• Tag Archives Dinosaur Renaissance
  • Jurassic World and the case of the droopy-tailed Stegosaurus

    As I write this the US premiere of Jurassic World is just around the corner. I had gone back and forth regarding this post given that we currently know very little about the film and as such the interpretations written about here and elsewhere may well be pointless by the time the film premieres.

    Ultimately I decided to post this anyway since the overall thrust of the article should remain true regardless of how the film pans out.


    Now there has been a lot of buzz around Jurassic World since it was first announced last year. The buzz has been mixed, but fairly positive. I suspect this was, in part, because everyone was happy to hear that the godawful military dinosaur idea was shelved in favour of a more “traditional” JP franchise storyline. Nonetheless the movie has still drawn its fair share of detractors, including myself. Most of the people who are unhappy with the film are either paleontologists, or hardcore dinophiles. Many of the problems leveled at the film have to do with the portrayal of the extinct animals. The problems are actually myriad ranging from pterosaurs capable of picking up humans using grasping feet, mosasaurs that are twice the size of blue whales, sauropods covered in elephant skin rather than scales (a problem not unique to Jurassic World), everything about Velociraptor, and of course Indominus rex.  My biggest beef with the film is that the dinosaurs are not being shown as dinosaurs so much as monsters. However, after The Lost World: Jurassic Park came out it became pretty evident that Spielberg’s original vision of portraying dinosaurs as animals had been shelved in favour of the more entertainment-friendly movie monster approach. However, for what seems like a majority of the detractors, the biggest gripe with the film has to do with a lack of  feathers on pretty much all the dinosaurs. This seems to be a common theme these days with a particularly vocal group of dinophiles and paleontologists strongly pushing for the feathering of every dinosaur in sight and insisting that all media that portrays scaly (erroneously called: “naked”) dinosaurs is inaccurate. Never mind the fact that a feathered, pack-hunting, 2 meter tall Velociraptor mongoliensis is still every bit as inaccurate as a scaly one.

    Anyway, I digress. Dealing with the overwhelming amount of internet drama surrounding Jurassic World (and the media depiction of dinosaurs in general) is a topic for another day. My reason for writing this post is centered around one particular criticism that popped up a few weeks ago.

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