#but like in an actual scifi way. its boring. its inaccurate

[oflgtfol]

“Other shortcomings [in communicating science] are evident in television science fiction programming. Star Trek, for example, despite its charm and strong international and interspecies perspective, often ignores the most elementary scientific facts. The idea that Mr. Spock could be a cross between a human being and a life-form independently evolved on the planet Vulcan is genetically far less probable than a successful cross of a man and an artichoke… There must be dozens of alien species on various Star Trek TV series and movies. Almost all we spend any time with are minor variants of humans. This is driven by economic necessity, costing only an actor and a latex mask, but it flies in the face of the stochastic nature of the evolutionary process. If there are aliens, almost all of them I think will look devastatingly less human than Klingons and Romulans.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[indowolfgang]

About Jurassic Park’s lack of feathers: (y’all this is long)

most dinosaur related media doesn’t have feathered dinosaurs and a lot of people blame Jurassic Park. dinosaurs are my special interest and Jurassic Park is a big part of that so ima prove them wrong. first off i wanna say haters get owned: 2011: NASA scientists said it was the 7th best SciFi movie and 2012: Popular Mechanics said it was the 6th accurate and “was faithful to early '90s speculative genetics theories”

anyways... lets get into it

Games (that i have lol):

Ark: Survival Evolved: 10/29 dinosaurs

Compsognathus,  Deinonychus, Gallimimus, Megalosaurus, Microraptor, Oviraptor, Raptor, Therizinosaur, Troodon, Yutyrannus (this dino was actually found with direct evidence of feathers!)

at first i had no idea what type of ‘raptor’ they were referring to, but i checked and its a Utahraptor. the largest-known individual of Utahraptor was about 7 meters (23 feet) long so size is a-okay with me

i debated including the Pegomastax because the wiki says it has fur and quills, which could be argued as protofeathers, but since its from the early Jurassic its hard to say.. just to be safe i left it out

i only looked at dinosaurs cause there are a ton of made-up/mythical creatures, prehistoric birds/reptiles, and just a straight up vulture

The Isle: 3/30 dinosaurs 

Therizinosaurus, Orodromeus (AI), Austroraptor 

none of these are playable in survival mode btw

also i’m not sure if the game is going for accuracy or not, Dilophosaurus and Velociraptor are the right size but still... no feathers on known feathered dinos: Velo, Rex, or Utahraptor

technically feathers have never been found on Utahraptors but there is strong evidence that all dromaeosaurids had them since Microraptor and Dakotaraptor had them

Jurassic World Evolution: 0/69 (nice) dinosaurs

based on the movies Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, and eventually they added a Jurassic Park DLC. despite the Jurassic World movies not counting the Jurassic Park sequels (Lost World and JP3) as part of its time line, the Jurassic Park DLC includes skins from those movies. not much to say here... i’ll get into the movies further down

i didn’t count the pteranodon, cause its not a dinosaur and, still, no feathers

Saurian: 4/8 dinosaurs

Dakotaraptor, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Acheroraptor, Ornithomimid

i’ve only included the dinos that are currently in-game, the wiki says they are planing to add another playable dino, Anzu (feathered), but so far it hasn’t even been added as an AI yet

they are actually going for scientific accuracy so all the dinos that should have feathers do and they are, as far as i can tell, realistically placed. Good Job!

games are hard to talk about... usually games that feature dinos will have an element of ‘fantasy’ (Ark especially) and JWE is based on the Jurassic World movies so its dinos can only look like the movies dinos. The Isle is most likely suffering from the status quo, most dinos in popular media look like big lizards so they didn’t want to take a risk. the game isn’t finished and its possible it’ll go from a dinosaur sim to a shooter, since there are human models in game and controls for weapons. i’ve also heard players rumor that you’re not actually playing as the dino but as a camera that follows it around (which would explain the nigh vision mode). chances are The Isle will end up like Ark: man vs dino

Movies:

i thought about discussing The Land Before Time movies (cause i was obsessed with them as a kid lol), but that was pre-Jurassic Park so i’ll give it an honorable mention. ANYWAYS... Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park: Lost World, Jurassic Park 3, Jurassic World, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. none of them have feathered dinos. lets look at why that might be 🤔

Jurassic Park:

no feathered dinosaurs. BUT, feathered dinosaurs were not very mainstream in the scientific community until about 3 years after the movie came out,

“Three years after the first Jurassic Park debuted, paleontologists announced that the small theropod Sinosauropteryx was covered in a fine coat of fuzzy protofeathers. This was just the initial drop in a flood of feathery dinosaur discoveries which confirmed that a wide variety of dinosaurs bore archaic forms of plumage, from simple filaments to asymmetrical feathers that would have allowed them to fly.”

