Jurassic Park: Novel and Movie Thread

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Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

It's funny how people now are like "ugh raptors had feathers how lame, I want cool old school dinosaurs". If Jurassic Park had this attitude, the dinosaurs would have been slow, stupid, living in swamps; "lizard-like" (though real lizards aren't like this either). Cause those were the proper, old school dinosaurs at the time - in pop culture at least, science had moved on. Jurassic Park had the opposite of that attitude and sure while it's not 100% accurate it was still pretty progressive about dinosaurs by portraying them as active, fast and possessing complex behaviors, and in doing so it was more accurate than most.

The dinosaurs as portrayed in Jurassic Park are now the Cool Dinosaurs because Jurassic Park was cool.

Here's a cool and obscure Jurassic Park thing: There was an old game called Trespasser, which was terrible, but there's one neat thing that came from it: John Hammond's memoirs, spoken by Richard Attenborough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqimhQ6QPp0

e: I forgot how nice that actually is, lots of good tidbits on the characters, the park itself and the dinosaurs.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Aug 12, 2019

# ¿ Aug 12, 2019 00:35

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:30

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Warbadger posted:

The funny thing about the feathers vs. no feathers slapfight is that, at least with the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Jurassic Park got the appearance correct. Fossilized skin impressions have showed no sign of feathers.

Turns out all dinosaurs weren't feathered any more than all mammals are covered in wooly fur.

Yeah, most dinosaurs weren't feathered. It's just some theropods. And some filamentous structures on a few others. Tyrannosaurus doesn't appear to have had feathers, or if it did it wasn't fully covered, or might have lost them growing up. It did have feathered relatives so feathers were probably available in its evolutionary toolbox. It might just not have needed them.

Dromaeosaurs (what you'd casually call raptors) were probably fully feathered and appears to have had pennaceous feathers on their arms, like the flight feathers of birds. Velociraptor and some other have quill knobs in their forearm bones which are attachment points for these feathers. This doesn't appear to make a great deal of sense since they obviously didn't fly, but there they are. Interestingly, some early dromaeosaurs did fly, so perhaps it was these that developed the feathers and passed them on to their non-flying descendants? Here's Microraptor. It's a Jurassic dromaeosaur that used all four limbs as wings, and coincidentally also one of the few dinosaurs we know the color of: It was an iridescent black, like some birds.

It also has the signature claw. It's been speculated that it might have started out as a climbing tool before being repurposed as the hunting implement we all know and love (because the big ones sure didn't climb trees). There's a hypothetical model for its use called "raptor prey restraint" that basically stipulates that they would have stabbed you with it to pin you down and then started eating you alive.

I also want to make a case for the coolness of feathered dinosaurs. They don't take away your scaly dinosaurs because indeed most were scaly, but they do provide more variety and create more artistic opportunities for more varied silhouette and color. And sometimes they can look awesome. This is Dakotaraptor, which is about the size of Utahraptor, but sleeker. Probably the closest thing in size and shape to a JP raptor.

Source and context: Emily Willoughby, who has a lot of great feathered dinosaurs.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Aug 12, 2019

# ¿ Aug 12, 2019 18:31

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Speaking of Spinosaurus, the real thing was loving weird. Some paper suggested it was semiaquatic, but another paper since then argued against that (for one, it couldn't dive - it could swim to some extent, as could most likely pretty much any dinosaur) and posited that it was, essentially, like a wading bird such as a stork but humongous.

Why would something picking fish from a river be so big? Because the fish were like this:

Also, here's another pic, which is a good example of how different pretty much equally accurate reconstructions can look.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 06:00

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

DON'T GO INTO THE LONG GRASS

https://i.imgur.com/RQ67hyk.gifv

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 09:34

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Big Beef City posted:

god in heaven how is his gigantic, monstrous face not super-imposed over whatever the gently caress is happening here? like are you kidding me? is that a real human?

what

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 18:20

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Blurred posted:

The author then says since these colours don't seem to serve any particular adaptive function (i.e. they're not particularly good camouflage), they must be a consequence of sexual selection. This means we can probably expect that dinosaurs (or at least the male sex of feathered therapods) were quite colourful as a means of distinguishing between members of different species and attracting mates, much how colour is used by modern birds.

