The Real Scientific History Behind the Jurassic Park Dinosaurs

The Jurassic Park franchise — including Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in theaters Friday, almost exactly 25 years after the first movie came out in 1993 — is obviously entirely fictional, so you don’t have to worry that the dinos are coming to get you. But that doesn’t mean there’s not something real at its heart: the story was in fact inspired by important changes in the scientific world. And, over the course of the franchise, though they might not get everything right, the filmmakers have incorporated some expert advice on how to make the dinosaurs in the movie the most realistic depictions possible. Here’s a look at how the real evolution of dinosaurs influenced the dinosaurs onscreen: How Scientific Discoveries Inspired the Franchise When Michael Crichton wrote the 1990 sci-fi novel that inspired the first Jurassic Park movie in 1993, he was inspired by paleontologist Jack Horner’s 1988 book Digging Dinosaurs, on dinosaur behavior and discoveries made in the prior decades. “He bases the character of Alan Grant on a guy digging up baby dinosaurs in Montana at a place called Egg Hill and [my site] was called Egg Mountain,” Horner tells TIME. A “dinosaur renaissance” had kicked off in the ’60s and ’70s, according to paleontologists. That didn’t mean there wasn’t interest in dinosaurs before the 1960s. In fact, as Daniel Barta, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural Histor...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Science Source Type: news