Prehistoric Planet vs. Jurassic World. Different Receptions to Fictional Dinosaurs

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In the past few weeks we have seen the introduction of two major additions to dinosaur media. Both come from well-established franchises, but only one of these is getting lambasted by the online paleo community. Why is that?

More specifically, why has Jurassic World: Dominion received a mix of resignation and revulsion whereas Prehistoric Planet has garnered near universal praise.

I mean, they both portray fictional dinosaurs?

Before continuing I will give readers a heads up now that I have seen both Jurassic World: Dominion and Prehistoric Planet. So if you don’t want spoilers, I would hold off on going any further for now.

Now, let’s get started.

This weekend sees the release of Jurassic World: Dominion. My previous thoughts on the first Jurassic World can be found here, as well as my initial reaction to the weird backlash that film received from the paleo community. Its sequel, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was such an extreme disappointment that I didn’t even bother covering it here. Now, the sixth movie in the series concludes (allegedly) the saga with a very heavy dose of nostalgia and cheese. My overall feeling about this film is that it was much better than Fallen Kingdom, but it was still a dumb monster movie.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago (May 23rd) a new documentary-style miniseries on dinosaurs called Prehistoric Planet, debuted on Apple TV+. The series is the brain child of BBC Wildlife producer, Mike Gunton, and American filmmaker, John Favreau. This five-part series purports to showcase the most accurate representations of dinosaurs ever shown in media.

Both Jurassic World: Dominion and Prehistoric Planet represent a continuation of previously established—and well respected—franchises. Jurassic World: Dominion is the final(?) follow up to 1993’s hugely successful Jurassic Park, whereas Prehistoric Planet is billed as the spiritual successor to 1999’s watershed miniseries, Walking with Dinosaurs. The parallels between both series don’t stop there. Both media pieces feature scenes of dinosaurs in the snow, swimming theropods, and even advanced parental care. Yet, despite these similarities, the response from the online paleontological community has been diametrically opposed.

Why is that? Well, I suspect that these disparate responses can be traced back to the history of each respective franchise.

The Legacy of Jurassic Park

The movie that started it all.

In the original Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg employed multiple paleontologists as consultants in an effort to produce the most realistic and accurate dinosaurs for that time. Jurassic Park was a landmark movie, not just for showcasing the viability of computer-generated imagery for film, but for showing dinosaurs in a vastly different light from their previous portrayals in movies such as Valley of Gwangi, The Land that Time Forgot, and King Kong. Instead of portraying them as monsters, a dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus was instead portrayed as

just an animal doing what he knows to do best, which is survive

Jurassic Park’s push to show accurate (to a point) and realistic dinosaurs proved to be vastly influential, with many early career paleontologists today citing Jurassic Park as their inspiration to get into the field.

Horner on the set of Jurassic Park 3

This noble push to portray dinosaurs as animals wouldn’t last however, and by the first Jurassic Park sequel (The Lost World), dinosaurs were once again relegated to their old roles as movie monsters. The push for scientifically accurate dinosaurs became less important as the handful of paleontological consultants in the first film quickly dwindled to a single paleontologist, Dr. Jack Horner. Horner’s influence on the films decreased over time, going from most influential to dinosaur design in Jurassic Park 3 (yes, you can thank him for Spinosaurus and its infamous scene with Tyrannosaurus), to least influential in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The latter was Horner’s last film as the paleontological consultant, with paleontologist Dr. Stephen Brusatte now taking over the mantle (though Horner still receives an honourary consultant credit in JW:D).

Jurassic World relies heavily on Jurassic Park Nostalgia

The Jurassic World series has always hinged on people’s nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. Early media puff pieces on the first movie made that abundantly clear, and the fact that “Roberta / Rexy”—the Tyrannosaurus from the first Jurassic Park—has been a key character in all three of the Jurassic World films further cements this fact. In Jurassic World: Dominion, the reliance on nostalgia is now so heavy that director, Colin Trevorrow brought back four of the original actors from the Jurassic Park series. Had Sir Richard Attenborough not already passed away I’m sure he would have made it into the film as well. This heavy reliance on nostalgia helps to cover up the fact that the storyline in the Jurassic World series has never been good. There are human dinosaur and even dinosaur-dinosaur interactions that are beyond the realms of realism, such as when Rexy and Blue (the Velociraptor) “talk” to each other and “team up” to fight Indominus rex in the first film, or the Indoraptor’s serial killeresque approach to hunting people in second film.