This reminds me of a very good point I saw somewhere: We tend to think drab dinosaurs look right probably because large land animals tend to have dull colors. However, modern large land animals tend to be either mammals with poor color vision, or ambush predators that need the camouflage (for example komodo dragons and crocodilians). For dinosaurs though there's no reason to think they wouldn't have had good color vision, and many of them wouldn't really have needed camouflage. If you're a motherfucking Brachiosaurus I don't think you care if something sees you.

A counterpoint I saw was that it would be difficult for large animals to find brilliant pigments in sufficient quantities. I bring this up because the solution is interesting: In modern animals, brilliant colors are frequently not pigments but structural color, created with nanoscale structures that mess with light through technobabbley sounding solutions like "diffraction gratings, selective mirrors, photonic crystals, crystal fibres, matrices of nanochannels and proteins that can vary their configuration".

This dinosaur, for example, wears its brilliant blue not through pigment but through collagen structures that manipulate the light so that it reflects blue.

What I'm saying is,

# ¿ Aug 17, 2019 17:05

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

ante posted:

Every time threads like this come around people talk about the original book of whatever movie is being discussed, and holding it up like it was a modern literary masterpiece, and I'm like, "Well poo poo, I thought it was decent when I read it at seventeen, but not that good. Maybe I should give it another go?"

And then someone posts a passage like that Wu death above and holy crap that's bad writing.

I tried reading the book for the first time recently and I didn't get very far until deciding "you know what, the movie does this so much better".

It just felt clumsy, and, say, the scene where they first see the dinosaurs none of the emotion of the equivalent scene in the film.

Sounds like Wu got eaten the way raptors are thought to have done it though!
https://emilywilloughby.com/gallery/paleoart/deinonychus-prey-restraint

quote:

It suggests that the unique foot morphology of dromaeosaurs was an adaptation to take prey in a very similar manner to extant birds of prey: by grasping with the foot claws, digging in with the hypertrophied "sickle" claw, and tightly hanging on to the prey animal as it struggles and thrashes around. The dromaeosaur would then begin to feed on it while it's still alive, until it finally dies from blood loss and organ failure, all the while standing on top of the animal to pin it down (a likely use of the unusually short ankles found in dromaeosaurs) and using primitive flight strokes with its "wings" to maintain balance.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2019 05:23

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

ChickenHeart posted:

Like the lovely park software, the lack of basic engineering principles in Jurassic Park's layout is further indicative of just how ignorant Hammond and his cronies were to the challenges of building and running a zoo on an undeveloped island.

I'd love to see the OSHA write-up from the aftermath of that shitshow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly0ttfsDKZg&t=210s

Realistically Jurassic Park's failure would have had nothing to do with dinosaurs (which are just animals, you can build a fence to contain a Tyrannosaurus like you can build a fence to contain an elephant) or chaos theory or playing god or any such nonsense and everything to do with capitalism.

SilvergunSuperman posted:

It's funny, rereading the book I was surprised to see how hard they bash BIRDS over your head.

We didn't know about the feathers yet - which most dinosaurs didn't have anyway but some did - but Jurassic Park's portrayal of dinosaurs had a lot to do with recognizing them as ancestors to birds:

Mark McCreery, JP movie concept artist posted:

I wanted to get away from people�s perceptions of dinosaurs as possible. [�] [T]he upright, bulky, clumsy kinds of creatures seen in previous movies. The idea was to show that we were up-to-date on the current thinking that dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded and birdlike rather [than] cold blooded and lizardlike. There was nothing in the drawings that had to do specifically with Jurassic Park. Stan just wanted to show Steven that we were on top of things as far as dinosaurs are supposed to be like.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Aug 22, 2019

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 07:13

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

charity rereg posted:

That post might as well be a c/p from the book, actually. The entire point of Malcom's chaos theory stuff is that certain systems are unpredictable by nature and Man is Not OK with that. He uses weather as the example in the book (not climate), how with all of the historical data in the world and all of the computing power spent on it you cannot really model the weather, and definitely not more than a few days out. It's just not a system that can be predicted or controlled.

