scene that prominently displays an accurate dino butthole for future paleontologists to carefully consider and provide their approval.

[via Digg]

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