JW:D is no different, and includes some seriously cringeworthy interactions between different dinosaurs. Aside from these cheesy interactions, we also watch as multiple dinosaur species roam around snow-covered Sierra Nevada California. Modern-day Sierra Nevada CA has winter temperatures regularly dipping to -6°C – -12°C (21.2°F – 10.4°F) depending on elevation and location. This temperature extreme has never been recorded throughout the entire history of the Mesozoic (so far) and yet these dinosaurs are roaming around with nary a care in the world, many of them sporting only a coat of scales. In a later scene, we see a grossly oversized Pyroraptor, dive into an icy lake located in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy and swim underneath as acrobatically as a seal. Aside from, well, everything about the design of Pyroraptor not matching the anatomy of the real animal (more on that below), or the fact that neither it nor the main characters suffer from hypothermia once they enter the water, Pyroraptor’s movements through the water make no sense for a terrestrial animal. Lastly, we see Owen promise Blue that he will return her kidnapped child, and the Velociraptor seemingly agree to this.

Yeah, this scene was just dumb.

All of these scenes are completely unrealistic, with the Pyroraptor scene bordering on comical in its absurdity (though it is far from the most absurd scene in the film), but you know what, none of that matters. At this point in the franchise the audience has long accepted that the animals in the Jurassic World films are really just monsters with a dinosaurian veneer. So when one sees a Mosasaurus four-times larger than the largest Mosasaurus on record breach the water to snack on a crab trap attached to a fishing vessel, we just turn off our brains and go along for the ride.

It’s when Jurassic World tries to be “accurate” that it drops the ball. The addition of two new dromaeosaurs, Atrociraptor and Pyroraptor were each treated like a new car reveal, despite neither recreated taxon looking much like its actual fossil (to be fair, neither fossil looks all that great to begin with). Atrociraptor is portrayed as a colour-swapped Velociraptor with a hint of demon, whereas the festooning of feathers on Pyroraptor feels more like a compromise for all the paleophiles who have consistently screeched about the need for feathering dromaeosaurs (if not all theropods / dinosaurs). The plumage feels weirdly out of place in the scene and the presence of these large, plumaceous feathers along the body just makes the animal look like a cosplay accident. Oh, and of course, both taxa are waaay oversized.

JW:D versions vs. actual material. Top: Pyroraptor olympius Bottom: Atrociraptor marshalli

Making matters worse for the film, we have a scene in which we we are explicitly told that BioSyn (the big bad of the film, and also from the Jurassic Park books) made sure that these new dinosaur clones were genetically pure versions of the original. In other words, all the new dinosaurs should be scientifically accurate. This moment gets undercut immediately as we are shown a guinea pig sized tyrannosauroid, Morus intrepidus living in a terrarium. This scene feels, yet again, like another bone thrown to appease the paleophile masses. The feathered critter running around the terrarium is vastly undersized compared to the the real adult size of M. intrepidus, which would have been closer to our Hollywood raptors (Zanno et al. 2019).

Okay, well maybe it’s just a baby then? Why have a baby living alone in a terrarium that it is quickly going to outgrow? That we see another tiny M. intrepidus in the wild later in the film makes it seem that this is what the adult size of these animals was. Also, much like our new dromaeosaurs, M. intrepidus is only known from a right partial hindlimb and some teeth. That’s an impressive identification by the BioSyn staff. A similar “ocular pat down” is done by Alan Grant earlier in the film, in which the massive sauropod, Dreadnoughtus schrani is identified based on…yeah. None of this felt scientifically accurate and instead comes off feeling like science-focused Easter eggs.

About that prologue

Last year, in another tribute to the paleophile community, Trevorrow enlisted the JW animators to portray a prologue scene set at some nondescript point and place in the Late Cretaceous. This scene was meant to show “scientifically accurate” dinosaurs living as they would, while also serving to lay the foundation for an alleged grudge match between Rexy and the big bad of Jurassic World: Dominion, Giganotosaurus. The scene is beautifully rendered and the prehistoric wildlife look really good in their environments. The problem is that this scene is a complete hodgepodge of dinosaur taxa that did not live near each other in place and time. The most egregious of these inaccuracies comes from the aforementioned encounter between the sire of “Rexy” the Tyrannosaurus, and Giganotosaurus. Whereas Tyrannosaurus was around in the Late Cretaceous, it was the latest of the late Cretaceous (67–66 mya) and was a strictly North American taxon. In contrast, Giganotosaurus lived in South America, which was nowhere near North America at this time. More importantly, Giganotosaurus lived much earlier in the Late Cretaceous (100–97 mya). That puts about a 28 million year gap between the last Giganotosaurus and the first Tyrannosaurus. To put this in perspective, Giganotosaurus was already a fossil when Tyrannosaurus first walked the Earth. There was no way in this situation for these two theropods to have met, much less fight. Other issues abound in this prologue, including an oviraptorosaur acting like a stereotypical egg thief, and tossing filaments on Tyrannosaurus, but the Tyrannosaurus vs. Giganotosaurus nonsense is by far the worst part of the prologue. It was so bad, in fact, that it did receive push back from some in the online paleo community. Unfortunately, the response from paleontology consultant, Brusatte, was that this level of scientific misinformation was fine as long as the animals had feathers.

