Skip to content

Column: Feathered dinos are plenty scary

Jurassic World, the latest sequel/reboot/re-imagining of the Jurassic Park series, premieres this June.

Jurassic World, the latest sequel/reboot/re-imagining of the Jurassic Park series, premieres this June. I may very well be outside the theatre with a protest sign, and it will read “Feathers Not Scales!” Plus as many exclamation points as I can fit on the posterboard.

Let’s go back a little bit. To the first Jurassic Park film in 1993, to the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, and back before that, too. Way back, to Victorian England, and the Great Exhibition of 1851.

During this world’s fair-style event, Victorian Londoners got their first view of one of the newest/oldest wonders of the Earth – dinosaurs! A series of life-sized sculptures had been created of iguanodon, megalosaurus, and hylaeosaurus. There were also an aquatic ichthyosaurus in a pond, pterodactyls, and a giant sloth.

All of them were utterly wrong.

The dinosaurs, in particular, looked bizarre. The iguanodons were sprawled giant lizards. The predatory megalosaurus was a hump-backed quadruped, a sort of crocodile-hyena hybrid, not the two-legged beast it was in reality.

And of course, all the dinosaurs had scales. “Saur” means reptile, right?

What we should have realized sooner was that birds are dinosaurs. From the discovery of Archaeopteryx in the early 1860s, some scientists realized it was closely related to dinosaurs, but also clearly an early bird.

It took until the 1970s for most scientists to accept this link, during the Dinosaur Renaissance, a huge change in how dinosaurs were seen. Researchers like John Ostrom dug up new fossils and re-imagined existing dinosaurs. No longer were they tail-dragging lunkheads, now they were fast-running, maybe warm-blooded hunters and herbivores.

And here’s where we get to Jurassic Park.

Real velociraptors are small animals, about the size of a turkey or a mangy underfed coyote. And they were definitely feathered – we’ve found a lot of their relatives with feathers fossilized in place, and we’ve found tiny knobs on velociraptor arm bones where quills for large feathers were attached.

The “raptors” in Jurassic Park were based more on critters like the related, but larger deinonychus.

When Crichton first wrote the book, only a few people believed that various raptor-relatives were feathered. By the late 1990s, when the last in the trio of Jurassic Park films hit theatres, it was gaining acceptance. A few years later, it was fully confirmed. Pretty much every paleontologist now agrees on this. Documentaries and illustrations show feathered raptors, even feathered Tyrannosaurus rexes.

But the director of Jurassic World doesn’t want to have accurate dinosaurs. Nope, they’re going to be the same scaly lizardish critters from the first movie.

Why? Why can’t hundreds of artists and animators come up with a scary feathered dinosaur? Wolves and hyenas and tigers are fuzzy-wuzzy, but perfectly frightening in films.

This is extra disappointing because Jurassic Park, book and movie, embraced the Dinosaur Renaissance. They were among the first big pop culture hits to feature fast-moving, warm-blooded animals rather than the tail-draggers of the 1950s and ’60s.

Jurassic World will probably be fun. But it could be better. It could go back to the roots of the first movie, and mix the best knowledge of its time with a thrilling adventure story. And frankly, if you can’t make a fun movie with realistic dinosaurs, you don’t deserve to be in the movie-making business.

Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance.