Scientific Issues: Jurassic Park - Part 1 

*Opens video with reasonable volume at 10:41 PM when everybody's trying to sleep* *C L O N I N G D I S A S T E R*

The "T" in T. Rex, stands for Toad. *T. Rex begins aggressively hopping toward you.*

F.R.O.G in an acronym Foreign Replacement Organism Genome

Using toad DNA for a dinosaur,is like using tuna fish DNA for a mammoth.

Warning: this video was made by a pretty immature version of myself! I totally neglected to mention many of the designs were accurate at the time of the movie's release, but on now inaccurate by today's evidence. That is the main problem with this video and has been accounted for in future ones.

frog-dinosaur hybrid?! That's why the velociraptors can jump very high!

Trey: the jurassic was when dinosaurs were there largest Argentinosaurus: can I have word with you in my office

Honestly, I'm willing to argue that none of the "dinosaurs" in the movies are real dinosaurs but instead InGen just taking whatever DNA they could find, frankensteining it together, and then basically just making it resemble reconstructions of dinosaurs. You could arguably classify InGen's creations as "Fauxosaurs". It's very probable that the initial "prototypes" were more frog-like, but they just progressively modified them to be less frog like over time.

You forgot to mention that many people were attracted to paleontology after seeing the movie. Jack Horner said he had two students helping him before 1993 and after the film that number grew to 50. So, if now we know that much about dinossaurs, you should thank to the first classic Jurassic Park.

The Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park weren't even Dinosaurs to begin with. This is explained in more detail in the books (which was before the first film). These creatures in the novel were created by scientist and were made to only look like what people thought Dinosaurs looked like. Why didn't they tell us that in the film? That's because the film is literally a simplified/condensed version of the book scripted by Michael Crichton later re-written by Maria Scotch Marmo. The movie was meant to be a Hollywood blockbuster hit. The book was meant to show the failures of running theme parks with the belief that absolutely nothing could go wrong. Those parts in the book had to be condensed or deleted when the story came full circle to being a script again. When Michael Crichton was writing Jurassic Park he wasn't just pulling all this sci-fi out of his ass. He actually consulted several scientists and paleontologists at the time. His idea about mosquitoes, amber, and dinosaur DNA had not been completely discredited at the time and was actually accepted by some scientists. At the time it was the most rational way of bringing back prehistoric animals. Why didn't they keep up with modern science with the film's sequels? That's because there would have been continuity issues. The bottom line in that Jurassic Park 100% science fiction. Neither the movie nor the novel was meant to educate people on actual Dinosaurs But they work as a good stimulant for people who really want to learn about Dinosaurs. Regardless of all the inaccuracies the film has that opposes today's science, Jurassic Park is still a great film.

Don’t think I wouldn’t notice the gravity falls theme playing in the background

13:31 The Toadasaur tadpole is unbelievably cute, the adult form is viscerally terrifying.

While the movie is VERY inacurate, the movie was made quite some time ago and new studies outdate these animals.

For the record, the Movement-based vision is apparently addressed in the novel as being another product of Frog-Hybridization, but that's obviously no defense for the movie, since it's never explained that way.

*”You didn’t ask for the actual thing, you asked for more teeth”* -Dr Henry wu So they don’t claim to be scientifically accurate

Jurassic Park Awesomeness: 10/10 Jurassic Park Accuracy: -5/10

I've always kind of known Jurassic Park was inaccurate, but I never knew HOW inaccurate it was. Wow. Either way, it's still my favourite movie. It's entertaining, but not educational haha.

the worst part is... VELOCIRAPTORS LOOK SOO AWESOME WITH FEATHERS

It's important to note that when Jurassic Park 1 first came out, everywhere else depicted dinosaurs as tail draggers. Jurassic Park was the first to show dinosaurs as agile and believable

1:18 Don't you mean: *F E A T H E R L E S S B I P E D*

Also the movie doesn't explain it but the book does. The book list more then toads. (Also the "they cant see if you don't move" is another thing they share with the toad. Its vision had everything to do with the toad (it's explained in the book, I know this is addressing the movie but for someone like me who knows so much about lore, Because of the novel. Its eh...) in the second novel the sonora rex's CAN see you if you stand still. And that was shown in the lost world in the cliff scene. Rexy is the only rex with defective eye sight. Also the book talks about a color changing raptor, and also explains the feathers were intentionally fazed out by Wu.