As much as I lament how this is where the bar for “scientific accuracy” now is for a dinosaur movie, it does reflect a common—and overblown—complaint leveled at the Jurassic World films since the beginning (e.g., here and here).

So, what about the other one? How does Prehistoric Planet fare?

Walking with Dinosaurs Changes Dinosaur Documentaries Forever

The game changer

1999’s Walking with Dinosaurs was the first time that a dinosaur education series was portrayed through the lens of a wildlife film. Tim Haines, Jasper James, and Susan Spindler (creators of the series) sought to film dinosaurs as if they were still alive today. Instead of visiting paleontologists in their labs and museums, where talking head interviews would explain our current knowledge of prehistoric animals, Walking with Dinosaurs showed the animals in their native environments, and used extensive consultation with paleontologists to make everything as scientifically accurate as possible. As with Jurassic Park before it, Walking with Dinosaurs was a landmark moment for television. Not only had the producers shown that this unique style of storytelling was possible, but they had also inadvertently showed that it was preferable to the older style of documentary storytelling. Walking with Dinosaurs received much critical acclaim and was widely lauded in paleo circles, though there were still a few detractors that rightly raised issues with this style of “show don’t tell” documentary film making.

Much like Jurassic Park, this runaway success led to multiple “sequels” (the Walking with franchise), with each addition being more lenient on scientific accuracy in favour of showy animal action. The Walking with series’s introduction of a CG-led documentary also led to numerous copycat series (from the Discovery and History Channels) that strayed ever further from science—or even basic facts—in favour of showcasing eye-catching animations. The eight or so scientists serving as consultants on the first Walking with Dinosaurs series, dwindled to two or three by the tail-end of some of these latter programs, with pointless versus “documentaries” such as 2008’s Jurassic Fight Club and 2009’s Clash of the Dinosaurs representing a rather dismal end to this style of film making.

Prehistoric Planet takes up the WWD mantle

Prehistoric Planet pulls directly from the ideals of the original Walking with Dinosaurs. Rather than being yet another pseudo-documentary CG fest, Prehistoric Planet seeks to showcase prehistoric life as realistically and accurately as possible. To do so, the producers enlisted the aid of paleontologist, Dr. Darren Naish, who already has a massive following thanks to his lay-audience geared dinosaur books and his long-established zoological blog (and now podcast), Tetrapod Zoology. This massive public presence in the paleontological science communication field, has made Naish a go-to individual for showcasing dinosaur paleontology. It’s this popularity of the Tetzoo website and associated social media that laid the groundwork for the remarkably warm reception Prehistoric Planet has so far received from the online paleo community.

However, it was this warm reception that left me worried. Wanting the best for people we like is a common human behaviour. This results in effusive praise for the things we like and convenient ignoring of the things we don’t. Prehistoric Planet’s stated goal was to show the most accurate portrayal of dinosaurs currently known to science. This means that Prehistoric Planet must be held to a higher standard than the popcorn fest that is Jurassic World: Dominion.

So it’s time to take off the blinders.

Beware the veneer of science

This is just blatant false advertising

As it is ultimately marketed as edutainment, Prehistoric Planet relies heavily on using a strong scientific backing for the multiple stories told in each of its six episodes. To the team’s credit, there was a dutiful effort to enlist the aid of multiple paleontologists around the world. In total 15 paleontologists were enlisted to help with portrayals of prehistoric life in the series. The series also keeps its focus relatively narrow, and only portrays animals living in the Maastrichtian period of the Late Cretaceous. This is the latest part of the Mesozoic, spanning just 6 million years. Thanks to its proximity to the modern day, it also is one of the most well sampled periods of the Mesozoic, allowing for some of the more higher resolution views of what life was like back then.