He points out that the park is like that ("It's a zoo, we know how to do a zoo," is basically the tagline of the overconfident people in the control room) because there are umpteen different uncontrollable variables with these animals. The oxygen content is different, the insects are different, the radiation levels are different, all sorts of tiny unmodeled and uncontrolled variables, just like the weather.

At the end of the day this post essentially is just saying "It's not the folly of Man, it's the folly of These Men, and it could be done right by actually spending more money." (I realize you probably correctly consider it an inherent flaw of capitalism, but even the idea that a Perfect Utopian Post Scarcity Society could do it is folly)

essentially this exchange happens in the book, closer to verbatim than youd guess. it's while theyre on the tour, when Tim spots a raptor, and grant finds an eggshell. Malcom shows them how the compy height graph proves a breeding population and asks them to search for more than the expected # of animals.

This is just basically assuming that dinosaurs are magic. We cannot completely predict weather, but society doesn't collapse because it unexpectedly rained. You cannot completely predict animal behavior either. Zoos still work. A regular zoo is just as much a "chaotic system" as Jurassic Park is. There is nothing here that makes it unique in some way that makes it an inherent folly to assume it could be controlled.

The main problem would be animal welfare, because if you don't know what the animals are like beforehand chances are you can't provide them the right kind of environment for them to thrive. This is a problem with attempting to keep any animal in captivity without prior experience.

The chaos theory thing, like the prospect of being able to recreate the dinosaurs from mosquitoes trapped in amber, are fictional plot devices that make just enough sense on the surface that you can fairly easily suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story. In that sense it's fine, but it doesn't make actual real world sense. I think the chaos theory bit is a tad unnecessary though since unbridled capitalism would do to explain why everything goes to hell on its own. I suspect it's there mostly because Chrichton thought it sounded cool and thought he hit on something profound.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Aug 22, 2019

# ¿ Aug 22, 2019 09:11

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh4zvQfDhi0

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 22:22

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

evobatman posted:

-Hammond contributes $50,000 per year to Grants dig. Even for the early 90s, that doesn't sound like a lot.

I dunno, it's probably a lot for paleontology. That stuff isn't exactly well funded. Somewhere in a lab there's a slab of rock full of Utahraptors, and digging them out of it is reliant on internet crowdfunding.

e: https://www.gofundme.com/utahraptor :negative:

Elukka fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Aug 27, 2019

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 10:38

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Jurassic Park was not realistic in terms of various details but it put a lot of effort into portraying the dinosaurs more realistically than what was previously common. It's kinda like how the Expanse is with spaceships.

I'd put it as a go to example of why researching the subject matter and going for some degree of realism can be a good thing. We have our now archetypal Cool Dinosaurs because JP did that. If they'd just gone with the then-current archetypes in popular culture (...like Jurassic World later did) we'd have gotten dumb clumsy swamp monsters.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Sep 6, 2019

# ¿ Sep 6, 2019 13:54

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Xenomrph posted:

gently caress that, feathered dinosaurs are objectively stupid and bad and dumb and wrong, and �modern scientific discoveries� should stay the gently caress away from my Jurassic Park franchise or so help me god I will cut you.

If the JP team had this attitude they would not have been the cool dinosaurs you now know but slow dumb swamp monsters. "Modern scientific discoveries" is what got you JP dinosaurs.

Kazak posted:

Dinosaurs have feathers now, get with the times

Only some of them. For example, Tyrannosaurus, probably not, despite being in a family that is known to have feathers in some species.

Xenomrph posted:

Fight me

The little kid in me liked dinosaurs because they looked unlike anything alive today and some of them were huge and stuff. Learning that they�re �birds, but bigger� undoes a lot of that.

