The Scientific History Behind The Jurassic Park Dinosaurs

Hi and welcome back to With Michelle! The Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchise, is entirely fictional, so you don’t have to worry that dinosaurs are coming to get you. However, the story was in fact inspired by important changes in the scientific world. Over the course of the franchise, everything might not have been accurate, but the filmmakers have incorporated some expert advice on how to make the dinosaurs as realistic as possible. Here’s how scientific discoveries really 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 the discoveries made in the prior decades. “He bases the character of Dr. Alan Grant on a guy digging up baby dinosaurs in Montana at a place called Egg Hill. What Jurassic Park Gets Right About Dinosaurs: Carrano gave Jurassic Park high marks for the basics of the dinosaurs that show up in the franchise. “The franchise gets one very important thing right: Dinosaurs were once active, living things that were as successful on land as any animal before or since,” he added. What Jurassic Park Gets Wrong About Dinosaurs: Now while the franchise has helped spread the word on some truths about dinosaurs, it has also introduced new misconceptions. In particular, one question that paleontologists didn’t often have to field before Jurassic Park is whether dinosaur DNA exists and if dinosaurs can be cloned. “The oldest DNA that has been recovered from fossil record is well under a million years old, and these non-bird dinosaurs all died out 65 million years ago. Because [DNA] is a fragile molecule, it’s not thought to have survived as far back as the Jurassic period.” (Horner explains that, in 1993, when the first movie was made, scientists didn’t yet know that they wouldn’t be able to find dinosaur DNA, adding that he and a grad student tried.) The films tend to be off on the sizes of some dinosaurs, and filmmakers ha