[from this National Geographic article (x)]

looking more into the history of feathered dinos, i found well... a lot. its really difficult to find a concrete time for when paleontologists discovered (and agreed on) feathered dinos, some places say 1860, 1923, 1979, 1983, it goes on forever, one source even said 2001. Archaeopteryx, which an early Jurassic creature, had complex, bird-like feathers. so why no feathers on other dinosaur reconstructions? its possible these discoveries were ignored by the larger scientific community in favor of the well established depictions of big, slow lizards

[if u wanna do even more reading about feathers check out this All About Birds article (x) and the History of discovery section on the Archaeopteryx’s wiki (x)]

JP definitely upped the Velociraptor’s size and did my Dilophosaurus dirty, so i will fault them for that. the big ass raptor has stayed in pop culture for-fucking-ever. it feels like everyone is making naked Utahraptors and calling them Velociraptors. and g*d... my poor Dilophosaurus... why’d they make you spit? and why so small? you’re really 6-7 meters (20-23 feet) long! you are a large carnivore!! also it is possible that Dilophosaurus had feathers, though again, because its from the early Jurassic, it would have been more like a fur

Lost World:

no feathered dinosaurs. i cant really fault them for not changing the dinosaurs looks in a sequel, also trust me when i say it could have been worse the dino depictions in the book are insane... Chameleon Carnotaurus anyone?

the movie also didn’t explain why there were different dinos at Site B compared to the actual park. my best explanation is from the book: Site B was where the dinosaurs were actually hatched and raised, they were moved to the park just before they got to big to handle. so we are to assume that any non-Jurassic Park dinos we saw in Lost World were originally planned to be moved. sucks that they left this detail out of the movie adaptation, cause a lot of fans got confused (including me lol)

Jurassic Park 3:

no feathered dinosaurs. an incredibly mild attempt at ‘feathered’ raptors was made in JP3 by giving the males quills, but at that point the movies had an established ‘science’ and completely changing the look of the animals at the end of a trilogy might have confused a few people (even if it was more scientifically accurate)

Jurassic World:

no feathered dinosaurs. they literally stated in the movie that they left out accurate feathered dinosaurs because Dr. Wu was asked to create: “Dinosaurs that look like what the public expects dinosaurs to look like. Scary. Scaly. Wild.” Dr. Wu also states that the dinosaurs have never been actual dinosaurs. their DNA is a melting pot of DNA.

(i swear i read something about Dr. Wu attempting to make feathered dinos, but because of all the non-dino DNA he couldn’t get the genes to stick, i can’t find a source or any proof of this so i guess that can be our lil headcanon lol)

though for a more real life reason,

“The reasoning behind this being continued through the subsequent movies, though, is more about how imposing the featherless versions look.” ... “It seems more likely that the filmmakers went with how most people would perceive dinosaurs in the hopes that dino experts would take notice.”

[from this Screen Rant article (x)]

so basically JW cared more about scary, recognizable dinos than accurate ones

Fallen Kingdom:

no feathered dinosaurs. again a sequel is a bit too late to change up your designs. unfortunately the change had to happen in JW or not at all

In Closing:

basically Jurassic Park came out just before paleontologists announced Sinosauropteryx, which popularized feathered dinos. even then Jurassic Park was restricted by the technology of the time. the early ninety’s was not the best time for CGI and i can’t imaging making feathered animatronic dinosaurs that could stand up to the rain they filmed in. new media is definitely stuck in the past, look at the movies that come out and compare how many are sequels or prequels or remakes or whatever. Jurassic Park was a great movie and obviously the vultures that make movies are gonna try and ride its brand into the sunset. blaming the movie for stopping new scientific discoveries from entering the mainstream isn’t fair. the movie did a lot to bring current science into the lime light, it popularized warmblooded, avian dinos and showed them as intelligent, fast moving animals instead of slow movie monsters

but JW had no excuse!  they should get majority of the blame for making the public afraid of feathers cause they themselves were afraid of feathers! they had the technology, the budget, and the opportunity to follow in its parent movie’s footsteps. they could have at least TRIED to be accurate but they just stuck to what people knew cause that was more profitable. science is only as interesting as the toys you can make of it i guess...

a final note, just for my sanity: JP dinos aren’t real dinosaurs. not even in fiction. they’re DNA is so full of garbage that their inaccurate appearances could be explained away with that alone. the books get into this more, talking about all the failed embryos and how many diseases these creatures had. even delving into their lack of social skills and how the raptors didn’t act like a pack, but a group of aggressive individuals. unfortunately the average viewer isn’t gonna know about all this set dressing. hell, i didn’t even read the 2 books until recently (end of 2019/ start of 2020) so i was as ready to believe whatever the movies showed me. honestly the books and movies are all good in different ways, not accurate, but good. read the books if you want more gore and technical explanations and the movies if you want, well... more story, they add a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the books

one day i’ll get into the differences in the books and movies.. one day

[ this was originally a response to someone but tumblr hid it, cause links. so i’ve edited it to be a standalone post and also WAY longer. feel free to add on or correct any mistakes i’ve made (be respectful tho) ]