I think this movie was pretty accurate in 1993. Our ideas have changed in the almost 25 years since but it was great at the time and I can still recommend it to anyone. Spielberg can tell an amazing story and John Williams' music is epic. The original Jurassic Park is a great movie even though the science behind it is outdated, as with many science fiction movies.

23:27 "D-long.. Heh"

I appreciate Jurassic Park because they tried to make it accurate from what they knew at the time while still being entertaining. And more people should read the book it is based on as it is really good. I've read most of Michael Crichton's other books, and they are brilliant. What KILLS me is how the movie franchise has refused to evolve with scientific breakthroughs and at least include feathers on dinosaurs. Its depictions are outdated by decades now. They could easily explain using more complete DNA and it would work and kids these days would see feathered dinos and love them. But it has become a political issue, with the director of Jurassic World asserting "no feathers" in his movie. It wouldn't matter as much if these films didn't define dinosaurs in our culture, but if Michael Crichton was alive today, I don't think he would want his dinos to be bald anymore. In my opinion, feathers make dinosaurs so much more interesting. Think of the color combinations, patterns, iridescence, different shapes and sizes. They could flare them out, ruffle them and display more body language.

Some of this was addressed in the book. Example, the book said that "Jurassic Park" was easier to pronounce than "Cretaceous Park" while acknowledging that most of the dinosaurs were from the Cretaceous period.

The dinosaurs don't get a free pass for being scaly because they are tad hybrids, but because the movie was made WAY before feathers were accepted among scientists as being the norm for dinosaurs. Paleontologists got to the feather consensus in 2007.

4:55 Though this dino didn't physically appear in the first movie, Herrerasaurus was part of the tourist brochure's list of dinosaurs cloned for the park. And Herrerasaurus was from the Triassic. So the most accurate name should be Mesozoic Park.

I will always gatekeep people who negatively view the fact that most of not all dinosaurs had feathers. I adored these creatures ever since I can remember myself, and the more discoveries are made about them, the more excited I gotten. I remember reading about how we could learn about the colour of their feathers or the pigment of their skins and getting flooded with awe and amazement

You're looking at this in hindsight. The dinosaurs were accurate with what was known at the time.

Many good points! they did however remove the scene which the tongue flicking velociraptor due to scientific inaccuracy which should have been mentioned

I would definitely argue a t-rex covered in bright colored feathers is far more threatening than a giant lizard.

Ok but that accurate toad-dinosaur hybrid is actually extremely creepy and I would've loved if they made it more like that

Not saying scientific inaccuracies should be ignored, but in the early 90's when this first film was made, the common scientific theories labeled dinosaurs as being closely related to birds, but the feathers theory didn't really become a big deal for at least a decade. At the time of release, Jurassic Park actually furthered scientific discovery, and moved the "Dinosaurs were closely related to birds" theory in to the larger public eye. Also pointing out, there aren't many carnivorous dinosaurs that were larger and scarier than the T. Rex, which still has the most powerful estimated bite force of any land animal.

Is it weird that I think T rex looks way better WITH feathers?

It would be dope to see actual dinosaur frog hybrids being used in the movie

"What John Hammond and Ingen did in jurrasic park is create theme park monsters, nothing more. And nothing less"

Jurassic park sounds cooler. (Also just realized that I’m wearing a Jurassic park t-shirt).

Dinosaurs with feathers look badass. I don't get why people can't see how cool a T-rex would look with a plume of colorful feathers around its neck and tail.

I had a kids book from the 80's on dinosaurs. It was one my dad had as a kid (I was born in 01) and it literally laughed and joked that there was no way a feathered dinosaur existed. Oh, how times change

T-Rex didnt become popular because it was 'american'. it became most popular because it was the first of the massive predators discovered.

Here´s the thing, a lot of the problems found in JP are modern. some of the species in the movies (velociraptor, etc) weren't given feathers because it wasn't until years later that it was proven that all raptor species had feathers and they used velociraptors because they hadn't found a raptor species as bid as they wanted them to be in the movie until they discovered the Utah raptor during the movies post production.

3:23 - But... But War of the Worlds didnt have any 'Grey Aliens'... The Martians were larger than bears, were gelatinous beasts with writhing tentacles and disk shaped eyes. They looked more like this - www.lesedwards.com/imagebank/9/7/6/976137.jpg However War Of The Worlds did pretty much change the worlds perception on what Aliens could truly be in that respect.

