How Realistic Are Movie Dinosaurs?

Jurassic Park: Rebirth is the latest installment in the Jurassic World series. And while dinosaur paleontologist Matt Lamanna https://carnegiemnh.org/research/matthew-lamanna/ has loved dinos — and the Jurassic Park franchise — his whole life, he says some of the films are more accurate than others. So how accurate are the ones unveiled in this latest movie? Matt gets into it with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber, who got a tour of the dinosaur exhibits where Matt works: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. https://carnegiemnh.org/research/matthew-lamanna/ They also discuss the accuracy of the beloved giant creatures in the newest Jurassic World film, as well as some of the hits from the franchise's archive — like the dinosaur he was partially responsible for discovering. Want us to cover more natural history? Tell us by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! We'd love to know what you want to hear from us. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:27Regina Barber?

  Picture you're sitting in the plush seats of a movie theater, popcorn in hand, Sour Patch Kids next to you. And on screen, you're staring at an enormous T-Rex chasing its prey. That's part of the plot of many movies in the Jurassic Park franchise. And as a scientist, as much as I love some movie magic, I've always wondered, how close are those dinosaurs on screen to the creatures that actually walked, flew, and swam on Earth millions of years ago?

• 0:53Speaker 02

  So the scene in Jurassic Park.

• 0:56Regina Barber?

  This is the OG Jurassic Park.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  You know, where. Can't see us if we don't move.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  It's actually extra problematic, the T-Rex, because it probably had one of the best visual acuity in any dinosaur.

• 1:11Regina Barber?

  That's Matt Lamanna, a dinosaur paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He's loved dinos his whole life.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  I told my parents I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was four years old, supposedly.

• 1:23Regina Barber?

  I recently took a trip to the museum to talk Jurassic World with Matt. He's one of the curators who helped design the dinosaur exhibits at the museum. He gave me a tour.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Most of what you see in the dinosaur gallery are real fossils. So there's about roughly 250 specimens on display, and about 75% of those are the actual fossils. So those three are real, for instance.

• 1:44Regina Barber?

  These like fishy-looking ones, they're real fossils.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep. But these are what are called ichthyosaurs. So just for the people that see the Jurassic World movie, that mosasaurus is described as a swimming dinosaur. It's not. It's actually more closely related to lizards.

• 1:59Regina Barber?

  Matt and I got to talk about the latest movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, released July 2nd, Jurassic World: Rebirth. It's in theaters now. It's about a group of mercenaries led by Scarlett Johansson and a paleontologist played by Jonathan Bailey. And they're hired to extract blood from three of the largest dinosaurs living in this fictional present day. In this story, the blood from all three creatures is the key to creating a cure for heart disease.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  If we get this DNA, millions of lives are saved.

• 2:29Regina Barber?

  But putting movie magic aside, Matt told me the series definitely gets some things more right than others.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  So dinosaurs weren't the only giant reptiles that were around during the Mesozoic Era, commonly known as the Age of Dinosaurs. That also included many groups of different marine reptiles that aren't dinosaurs, including mosasaurus, and these guys here, which are called pterosaurs. A lot of people call them pterodactyls, and they're not quite dinosaurs.

• 2:57Regina Barber?

  And when it came to this new Jurassic World series, Matt got to play a role in a dino's design, a dinosaur he helped discover.

• 3:08Regina Barber?

  So today on the show, dinosaurs on screen. We talk with a paleontologist about the beloved giant creatures in the newest Jurassic World film and the accuracy of some others in the franchise. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:38Regina Barber?

  Okay, Matt, you said you loved dinosaurs since you like were a little kid. What was it like seeing Jurassic Park for the first time? That first film?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So I was in high school when the first Jurassic Park came out. And I remember very distinctly like when the first scene of that Brachiosaurus walks on screen, like, you know, it's the classic scene where the paleontologist Alan Grant grabs the Paleobotanist Ellie Sattler's head and they get out of the Jeep and there's this gigantic majestic animal there, you know, browsing from the top of a tree and trumpeting and all these things. My brain must have just gone into like overdrive or something like it was like, it was like somebody had put on the big screen what I'd been imagining my whole life and it was totally, totally mind blowing to see that, you know, on the big screen.

• 5:24Regina Barber?

  So you loved Jurassic Park movies. And then like later in your life, you actually got a chance to be part of one Jurassic World movie, like you and your team discovered a dinosaur called Dreadnautilus and, and this dinosaur showed up in the last movie, Jurassic World Dominion. How did you find this new dinosaur Dreadnautilus?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Well, so it's from Southern Patagonia, Argentina, in particular Santa Cruz province. It's near these two beautiful glacial lakes. I walk up the side of a mountain because I always do this. I'm always like the, the best looking rocks are going to have the best looking fossils in them and I've got to get up to the, you know, up the side of the hill. So I'm playing music and I'm walking up prospecting the whole time and I found virtually nothing that day. But I turn around and I see my three Patagonian friends, Lucio, Gabriel, Marcelo, gathered around this very like nondescript looking spot of Badlands, but they were all standing there for a long time. So I was like, something is going on. So I came down the hill and I joined them.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And when I got there, they had already uncovered the six foot three, so 1.9 something meter long femur thigh bone of, of what would become Dreadnautilus. And so then we, and this was when it got really cool. Like it's one thing to find an isolated bone of a giant dinosaur, but we dug towards the, you know, kind of the knee end of the thigh bone. And lo and behold, there was the shin bone. And then we dug a little further and we, there was the ankle bone. And then there were some tail vertebrae over here. And we, this was the first day we were there. Um, and so we knew right away that we have part of a skeleton, um, of a giant titanosaur, a giant, um, you know, sauropod dinosaur. So titanosaurus are a type of, of sauropod.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Um, and so dreadnoughtus is a sauropod dinosaur. So every dinosaur you've ever seen in your life that looks like a brontosaurus, so to speak. Um, so with a small head, a long neck, big elephant-like body and long tail. Um, these are all called sauropod dinosaurs. And dreadnoughtus is another kind of sauropod. So it is, and it actually is, um, fairly closely related to brachiosaurus from that original Jurassic Park.