That’s the good part. The bad part, sadly, is the execution of each episode..

Each episode is broken up into three or four vignettes showcasing a group of animals living in that episode’s chosen environment (Coasts, Deserts, Freshwater, Ice Worlds, and Forests). Sir David Attenborough discusses each animal as the camera passes by. Sometimes we focus on that animal for a while, other times they are just background critters. The science behind how each animal looks and interacts with its environment are assumed to be accurate, but there are never any cutaways to experts or even statements from Attenborough separating what we do know vs. what is being inferred. As such, many areas that would be considered controversial or at least uncertain, are taken as factual in the show. This is the exact same problem that Walking with Dinosaurs suffered from and it makes Prehistoric Planet frustrating to watch. Unlike a real animal documentary, we aren’t looking at real behaviours or even real dinosaurs here. We are watching animations and fictional stories that were decided by a committee of people, on how dinosaurs and other prehistoric life should look and act. That is not an accurate portrayal of science at all. Scientific consensus is rare and dinosaur paleontology in particular is extremely messy.

All of that is frustrating, but then we come on to the completely made up nonsense.

Just like Jurassic World: Dominion, Prehistoric Planet has its fair share of wacky / dumb moments of fiction. I think it is this that bugs me more than anything else in the series. Yes, a Tyrannosaurus swimming from shore to shore is questionable in terms of effectiveness and likelihood, but it can at least be argued for based on what we know of how modern terrestrial animals handle large bodies of water (most terrestrial animals can float and swim, though few do it well). In contrast, watching Dreadnoughtus males show off to females by inflating air sacs placed along their necks is nothing more than speculative daydreaming. Yet, these moments of 100% speculation are placed right alongside the most scientifically backed pieces in this series without any attempt to separate the two. This isn’t just bad for science communication, it actively damages the reputation of dinosaur paleontology.

Some of the most egregious examples of made up moments in Prehistoric Planet.

Yes, I know, that sounds hyperbolic but one look in the online paleo space (e.g., compilations here and here) shows just how effective these fantastical interpretations of dinosaurs have become to budding paleo- artists and possibly even future paleontologists. There still remains a derogatory view of paleontology that wavers between glorified stamp collecting to inventive storytelling. Placing these very out there interpretations about prehistoric life in a faux documentary that explicitly leans on its scientific credibility only serves to undermine what we can actually learn from the fossil record.

As I mentioned earlier, a large part of the problem lies in the format of these shows. A lack of “talking head” cutaways makes it harder to separate moments of speculation from areas of genuine knowledge. To Prehistoric Planet’s credit, each episode does feature a companion piece (Prehistoric Planet: Uncovered) that delves into the science of a single part of the program. Unfortunately, the choices for most of these behind the scene bits rarely cover the most controversial moments (e.g., Deserts features the infamous Dreadnoughtus neck sac scene, but the Uncovered episode focuses solely on sneaker males in pterosaurs). Similarly, Twitter threads and Reddit AMAs are not really appropriate venues for tackling these controversies either. Especially given that both require the viewer to go somewhere other than the original show to find their answers. One option that I would have liked to see the Prehistoric Planet creators go with would have been to add show notes for each episode. Walking with Dinosaurs did this in the past, creating an entire companion website dedicated to what was known or not about the animals at the time (Scott and White 2003). Prehistoric Planet would have vastly benefited from a similar approach.

There is much more that I could say about the series and the specific problems I had with it, but that’s a post for another time.

Don’t be fooled. Both series portray fictional dinosaurs

Neither the Jurassic World films nor Prehistoric Planet portray scientifically accurate dinosaurs. Yes, the latter does show more accurate dinosaurs, but they are interspersed with design choices and preferences that ultimately undermine the credibility of the series.

Both Jurassic World: Dominion and Prehistoric Planet can be enjoyed as standalone pieces of entertainment, but there is no denying that one of these series has a much greater weight to bear. Of the two, Jurassic World: Dominion will have a broader reach due to its theatrical release and massive marketing budget, but aside from the occasional blurb in passing by Colin Trevorrow, the series has long given up on trying to showcase accurate dinosaurs and the public knows this.