Just a note from 2018 there was actually some evidence found that scientists might have been wrong about feathered trexs. Your still right about the smaller dinos like rapters and stuff. (Speaking as some one with no great atatchment to the franchise)

It may be innacurate, but it's the design we love

I understand where you're coming from, I am well aware of the feathered dinosaurs, but Jurassic Park was released around 1993, based on a novel that was being written around 1989 and published by 1990. It's not accurate now, _but it was at the time._ Also, the only dinosaur species featured on the film that we now can _confirm_ would have feathers would be the "Velociraptors". We have almost entirely featherless skin-impressions of Tyrannosaurus, which makes sense, because like elephants, Tyrannosaurs were probably too big to need a lot of fuzz to keep their body temperatures stable, and we don't know if Triceratops had quills, we only know that Psittacosaurus had quills. Yes, like I said, the so-called Achillobator-sized, Deinonychus-shaped, "Velociraptors" definitely had feathers, but those were the only dinosaurs from the movie that that we can safely say most definitly should have them, and back then, it was hotly debated whether or not they had any.

While I agree with all these inaccuracies, this film was as accurate as it got at the time. Nobody knew that most theropods had feathers, the "Velociraptor," as it's called in the film, had been confirmed by Michael Crichton himself that the raptor was Deinonychus in every aspect except in name. In addition, the cloning process in Jurassic Park hadn't been disproved, and even had scientists backing it up. So while we all see this film as just as inaccurate as other films, it was as scientifically accurate as it got back in the day.

The first Jurassic Park film was very forward-thinking and heavily accurate for the time it was made. Remember, most people still thought of Dinosaurs as swamp-bound, sluggish, outdated monstrosities. This is the move that introduced avian, Renaissance-era dinosaurs to a new audience. They even anticipated the criticism, with that "Six-foot Turkey" kid. Given that it was also a groundbreaking achievement in special effects, it only makes sense that its dinosaurs would go on to become iconic. As a piece of creature-design, the Velociraptors are pure genius; sinister glares, winding necks, and high-pitched shrieks all come together to make one of the most impactful movie monsters ever. I didn't care for any of the other movies, but the OG JP came closest to accuracy, and was clearly a love letter to paleontology.

Dr. Grant, my dear Dr. Satler, welcome . . .to Mesozoic Park. Sounds good

I don't want to sound like I'm against acknowledging the scientific inaccuracies of Jurassic Park, but would you be prepared to allow some sort of leeway based on the fact that Jurassic Park (both the novel and the book) was a product of the 90s (not 1800s)? It should be pointed out that feathered dinosaurs was still just a theory back then, therefore the depictions of the dinosaurs were going to be dated no matter what. Crichton described the appearances of the dinos in his novel, introduced the use of amphibian DNA to allow the animals to breed, and the film takes cues from the book. Compare the dinosaur designs in a film like The Land Before Time to the ones in Jurassic Park, the ones in The Land Before Time are very much 80's designs. Jurassic Park broke the stereotype of dinosaurs as slow, stupid, swamp dwelling behemoths and put them don the eventual path of streamlined, graceful if still fearsome animals. If you're going to blame someone or something, at least acknowledge the book the film is based on. The 2000s certainly saw an explosion of evidence for most theropods being feathered, and that's really when the image of the feathered dromeosaur really took to the skies. By 2015, I think the idea of a feathered T.rex needs time to become accepted. Say what you will about Jack Horner and his position as "advisor" for the films, but he did curb some of the more outlandish ideas. The snake tongue was removed at his request, and wanted to promote the idea of birdlike features in dinosaurs, as seen when Grant and Ellie study the raptor skeleton in Montana. Heck, the film ends with a shot of some pelicans flying into the sunset, a gentle reminder that not all dinosaurs went extinct and are still around us today as birds, more real than the creatures on the island. That's not to say he couldn't have done more, but then again, it was early days. I don't find your raking one of my favorite films over the coals entertaining, funny or even insightful, its just painful and makes me tired. As I grew up and learned more on dinosaurs by reading New Scientist magazines and web articles, I understood that dinosaurs were far more birdlike than reptilian, to say nothing of the notion of resurrecting them from DNA found in amber. I don't want to sound like I'm insulting you or your work, coming to the video was pretty much an accident, but I just want you to know. Are the dinosaurs in the JP series inaccurate? Yes. Should there be a new standard set for 21st century dinosaurs? Definitely. Will it come from sucking all the fun out of what is by all accounts a well loved movie that inspired a generation of dinosaur fanatics. Not in 65 million years.

