Jurassic Park Dinosaurs Illustrated with Modern Science | Hacker News Reader

Jurassic Park Dinosaurs Illustrated with Modern Science

jurassicparkterror.net

385 pointsraattgift35 comments

Nice article indeed. There are actually less feathered species than I expected.

It reminded me of one of my favourite article about how dinosaurs are drawn [1]. Two paleoartists draw modern animals like Hollywood draws dinosaurs. It was eyes opening to me. We mostly have skeletons of dinausors but fat and soft tissues play a very important role in how animals look.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/dinosaur-an...

Your link is also excellent!

I also think - when people ask- "but how did Tyrannosaurs manage with such stupid little arms" - just how well birds can manipulate objects (and in the case of some corvids, tools) with just two feet and a lipless pointy beak. Ever watch a parrot peel the skin off a grape? I've never managed that even with the advantage of opposing thumbs.

In fact modern birds are my favourite dinosaur-like things.

Funfact: birds aren’t dinosaur-like. They are dinosaurs. Theropods specifically

Yes! We buy dinosaur eggs and dinosaur meat from dinosaur farms, wild dinosaurs play around and crap on statues. World is wonderful.

Exactly. I love this and sometimes think of the running birds in my garden as little velociraptors (or should I now say Deinonychus?)

Yet for some reason nobody appreciates when I label the leftover chicken in the fridge "dino meat."

Not just birds -- humans who were born with no arms learn to become dextrous enough with their legs and feet to where they can cook, paint, operate a computer and even drive a car almost as well as if they'd had all four limbs.

T. rex got along just fine with its stumpy little kiwi-bird wings.

But dinosaurs were modeled after lizards and reptiles, not mammals. And looking at their most related living descendants, birds and crocodiles, I think popular illustrations are close to reality.

Many of those illustrations are by C.M. Kosemen, from the book All Yesterdays [1], which is fantastic.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/All-Yesterdays-Speculative-Dinosaur...

I actually learned the bit about Raptors and Deinonychus from Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin would never mention velociraptors, but several times mentioned packs of hungry deinonychus. Being a 10 year old boy when Jurassic Park came out and being obsessed with dinosaurs, I looked up what Calvin was talking about and learned that raptors were modeled after this smaller dinosaur, and that they were about the size of a turkey, not the size they are in the movies.

In the book they're specifically Velociraptor antirrhopus (rather than mongoliensis), which, as I understand it, actually was a name for Deinonychus antirrhopus for a while before they settled on the current hame. So they (kinda) really are supposed to be Deinonychus.

[EDIT] ah, I see the article covers that.

The larger _Utahraptor_ was discovered while the movie was being written/made, but only the consulting paleontologists knew they were making the raptors so large for the movie.

The thing about the motion sensitive vision was only hinted at in the movie but the book explains it as a result of the frog DNA used to fill in missing sequences.

That's probably the best way to explain the differences from the movie to real life. I think its a decent explanation that holds up upon suspension of disbelief.

Those "Long necks" probably didn't hold their neck that way, according to this highly informative article: https://svpow.com/2009/05/31/necks-lie/

The article discusses pretty recent developments, so I'm trusting OP over a 2009 piece.

More than recent / old, I think the neck posture debate is still active.

This article is great! I was completely absorbed the whole time I was reading it :)

Thank you to the author and the people who shared it!

This is my favorite talk on the T-Rex:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-jD7kQvyPs

I stopped being obsessed with dinosaurs 15 years ago. This was a great introduction to how our picture of the T-Rex has advanced since then.

Lovely article. Allosaurus is amazing and terrifying. Very cool factoids about the bunny hands, first time hearing they were incorrectly depicted.

I remember having two Jurassic Park velociraptor toys as a kid. One had the arms positioned as in the film but, oddly enough, the other got it right, as in the article.

Wrong:

http://www.toydreams.co.uk/images/jurassicpark/loose/dinosau...

Right:

http://dinotoyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/JPRaptor-4...

That second image just triggered something in my brain.

I remember the texture and the smell of the rubber after 20+ years.

I remember 2 being harder plastic and 1 being the more rubbery one. Though I could well be wrong. Sold all that stuff years ago except three or four of the bigger ones, which my kids play with.

second is better, but you'd want the hands flattened out too, right? Claws extended straight instead of curved in.

Maybe, but it's intended to be actively grabbing with them, not at rest (so having them turned correctly is probably just an accident, not a correction of the earlier pose) so the curved-in hands might make sense—I didn't get the impression from the article that their wrists and "fingers" can't bend. The toy would move the arms in a grasping motion when, IIRC, you pulled the legs a certain way. Something like that.

I'm still not sure I understand the logic of that; the only rotation I see is in the supine in the 'correct' version. The 'wrong' version doesn't require any rotation at all, even using the illustrations. It's simply lifting the front limbs up, allowing the hands to rest.

Imagine a chicken flapping its wings forward at a cat or something.

If you want to bring it in front of you in the zombie like position most people use, you should have a notable rotation of both the elbow and the wrist.

This is true, but I notice similarly if I attempt a hands up position.

I should mention how excellent and detailed this article is. Anyone with a young child knows how fascinating they find this stuff and I have some corrections from this article to share with mine.

To me the most surprising detail was how scrawny T. rex legs turn out to be.

the post references this vid of Real Parasaurolophus Calls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtpSOpUDCb8

not loud or anything but spooked my cat

Dinosaurs could have feathers for thermal reasons. e.g.: to keep baby dinosaurs warm.

Great article. I was almost lost in the first section though, as I’m sure 99% of humans understand “dinosaur” to mean “all those huge ass animals that lived 200 million years ago” and not a particular biological group. The Wikipedia page on dinosaurs does a much better, non-pedantic job at explaining the distinctions.

But isn't the whole point about this article to be "pedantic" about popular misconceptions?

How is the wikipedia page non-pedantic compared to the article? It says the same thing, just in more detail.

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