What Jurassic Park got wrong about dinosaurs

Standing still wouldn't have saved you from a T. rex.  A paleontologist on five things Jurassic Park got wrong about dinosaurs.

Transcript

00:00One of the main things that bothers me about Jurassic Park is that there's this idea that if

00:05you stand still, T. rex can't get you. But that's not at all scientifically accurate. I mean,

00:11a T. rex would definitely see you and probably would come after you.

00:21We find them in Archaeopteryx and Microraptor and a lot of other

00:25raptors like Dromaeosaurs and Velociraptors. So that's another interesting thing that Jurassic

00:31Park didn't add in was the feathers. But that has been one of the really big things that has

00:36happened since that movie came out was that feathers and the colors of dinosaurs were

00:41actually quite colorful instead of grays and mucky colors. A lot of dinosaurs we have found

00:47feathers for, but T. rex we still haven't. So there's still a little bit of a debate going

00:52on right now. Currently, it's likely that they had like plumages when they were young.

00:56And then as they grew older, they lost their feathers.

01:03Because constantly you're getting asked about big theropods with their massive teeth and how

01:07big and scary they are. But there were also really tiny little dinosaurs and there were also

01:12very docile creatures as well.

01:25What they actually found later on was that Oviraptor was living in

01:29nests and they were taking care of their young and that those eggs were actually eggs of Oviraptor.

01:34They were actually really good parents and they were taking care of their young.

01:37So I feel like we need justice for Oviraptor.

01:42One of the really main issues with early paleo art was that they weren't taking into account a

01:49lot of things that couldn't have fossilized, like soft cartilage or soft material like cartilage is

01:54quite rare to preserve. But now that we have more soft material that has preserved and more skin

01:59impressions and stuff like that, then we can make better observations and better reconstructions.

02:04So now they'll try to make their dinosaurs a little bit more chubby than they had been previously.

02:12Dinosaurs are defined by how many holes they actually have in their head. Pterosaurs like

02:20Ramphorhynchus are a completely separate group from dinosaurs, but they lived at the same time.

02:26So when you go into a museum, a lot of times you see kids pointing at them like,

02:30oh wow, a dinosaur. It's like, it's not a dinosaur. It's something completely different,

02:34a flying reptile.

02:35A lot of the time when you ask someone like, what do you think of prehistory? They always

02:43think like, oh, the oldest thing that lived were dinosaurs. But that's not true. I mean,

02:47they lived in the middle of everything. The Cambrian, the Permian, all of that came before.

02:52And then there were dinosaurs. And then there was the Pleistocene and the rise of the mammals.

02:57And then we came.