A shorter version of this feature was published in The Telegraph in June 2018
Dr. Thomas Adams, a palaeontologist from Texas, remembers the first time he saw Jurassic Park. And the second, and the third, and the fourth. They were, after all, all in the same month – and led to him quitting his job to study dinosaurs.
“I was very, very affected by it,” he says. “It re-sparked all that love of dinosaurs I had as a child. I was 25. I was managing a record store. But I then knew what I wanted to do with my life. That film is responsible for me having the passion to quit my job and go back to school to become a palaeontologist and as a result, here I am. In 1995 I went on my first dinosaur dig. By 1999 I was in college working on getting a Bachelor of Science Degree in Geology as well as another one in Zoology and Physiology, as well as a Masters and a PHD. I’ve now been doing palaeontology for 23 years. And it’s all because of Jurassic Park.”
Although a late-starter, Adams’ story is not that unusual. Speak to any palaeontologist of the Jurassic Park generation, speak to any scientist who sat down in 1993 to watch a Steven Spielberg adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel, and they’ll tell you the same thing – of lives changed, of childhood dreams forged, of a livelihood transformed.
Steve Brusatte, 34, a palaeontologist from the University of Edinburgh, saw it with his brother when he was nine.
“It blew our minds,” he says. “The film presented a whole new image of dinosaurs. Nobody had ever seen dinosaurs that looked like that before. All of the books and movies and television shows about dinosaurs I remember seeing as a kid portrayed dinosaurs as these dim-witted, slow-moving, boring animals that were just sitting around waiting to go extinct. Jurassic Park was a revelation. It showed dinosaurs as real animals, moving around, eating, interacting with each other. It showed dinosaurs that were active and energetic and intelligent. This image of dinosaurs is the correct one scientifically, by the way!”
ReBecca Hunt-Foster, 39, a palaeontologist based in Utah, saw it when she was 14, having just finished the novel on the way to the cinema.
“Watching that movie as a teenager humanised palaeontologists as real people,” she explains. “I started to reach out to those in the field for advice on pursuing Palaeontology as a career. Some even replied. Some became my mentors… Laura Dern’s Ellie was the first woman palaeontologist (palaeobotanist) I ever encountered in pop culture. I would not meet my first real woman palaeontologists until 2001, almost ten years after the movie came out. Thank goodness for [renowned palaeontologist] Karen Chin! It made me see that women scientist can be strong, smart and brave and seeing that portrayed on screen made a huge impact on my 14 year-old self. I appreciate Laura Dern playing her with such sincerity and courage.”
Unsurprisingly, Jurassic Park’s impact on the field at large was enormous – although it didn’t, as is commonly assumed, revolutionise the science entirely on its own. Those changes were already taking place during the 70s and 80s: the decades in which the centuries-old theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs finally became fact. This changed not only what scientists thought about the animals’ social behaviour, but opened up what was a relatively niche field of study to something that could help scientists understand animals that are still alive today. Hence the increased interest, and jobs.
“Jurassic Park rode the crest of that wave,” says Paul Barrett, 46, Dinosaur Specialist at London’s Natural History Museum. “There were people going into dinosaurs in a bigger way because of that rediscovery of the bird-dinosaur link. But the movie took on a number of scientific advisors, some of whom were on the cutting edge of the subject at the time. So things like the link with birds, speculation over parenting behaviour – all of that was being put into Jurassic Park in a fictional context for the first time while reflecting the real advances that were being made in the field over the last ten years or so before it came out. It was sort of a perfect storm. This stuff was all happening at once and all gelling in the early 90s, creating a whole new view of dinosaurs.”
Still, beyond the field itself, the popularity of Jurassic Park – which grossed over $900 million worldwide, and has birthed a franchise of five films – is undeniable. Barrett, in fact, got his first job in palaeontology because his predecessor at the Natural History Museum was overwhelmed with Jurassic Park-related requests. While Thomas Adams, who works as a curator at the Witte Museum in Texas, is banking on increased visitor numbers off the back of new film Jurassic World 2: Fallen Kingdom, released in the UK next week.
“If it wasn’t for Jurassic Park getting the public excited about dinosaurs and then in turn having the public come in to museums and translating that excitement into box office numbers at the door of museums, we would be struggling as palaeontologists,” Adams says. “Because what happens is: museums and universities and other institutions are going, ‘Hey, people like dinosaurs, so we’re going to give you funding to do research, to develop technology.’ That’s how NASA works, that’s what drives space exploration. It’s very popular with the public so we want to support it. Dinosaurs are really the same way.
“And if you look at the number of discoveries of dinosaurs – prior to the mid-1980s it was like one or three new discoveries a year. Then in the 1980s it kind of went up to maybe 10 or 12 a year. Today we’re looking at about 50 new species discovered a year. That’s almost one a week. And the reason is because there are more people looking for dinosaurs and they’re going to different places looking for dinosaurs. That happened post-Jurassic Park, post-1993.”