I remember when I was a little kid, I was devastated to find out that dinosaurs were more like birds than lizards. Now that I'm older, it makes them really fascinating. They aren't anything like what's around nowadays, and are an amalgamation of a bunch of traits that we recognize, but are so bizarre to imagine together. It really makes you realize how alien our own planet can be to ourselves.

is that gravity falls music i hear? i like this guy

you cant blame the first jurassic park because when it was made feathered dinosaurs hadn't been discovered yet

The purpose of this video: I love sciencey movies and enjoy them and do not want to take the fun out of them, but the movies still need to be somewhat accurate, so that the audience does not confuse movies inaccuracies with actual science

I get the point of not promoting scientific inaccuracies in film, but given the themes of the novel / movie I actually kinda like it. Hear me out! The dinosaurs are transgenic hybrids, heavily engineered into zoo animals. What do they do with this marvel of bioengineering? Make a theme park. So they make them look inaccurate, but more like monsters that people will pay to go see. (Almost the same reason the dinosaurs look the way they do in the film lol) and its a metacommentary on style vs. substance when trying to educate, amaze, and make profit all at once. Like, they're not accurate dinosaurs, they're what an old billionaire trying to start a theme park wants dinosaurs to be. I mean its actually because Michael Crichton was a hack who got way too optimistic about the field of cloining in the late 80s, but hey.

I saw this video years ago and rediscovered your channel and found it again. Still as great as I remember. I love Jurassic park♥️

The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park lacked feathers for two reasons: 1. It was much easier to render high resolution animations of dinosaurs without feathers or complex scaling. It was more important to depict the general shape and behaviour of dinosaurs rather the exact dimensions and anatomical characteristics. 2 In the early 1990's the feathering of dinosaurs was controversial and more so with respect to a key character in the film namely Tyrannosaurus rex. Nevertheless, they could have tried harder to be more accurate in their depiction. However, every dinosaur depicted is essentially artificial having been a combination of toad and residual dinosaur DNA. In my opinion although it is just science fiction and fantastical, the fictional company INGEN would have done certain advanced genetic engineering techniques much more complex and advanced then they indicate in their public information video. For instance, if they were missing complex bone structures, especially related to the diapsid nature of real dinosaurs they would have had to alter vertebrate species dna to accomplish that or use avian skull derived alleles. Is it plausible? No, but if we consider the public information depicted as intentionally deceptive with regards to the advanced genetic engineering that they would have to do [i.e. virtually all of the DNA would not correspond to the species but would emulate the intended characteristics and morphology [ontogeny?] of an assumed model of what the species would be.

a q: i thought they didn't discover feathered dinosaurs until the late nineties? which would explain why the feathers aren't present in the first movie. JUST the first though

You let out something, the most important use for feathers would be for insulation, for warming eggs and babies :)

glory to arstotzka

We also got to look at it as a Hollywood film that was made during the time when the t-rex was considered scaled. Heck, the raptors in JP3 had quills on them as some sort of feathering.

That toy that you showed is actually one of my most precious figures. Bought by my mom when I left home.

There were no fossils of feathered dinosaurs until the mid 1990's, after Jurassic Park was released. Outdated scientific knowledge is not the same of "scientific inaccuracy," that latter concept presupposes that the producers of the film had reasonable access to scientific knowledge, but chose to ignore it.

did you know that an old dora show also said that if you don't move, the t rex can't see you, it was a huge basis of t rex for me when i was little...

The book author using the terms poisonous and venomous interchangeably had me 🤯

This man is a gift to humanity, and this channel needs more subscribers.

Could you perhaps make a revamped version? Also when were feathered dinosaurs first depicted, cause I am pretty sure they weren't depicted during the early 1990's.

3:40 *GRAVITY FALLS THEME SONG*

It’s funny that in Jurassic world dr wu says that if they had pure Dino dna that the Dino’s would look totally different, but he had to use a a bunch of different dna samples to fill in the gaps

PAPERS PLEASE THEME!!!!!

Aren't the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park genetically altered to look like what people thought they looked like and appeal more to the public? Don't remember where that came from, but it is interesting. Also, excuse any grammar and/or ortography issue. English is not my first lenguage and I get things mixed up sometimes.