Like, the little kid in Jurassic Park who makes fun of Raptors being 6-foot turkeys is doing that because a six-foot turkey would look dumb and not scary regardless of how lethal it actually is. It�s why we�re not scared of housecats even though they are literal serial killers who murder for fun.

Well, they're still pretty unlike anything alive today. There's not an awful lot of common between a Brachiosaurus and a sparrow. Not an awful lot in common between a Tyrannosaurus and a sparrow either, despite those being much more closely related. Actually sauropods are a really interesting example of a type of animal that simply does not exist anymore. The niche of land animals as large as that has gone unfilled ever since, if it still exists.

Also, you probably wouldn't say a tiger is not scary because it's just a housecat but big. Similarly a Utahraptor or whatever probably didn't look a whole lot like a turkey because it's a very different animal and "had feathers" doesn't make them that close.

From an artistic perspective, I like feathered dinosaurs because it gives a lot more opportunities for silhouette, color and expressiveness, and at the same time it doesn't exclude scaly dinosaurs because plenty of those existed too.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Sep 7, 2019

# ¿ Sep 7, 2019 02:01

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

While not Jurassic Park this is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1yv7Pi78Og

It's like the battle of Hoth, but with dinosaurs.

e: Allosaurus gave no fucks.

Wikipedia posted:

Of the 47 hand bones the researchers studied, 3 were found to contain stress fractures. Of the feet, 281 bones were studied and 17 found to have stress fractures. The stress fractures in the foot bones "were distributed to the proximal phalanges" and occurred across all three weight-bearing toes in "statistically indistinguishable" numbers. Since the lower end of the third metatarsal would have contacted the ground first while an allosaur was running it would have borne the most stress. If the allosaurs' stress fractures were caused by damage accumulating while walking or running this bone should have experience more stress fractures than the others. The lack of such a bias in the examined Allosaurus fossils indicates an origin for the stress fractures from a source other than running. The authors conclude that these fractures occurred during interaction with prey, like an allosaur trying to hold struggling prey with its feet. The abundance of stress fractures and avulsion injuries in Allosaurus provide evidence for "very active" predation-based rather than scavenging diets.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Sep 10, 2019

# ¿ Sep 10, 2019 13:48

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

purple death ray posted:

My fuckin childhood exists in those paintings

Very much this.

James Gurney is awesome and his videos about painting dinosaurs and other things are extremely chill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f4O8M_WG6Y

# ¿ Sep 17, 2019 04:18

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

It occurs to me that there are animals that can reproduce even if their population is all female. Komodo dragons have a solution for just this contingency: They normally reproduce sexually, but they're capable of asexual reproduction too (parthenogenesis), and through that they produce males exclusively to make up for the shortage.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 13:42

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

oldpainless posted:

The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you.

This was also quite possibly true in reality. And very similar animals as big or bigger as JP raptors did exist.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2019 13:15

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:30

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Arcsquad12 posted:

I know I'm overthinking things but I've always wondered what would actually happen if you put dinosaurs millions of years and eras apart into the same ecosystem like Jurassic Park does. Like what chance does a Jurassic Period sauropod have against a superpredator like a T Rex? There were giant sauropods in the Cretaceous but not many in the Rex's hunting range. Or in reverse how would an Allosaurus get along hunting Ceratopsids, like that Battle at Big Rock short film? The movies never really talk about how this artificial ecosystem would struggle from what are essentially dozens of invasive species all competing with each other. As a theme park that's fine, but in the wild on Isla Sorna or now the mainland I'd really like to see how the ecosystems adapt or fail to adapt to new species.

I've thought along similar lines and it's why I love this part from the Hammond memoirs from the Trespasser game (where they apparently just released them on Isla Sorna to see what would happen) where he talks about how the dinosaurs survived and got along, how the different predators carved their niches and territories and such.

"Not all the original species survived; in the end only a few adjusted to the new world. These became dominant."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDHUQdGnkGE&t=123s

# ¿ Oct 5, 2019 18:15

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