For its time, the original Jurassic Park was built upon a relatively accurate understanding of dinosaurs. But palaeontology has changed dramatically since then. New technology, for example, has debunked the myth – as put forward by Sam Neil’s Alan Grant – that the Tyrannosaurus Rex’s vision is based on movement.
“We know this because over the last decade CAT scans of T-Rex skulls have allowed us to visualise the brain cavity,” explains Brusatte. “We’ve learnt from this that the T-Rex had binocular vision, so it had a strong depth of 3D vision. It could also hear a range of sounds and had a great sense of smell. If the T-Rex was after you, it was probably going to get you.”
And of course, there was the paradigm-shifting discovery that most dinosaurs had feathers, which was confirmed in 1996 when the first feathered fossil – the Sinosauropteryx, a small carnivorous dinosaur – was discovered in China. “Those dinosaurs in China were buried by volcanos,” explains Brusatte. “It took a one in a billion preservational situation to get something soft like skin or muscle or internal organs preserved. Then more and more just came out of the woodwork .We were flooded with feathered dinosaur discoveries and now we know 20 years later that probably most dinosaurs, if not all dinosaurs, have some type of feathers.”
But still, as far the popular imagination is concerned, the scientific myths persist – perpetuated by 25 years of Jurassic Park. Every palaeontologist seems to have a favourite – if that’s the word. For Brusatte, it’s that the Mosasaurus – the shark-eating sea beast from 2015’s Jurassic World – is “way too big”. For Hunt-Foster, it’s that dinosaurs digs don’t have a “magic gun” that can illuminate dinosaurs underground. For both Barrett and Adams, it’s the Dilophosaurus: the tiny dinosaur with a frill that spits venom in the original Jurassic Park . “There’s no evidence it had a frill,” says Barrett, “or that any dinosaur was venomous. And we knew that at the time.”
But overall, most palaeontologists seem to agree that the inaccuracies – while a “double-edged sword,” to quote Barrett – can be a positive force for educating the public. Ie. It is better that people come to museums with wrong information than they don’t come at all.
“I feel like any of the gripes about how the animals looked or behaved has only made our science stronger,” says Hunt-Foster. “It has made people 1) improve their knowledge of how dinosaurs lived and looked, both through science and art, and 2) it makes us be better communicators to the public of what dinosaurs were really like.”
“There’s an interesting phenomenon that occurs when these movies come out,” adds Adams. “The first thing that happens is that the professional field goes out a rampage about how inaccurate everything is. ‘Why isn’t the T-Rex feathered? Why aren’t the velociraptors feathered?’ and so on. And I’m always thinking, ‘You know, that’s OK. They don’t have to be.’ They don’t make movies for palaeontologists. They wouldn’t make any money if they did. And they get people excited about dinosaurs and that translates to people coming to the museum and there I can go, ‘Hey, you’re here, let’s take a moment to talk about what actually is real palaeontology vs. what’s in the movies’. And so that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do.”
One area palaeontologists do disagree on, however, is the portrayal of dinosaurs in the new Jurassic World films: which are notable for introducing the concept of a fictional dinosaur, a genetically-enhanced hybrid dino called the Indominus Rex.
Adams and Barrett, for instance, see the development almost as a tribute to the gripes of palaeontologists.
“I do think one thing which has been a missed opportunity is feathers,” says Barrett. “Because we do know now that a lot of these dinosaurs should have had feathers on them… But they actually do give themselves this ‘get out of jail free card’ in the script where they say, ‘These aren’t real dinosaurs, these are genetically engineered created attractions’. And they mention that several times in Jurassic World. And as a result you can’t really criticise it because basically what they say is ‘we have made these things up to look how we want them to look’. In which case: fair enough! We can’t really criticise you for not being accurate, because you’ve owned up to the fact you are not.”
But others are concerned. The original Jurassic Park reintroduced dinosaurs to the world as living, breathing animals –a species with wants and needs. Now Jurassic World – and its sequel, which also features a mutant dinosaur – are in danger of recasting them as fantastical monsters.
“The new films have strayed from the original,” says Brusatte. “They’re definitely more in the vein of monster movies now. That’s OK. Film franchises have to adapt, and it’s all entertainment anyway. My only slight concern is that moviegoers think that these genetically modified dinosaurs were the real thing. Some of the new movie characters are huge, much bigger than any real dinosaur. Which is fine, they’re movie monsters. But if the film desensitises people and all of a sudden people look at a long-necked sauropod the size of a Boeing 737 and say ‘meh,’ then that would be sad. Because to me, real dinosaurs were much more fantastic than even the biggest and weirdest Jurassic World hybrid mash-up.”
“It is more about the ‘scare factor’ than the ‘awe factor’ at this point,” chips in Hunt-Foster. “I guess a real Tyrannosaur or Velociraptor just isn’t scary enough for the world we live in today.”