Zach Eviscerates Jurassic Park 3 with Extreme Prejudice
'Round town here, my hatred for
Jurassic Park 3 is legendary. I spit on this film, and the filmmakers, and Jack Horner for attaching his name to it and calling himself their "paleontology consultant." He collected a paycheck is what he did. He called
Spinosaurus a "super-predator" in interviews. I don't think the lot of you have been exposed to my wrath regarding this film, which is a heap of scientific inaccuracy the likes of which the world has never seen. What's that, you say? Older films made worse mistakes? Sure,
The Valley of Gwangi and
Carnosaur made errors too, but they were, in fact, working with the best science had to offer at the time. Most of the inaccuracies of
Jurassic Park 3 can be chalked up to stupidity, completely lack of knowledge (about the subject), or a failure to read Wikipedia. Let's get on with it...this will be fun.
The Dog Brain
The film starts at a score of less than zero: Dr. Grant's idiot grad student produces a 3D-printed model of a dromaeosaur brain. Grant seems surprised--ain't technology grand? Well, technology is stupid, because you're holding a dog brain, Alan. Yes,
Canis familiarus, the one you feed every morning and pick up after. It shits on your lawn. You'd think the filmmakers would have picked a bird brain, since birds are theropod dinosaurs, but NO--you had to go with a dog brain. What's a raptor brain look like? Well, the image up top shows
Bambiraptor's brain in blue. Not very big, is it? And it doesn't look much like a mammal brain, either. So good job, morons, you made the public think that raptors have dog brains.
Oh, and that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that Dr. Grant and his colleagues use the brain like a duck call, blowing into one end to produce a trumpeting noise. This is not how brains work--brains don't have random hollow spaces in them. It'd be a different story if they were holding up a 3D model of sinus passages, but they're holding up a DOG BRAIN. My god. MY GOD. And even blowing into a brain (
) produced any sort of noise comparable to the natural sound made by that animal, it would apparently be a barking noise, because it's a DOG BRAIN. YOU IDIOTS.
Spinosaurus vs. Tyrannosaurus
Fun fact:
Tyrannosaurus rex's bite force has been estimated to be between 185,000 and 235,000 pounds per square inch. The closest modern animal to that is the great white shark, and the next best is the crocodile. But they both orders of magnitude less than
Tyrannosaurus rex. The image above is where the fight should have ended--
Tyrannosaurus would have crushed
Spinosaurus' neck like a dried-out twig, but somehow neither party even bled during the battle (a massive failure of CGI that was repeated in
King Kong) and the
Spinosaurus even apparently made
T.rex hurt with its own bite, something that is laughable given the fact that spinosaurs consistently have the weakest bite forces among theropods. These were fish-eating animals that didn't need strong bite forces. Their bites have been compared to gharials, whose snouts will actually break if their prey struggles or they bite something that's too hard.
And then
Spinosaurus won because of my next complaint.
Neck-Breaking TheropodsYou'll recall that
Spinosaurus won the fight because it managed to break
Tyrannosaurus' neck. Later, an unusually large
Velociraptor (actually
Deinonychus) breaks some dude's neck instead of disembowling him or something. Gonna tell you right now: theropods had (and have) no concept of how skeletal systems or nervous sytems work. Go figure. Also,
Tyrannosaurus' neck was bathed in muscle--it had the most powerful neck of any theropod. The muscle mass alone would've made breaking
Tyrannosaurus' neck basically impossible. Goddamnit, I hate this movie.
Spinosaurus in General
They made this dinosaur up. I'm not kidding. It is a composite animal made from the undead remains all known spinosaur material known at the time (probably 1999-2000) which wasn't much. The group remains a bit mysterious to this day. In the late 90's, the best known spinosaurs were
Baryonyx from England and
Suchomimus from Niger.
Spinosaurus is a real dinosaur--it was based on a dentary and several dorsal vertebrae unearthed in the 1930's. But nobody really knew what it looked like. These scant remains were destroyed in a bombing raid during WWII. Thankfully, the bones were exquisitely monographed prior to their destruction. In 2006, a large portion of
Spinosaurus' snout was described. This indicated that
Spinosaurus (and South America's
Irritator) were significantly different than the more basal
Baryonyx and
Suchomimus. But hey, it really did have that big dorsal sail.
That picture is actually MINE (that is, I drew it) and I was surprised to see it on a website I'd never heard of, and I wasn't given the image credit. Wonderful. Anyway, this is Suchomimus, and it's clearly where we got the Jurassic Park
3 Spinosaurus. Minus the awesome central crest, that is. The film's
Spinosaurus also has massive bear mits, which spinosaurs did not have, though they did get the enlarged thumb claws right (I know, I was surprised too). And yes, while
Spinosaurus was an enormous theropod (a bit longer than
Tyrannosaurus), it wasn't the size of Godzilla.
"Pteranodon?" Seriously?
So that's an excellent version of Kansas'
Pteranodon. It's from the very end of
The Lost World. This is what it looks like in reality, basically. A big, toothless, long-winged animal that probably weighed about 80 pounds. Now...here's what the
Jurassic Park 3 "
Pteranodon" looks like.
I have no words. People are often surprised to learn that pterosaurs were incredibly lightweight. I find this surprise puzzling--birds have hollow bones to allow flight. Pterosaurs got pretty huge, so they'd also need to be very lightweight. There is no WAY it would be carrying a small child who probably weighed as much if not more than itself. There's also no evidence of parental care in pterosaurs--all evidence points to hatchlings being flight-capable and basically being miniature versions of the adults--like lizards. Oh, and remember how I said
Pteranodon didn't have teeth (it's name actually manes "winged and toothless"), the abominations in
Jurassic Park 3 actually do have conical,
Pterodacylus-like teeth.
Also gotta love that final pterosaur shot, of the one
Pteranodon suddenly looking at the survivors as if to say "You're next, humans."
Raptors had Feathers. They had Feathers in 2001. They had feathers in 2000. Ceolurosaurs had feathers in 1999.
This is Dave, a juvenile
Sinornithosaurus, a small raptor from China. It's a smaller cousin of
Velociraptor. And
Deinonychus. It was discovered in the late 90's and described in 2000 (hence the species name "
milleni"), so it was known during the production of the film. Fully covered in feathers. Head to tail. But the filmmakers pussed out and only tossed some..."things" on top of the male
Deinonychus heads. Looks a little like this guy, actually:
Yup.
Primal Rage got exactly that much right in 1994.
The Other DinosaursThere are some "new" dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park 3. The most surprising one was
Ceratosaurus nasicornis, a basal theropod from the Late Jurassic of North America. It was handled with some modicom of respect, although it certainly didn't have binocular vision. The ankylosaurs, seen briefly when everybody is sleeping in a tree, conform to the unfortunate "
Ankyloplocephalus" syndrome: ankylosaurs in virtually every media form are called
Ankylosaurus because it's popular, but they always end up being based on
Euoplocephalus, a large ankylosaur who was radically different in terms of body armor, but far better known. Finally, we've got the World's Fattest Brachiosaurs standing on the riverfront, displaying jiggling fat rolls that would have been completely unknown on the real animal.
So, in closing, I hate
Jurassic Park 3. Questions?
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