In contrast, I believe that Prehistoric Planet will be the more influential series. Aside from appealing to the online paleophile community, the series is billed as a legitimate piece of educational entertainment, which means it will be pushed in those markets and watched by many young paleophiles and future paleontologists. As such it needs to be held to a much higher standard. At the moment, I don’t think it meets this standard and too much of the online paleo community is giving it a free pass. I don’t doubt that Naish and colleagues went to great lengths to ensure scientific accuracy, but their flair for the speculative (see: All Yesterdays) results in too many weakly supported, controversial and/or completely made up pieces that appear in the series with no discussion about their credibility.

Food for thought.

~Jura

References

Scott, K.D., White, A.M. 2003. Unnatural history? Deconstructing the Walking with Dinosaurs phenomenon. Media, culture & society, 25(3):315-332.

Zanno, L.E., Tucker, R.T., Canoville, A., Avrahami, H.M., Gates, T.A., Makovicky, P.J. 2019. Diminutive fleet-footed tyrannosauroid narrows the 70-million-year gap in the North American fossil record. Comm Biol 2(1):64.

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7 Responses to Prehistoric Planet vs. Jurassic World. Different Receptions to Fictional Dinosaurs

  1. Avatar Spinosaurus The Strange
    Spinosaurus The Strange says:

    One of my biggest gripes with Prehistoric Planet is the reappearance of the magical integument-switching Tyrannosaurus. I thought we were past the ludicrous idea of fuzzy babies turning into scaly adults, but sadly, I guess not.

  2. If you are going to be as detailed and critical of Planet you can’t have blinders on to the positives.

    The mechanics of bodies moved in fast twitch reaction way that seemed more realistic to me. The way the feet left the ground slowly reminded me of a modern day ostrich.

    This CGI is best representation of Dinos to date. ( This is huge and this should have sandwiched your valid disappointments.)

    • You’re right, I could have added more detailed praise for Prehistoric Planet. To be fair, I could have also done similar for Jurassic World Dominion (e.g., the Therizinosaurus introduction scene was genuinely suspenseful and well shot). There were lots of things to like in Prehistoric Planet, but I feel that those things have largely been covered by other media outlets and Twitter conversations. There is no lack of love for Prehistoric Planet out there. I’m just reminding folks that this series was far from perfect and that it is okay to criticize its faults.

      All that said, I agree that this is the best CG representation of dinosaurs to date. While there there were some moments that didn’t quite capture the weight right (e.g., a scene where the Tyrannosaurus youngsters are running on the beach made it look like they were floating), but these are few and far between. Also, the Qianzhousaurus hunting scene did a great job of capturing what felt like a real-life nature documentary shot.

  3. Avatar Anonymous
    Anonymous says:

    Dr. Bourke,

    You do know that every dinosaur in media is “fictional”, right? Regardless putting Prehistoric Planet on the same level as Jurassic World: Dominion in terms of “ficticious-ness” is extremely disingenuous.

  4. Thank you for your detailed critiques, particularly of Prehistoric Planet which we have watched over the past few evenings.

    Although my knowledge of the subject is definitely of the mildly interested amateur I found a few parts less believable, in particular of the small avian looking creatures attempting to take one or more of the babies walking along the riverside with the herd of massive parents.

    First of all the scene is in a very wintry location, I would doubt that the parents would be taking their very young offspring into that environment unless there was a prime feeding place very, very close by, but that seems unlikely based on the amount of snow and ice and it’s valley like location.

    Secondly, it seems highly unlikely that such massive creatures would be stampeded by such small predators. Yes, their young were at risk, if the predators could reach them, but it seems highly unlikely that the parents wouldn’t simply turn to the tiny predators and destroy them if they came too close.

    It would be somewhat similar to a secretary bird attacking a herd of elephants, although the babies are obviously of a much different size.

    I wondered about the colourful air sacs on the Dreadnoughtus. I gather that some dinosaurs are now considered to be warm blooded and capable of hibernating, or at least existing through months of very cold weather.

  5. Placing large dinosaurs in snowfields is always going to get groans. Nature has always provided animals with the ability to sense when it is time to migrate – not after-the-fact.

  6. Avatar sodonewithingen
    sodonewithingen says:

    I appreciate the check WRT Jurassic Park 6’s new pseudo-dromaeosaurs & Prehistoric Planet’s speculative bits. I’m still a bit skeptical WRT T.rex’s lips completely concealing the largest upper teeth, but the issue of whether theropods had visible lips *period* seems settled (goodbye 90s wraparound overbites). Next on the wishlist: a documentary that gives G.carolini & other late carnosaurs their due love *without* a ‘stack ’em up vs. rexy’ hype line.