• 7:27Regina Barber?

  Titanosaurus is what the huge, like sauropod dinosaur is called in this, uh, new film, Jurassic World Rebirth. It's so humongous. It's got this really, really long neck and these really, really, really long skinny tails. Um, are any of those features real?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Well, so titanosaurus are, they're a group of sauropods. So they're like, uh, you know, a, a family of sauropods. Um, you know, think in a loose sense, like a breed of dog or something like that. Um, and, uh, so titanosaurus, the group were super diverse. You know, again, ranging in size from a humpback whale to a cow, lived on every continent, you know, ranged in time for tens of millions of years.

• 8:03Regina Barber?

  So there was a new dinosaur in this one. Probably this dinosaur was probably one of my favorites in this movie. Um, this new little like baby-like dinosaur, it almost looked like a pet. It almost, it acted like a cat or a dog.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Aquilaps is, is how I would pronounce it. It's a, uh, an older, so geologically older and much, much smaller hornless relative of triceratops, like distant relative of triceratops. Um, and it's, um, yeah, I've seen little clips of the, of the thing and, um, it looks adorable.

• 8:36Regina Barber?

  Can you tell me the best example of like accurate dinosaurs, uh, accurate dinosaurs in the franchise?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good question. Um, the T-Rex is pretty awesome, I will say. Um, and what I've heard is the new T-Rex, the one that's in the, in the current movie is even more accurate than previous. Um, but in the first movie, when the paleontologist Alan Grant tells the kids, you know, freeze if you, you know, if you, um, if it can't see you if you don't move, um, this was back then not defensible and now is not defensible at all. Um, T-Rex, I mean, certainly could see you if you didn't move. In fact, it probably had some of the best vision of any predatory dinosaur.

• 9:18Regina Barber?

  It's a big thing in the movie.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Well, the other thing is like, it's based on, um, this idea that, uh, the paleontology consultant for the original Jurassic Park is one of my all-time heroes, a guy named Jack Horner. And he, um, had this longstanding idea that T-Rex was primarily a scavenger. And so it had a really big, well-developed sense of smell. But on top of that, in that scene, if you remember it, the T-Rex actually nuzzles the people. And so if it like, has a good sense of smell, it's gonna eat you anyway. Um, so there's so much wrong with that scene, I can't even take it. This is, uh, the dumbest thing that they did in, in Jurassic Park was make the T-Rex not only not be able to see you, but also not be able to smell you. It makes for an incredibly dramatic scene, and I will

• 10:04Speaker 02

  give it that. Like, you know, you think for sure they're, they're goners, right? And that was the point. But, um, I feel like there's other ways they could have done that where, you know, they didn't turn this, you know, one of the most awesome killing machines that's ever evolved into this completely inept, like hapless, like thing that can't see you or smell you.

• 10:22Regina Barber?

  Um, in the latest Jurassic Park, well, in the latest Jurassic Park movie, I found a couple of things interesting. One of the things I found really interesting is that they keep on talking about how the dinosaurs wouldn't survive outside of the tropics. Like, this is a new thing for the series, and all of a sudden, the dinos are only kind of, um, isolated to near the equator. Why would that be true, if it would be?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's probably not true. Um, it is true that the, the age of dinosaurs, the Mesozoic Era was much warmer on average than it is today.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  However, we have dinosaur fossils from the north slope of Alaska all the way down to the to 500 miles from the South Pole in Antarctica. These areas, they would have certainly been warmer than they are today on average, but they would have been very seasonal environments, I think. Think of like the Pacific Northwest, but like mix it up with Alaska such that you have like several months of darkness every year. Because geographically, Alaska and Antarctica were more or less in the same place as they are now. So they would have had months of darkness on end and climates that were, you know, temperate, you know, so not tropical for sure. And dinosaurs lived there anyway. We have we have extensive fossils from Alaska.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  We have extensive fossils from Antarctica. And so we know that dinosaurs lived from virtually from pole to pole during the age of dinosaurs.

• 11:45Regina Barber?

  So another thing about the movie, like is this this whole idea in this recent movie that people would be bored of dinos once they were here. What do you make of this premise in this plot being nobody cares about dinosaurs anymore?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I think that I find that a little bit hard to believe. I mean, of course, I'm not your normal, you know, like I'm a middle aged man who studies dinosaurs for a living. So I'm not exactly like the the objective mind here. But I do find it really hard to believe that the public would ever tire of dinosaurs, especially if we were, you know, if, you know, this magic from Jurassic Park happened and we were able to resurrect a few of them. Dinosaurs are huge now and all we have are, you know, in the best case scenario, we have a complete skeleton or maybe a few smatterings of skin and feathers. You know, the public is absolutely fascinated by these animals. They come to our museum by the hundreds of thousands a year to see them.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And so it's really hard for me to imagine like if we had living dinosaurs walking around that people would just be like, meh, you know, whatever.

• 12:49Regina Barber?

  Thank you so much, Matt, for talking to me today.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely, Regina. Thank you so much, too.

• 12:54Regina Barber?

  If you liked this episode and want to hear more, please like, follow, or subscribe to Short Wave now. You'll get a fun, fresh science episode in your feed four times a week.

• 13:07Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Quacey Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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