How “Jurassic Park” led to the modernization of dinosaur paleontology | Hacker News Reader

How “Jurassic Park” led to the modernization of dinosaur paleontology

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This reminds me of the unfortunate logo the email sending company 'bronto.com' had before Oracle bought them out:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140101030328/http://bronto.com...

The Brontosaurus in their logo has the tail dragging along the ground, as if we are still in the 1980's when all dinosaurs were drawn that way. As if they ever dragged their tails along the ground like that, but it was plausible then when serious study of dinosaurs was only for small children!

Actually it was only a decade or so when the Natural History Museum in London changed 'Dippy' to have the correct tail posture, i.e. in the up position, not dragged along the ground. However, I did not take the Bronto 'product' seriously in part due to the fact that I despise marketing types (and their product was shoddy) and in part because their logo was so lame.

This article is... ok. It's a puff piece for a book that is trying to ride the coat tails of Jurassic Park.

But the headline doesn't follow from the article. The author says that Jurassic Park has been good for paleontology because it increased public interest in dinosaurs. But saying it has modernized paleontology is quite the stretch.

The book actually looks sort of interesting (although reviews suggest it's not written very well). I'm not aware of other recent books that pull together recent discoveries although I can't say it's an area that I follow especially closely.

But, yeah, there's absolutely nothing in the interview to support the claim that Jurassic Park modernized paleontology. Rather, Jurassic Park represented an era where: 1.) CGI has getting astonishingly good relative to what people were used to seeing and 2.) Dinosaurs were being dramatically rethought relative to the giant lumbering reptiles that were still how most people thought of them.

It’s also a great story that brings up a lot of philosophical questions, especially as we started getting into cloning and bioethics. Michael Criton was a genius and had a good handle on the future.

Jurassic Park was more than dinosaurs — it was a fable of caution in a rapidly evolving world.

No argument from me. It was timely and visually exciting. But it was also just a good movie on a lot of other dimensions--the script, the actors, etc.

Criton -> Crichton BTW. Though I have to say that the book never grabbed me the way the movie did. Or that a couple of other Crichton books did. His novels seemed to be starting to turn into something more akin to movie treatments by then.

   I have to say that the book never grabbed me the way the movie did.

Really? I read the book first. I was profoundly disappointed in the movie. I was angered by how artificial and contrived the deviations from the book were.

Book was Crichton's, movie was Spielsberg's

Chrichton wrote the screenplay.

Unfortunately, there are very few movie adaptations of books where this isn't the case. You gotta let it go. I eventually did over the Jason Bourne series. How can they make a whole series of movies based on a series of books where the main antagonist doesn't even exist in the movies and the girlfriend dies at the beginning of the second movie instead of becoming the wife that keeps him human and gripped on reality?

Eventually... Just gotta let it go. :(

Films are always always going to depart from books. The media are a lot different. They're probably targeted at different audiences. I don't remember many of the details of the Bourne books; it's literally been decades since I read them. But Ludlum's books were cut from the shadowy conspiracy/spy/etc. cloth whereas the Bourne movies are primarily big budget modern Hollywood action adventure. (Which I don't much care for and probably wouldn't have loved even if they kept characters and other relationships between the books and the films.)

Directors are also just going to have their own visions. In many cases, they're just not going to like some of the creative choices the original author made--and there are a lot of fingers in Hollywood development projects in any case.

Hehe. Apparently, for Ender's Game, there were actors who actually refused to read the book because they feared it would affect their work.

The biggest differences I remember are that there were more species of dinosaurs, the kids were slightly younger and basically had their personalities reversed, Nedry's hack was more sophisticated, and Genero turns all macho and becomes Muldoon's assistant instead of getting eaten. None of those seemed particularly artificial to me. What changes made you angry?

I liked the movie, but if there was a moral it was no more than the standard-issue Frankenstein fearmongering: "if you meddle in God's domain, or study that which man was not meant to know, awful things will happen." It certainly makes for fun adventures, but I'm not sure it's praiseworthy on its own.

> 1.) CGI has getting astonishingly good relative to what people were used to seeing

Wasn't the first one done with animatronics and costumes?

Largely. But what CGI it did use was very good for the time (and even today), and represented something if a watershed moment.

There's plenty of CGI in the first JP. At the time it was groundbreaking. The first big reveal of the brachiosaur munching on trees is CGI (this famous clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJlmYh27MHg). I think most of the big dinosaurs were CGI. Some of the raptor stuff was costumes. And some of the close-ups were models.

Its interesting to ponder that before Jurassic Park released in 1993, no-one had ever seen a photorealistic moving image of a dinosaur. Every attempt beforehand was glaringly obvious stop motion. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hxSws2W0-E

This is one of the films whose visual impact at the time is hard to appreciate today. That scene was one in which the impact on the audience was almost as great as it was on the characters in the clip.

The opening of Star Was was similar (although that was more models-based).

I think a lot of the impact can be recreated, with the appropriate score: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w-58hQ9dLk

IIRC the T. Rex was mostly CG but they had a real animatronic head and I think a foot for when it was interacting with things. (This is based on my recollection of the 10000 making-ofs I watched at the time.)

There was a complete full-size T-Rex animatronic model that was used for most of the car scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZtJVh3nUyU

Holy crap, I didn't know that. I just watched this and it seems they switched between CGI and animatronics for that sequence depending on what would work best. I think CGI was still basically being invented then and was crazy expensive. https://youtu.be/oelBtZHkL4c?t=9m5s

CGI that's not actually CGI usually looks better and lasts better (baring periodic rerenderings). ;)

Well, the influx of new blood would almost certainly have a secondary effect of finding new ways to do things. So, Jurassic Park probably didn't directly contribute, and indirect contributions do not seem like a stretch to me at all.

The interviewee cites [Robert] Bakker [0] as a gateway author into science, but doesn't actually mention Bakker's excellent 1986 book, 'The Dinosaur Heresies' which promoted the idea that many dinosaurs were agile, smart and warm blooded. Bakker had been publishing on this concept since the mid-1970s. Jurassic Park may have helped with popularisation, but it was Bakker and his co-researchers who started the modernisation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_T._Bakker

Jack Horner was a big driving force behind the modernization afaik. He was involved with the original movie. Living near Bozeman I've been able to hear him speak several times and also run into him at Costco.

Reminds me of the "Scully Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Scully#%22The_Scully_Effe...

does anyone know when/why we started going from the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago to now 66 million?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis

The Chicxulub impact is now generally accepted as the direct cause of dinosaur extinction. A 2013 paper updated the date of this event from 65m years ago to 66m.

Made me think of this [0] directly relevant XKCD.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/460/

Funny thing aubout the hover text for that xkcd is that Brontosaurus has been ressurected since then.... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/that-b...

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