Wasn't it found that T. Rex wasn't actually all that fast? Sure as hell no 45 mph

in this rare video we can observe a wild trey in his natural environment. we can notice a good knowledge of biology and science, sadly this is compensated by the comolete lack of comprehension of the concepts of suspension of disbelief or a premise.

Love that “Papers, Please” theme.

Jurassic Park was the best sounding name. Pass. Dino DNA? Fail. Toads? A lot of the information given in the movie is 'as presented to the public'. Much like the 'labs' on the ride, a lot of the information provided is not only simplified for the general public, but also may be deliberately obfuscating, or outright false, to protect InGen's 'trade secrets'. Pass. Feathers? The first film was produced and released before a lot of the important discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in the 90s. Pass.

So, about Rexy's vision. Funnily enough, some Bullfrog species vision is based on movement. Now, remind me, where does the DNA of Rexy come from?

My personal theory as to why the animals in Jurassic Park are inaccurate is because in the movie Mr.DNA explained that there were missing pieces of DNA in the amber so they had to fill it in. So that’s why I think they look and behave the way they do.Also I think that Ingen also purposely added some DNA to make the animals in the park to be more appealing like how the T.Rex roars for example.

How can you have a scientifically inaccurate alien? We don't know what any look like right now, so its all technically fair game

Watch Jurassic world, Dr. Henry Wu States that if these dinosaurs were ACTUALLY Dinosaurs, they would look much different. It is the fact that they had to supplement the DNA with other creatures, that could explain the feathurless appearence. And at the time the Movie was made the Idea of feathered dinosaurs was not Wideley accepted, and wasn't widely accepted until the mid to LATE 1990's, the only Feathered Dinosaur at that time was Avimimus portentosus. Which was only "Inferred."

3:24 It still boggles my mind how the livestock of the Martians in WOTW became the stock alien.

Unpopular opinion: dinosaurs look wayyyy cooler with feathers than they do with scales.

Jurassic Park sounds better than Cretaceous Park or Triassic Park. How did they know?

One thing you are forgetting is that the books and movies were based on the most scientifically accurate data of dinosaurs *at the time*. In the early 90s the feathered dinosaurs had not been found yet, raptors were thought to be scaled down relatives of allosaurs and it was still not confirmed that the asteroid impact was what drove the dinosaurs to extinction, as well as other things that had yet to be confirmed at the time. The big problem is how outdated it all is and the franchise's refusal to update the science or create a plot device as to why they are scientifically inaccurate. I will give the original Jurassic Park this though, we have yet to animate anything as well as the dinosaurs in that movie. I look at modern movies with animated dinosaurs and just sigh with disappointment. We had this shit down in '93, what happened!?

3:48 I love that when you cut to "inaccurate scaly dinosaurs" it shows dimetrodon, trex, stegosaurus, and allosaurus. All 4 of which are examples of animals that would have been scaly when they were alive

there have been newer studies that say the top speed of a t-rex could only be up to 12 to 14 mph

There's so much potential for an awesome and ACCURATE dinosaur movie. I wonder if we'll ever get one...

They did not say that they exclusively use frog DNA and the dinosaurs dont have feathers because Dr.Wu states that the dinosaur's appearances were altered to fit the public's perception of dinosaurs. The name Jurassic Park was given as a catchy title and doesn't nessicarily reflect the period in which the dinosaurs featured are from. Also, Cretaceous Park is just as inaccurate as dimorphodon, brachiosaurus s, compsagnathus and dilophisaurus are featured. Rant over.

Video : Gravity falls music play Me : aayyyyyyyyyyy!

Just because of that Peter Griffin Jurassic Park theme I’m giving it a like lol

I think trex looks cool in feather

Why so many dislikes? This video is so interesting.

9:20 scientist: **finds trex dna in thigh bone by smashing it** trey: "well fu-k"

That picture of a toad t-rex hybrid looks fucking awesome

I FOUND OUT THAT A T REX FEMER WAS DESTROYED AND HAD SOFT TISUE

People at my school WILL NEVER let go of the featherless dinosaurs, even though I keep telling them otherwise

i love feathers!

I, for one, absolutely LOVE the idea of feathered dinos!!

Welp, time to wave goodbye to my childhood.

Since all the dinosaurs are part frog it could have explained no feathers.

You probably mentioned this already, but all of 'Dolly's' 'mother's ' were still the same species, just slightly different breeds of same species...

Love the Peter Griffin Jurassic park theme