Regular Episode
#172 – JURASSIC SNARK
An extended cut of this interview (with, per Blake, a “rather curious tangent”) is available to Patreon supporters at any level.
🦕 What Jurassic Park Got Right
Darren saw the film on opening night in the UK — a few weeks behind the North American premiere in July 1993 — already steeped in Michael Crichton‘s source novel and saturated with promotional merchandise from his newsagent job. His verdict: the film did a creditable job of bringing the Dinosaur Renaissance to a mass audience that still largely pictured tail-dragging, cold-blooded reptiles straight out of Fantasia.
The active, horizontal-bodied, moderately intelligent dinosaurs of the film reflected science that had been circulating among specialists since the late 1960s — it was just two decades late reaching multiplex screens. The Tyrannosaurus, the brachiosaurs, and (nomenclature aside) the “Velociraptor”-type animals were, Darren says, pretty good for 1993. The concept of dinosaur thermoregulation is more nuanced than a simple warm/cold binary, he notes — and probably warrants its own episode entirely.
🪶 What Jurassic Park Got Wrong (The Feather Problem)
The biggest miss, now canonical knowledge: the film’s Deinonychus — called Velociraptor in the film, following Crichton, who followed one author who considered the two synonymous — should have had feathers. Anatomical evidence linking dromaeosaurids to early birds like Archaeopteryx existed as far back as the 1960s, and some paleontologists argued for feathering even then. The filmmakers went with the conservative consensus of the day. Hundreds of feathered fossil specimens later, that consensus looks very wrong indeed — and the error has been inherited by every Jurassic World sequel since.
The DNA extraction premise also gets a skeptical once-over: amber-preserved mosquito blood is a wonderfully cinematic idea, but DNA degrades on a timescale of tens of thousands of years at best, not the 66-million-year minimum required. The “gap-filling with frog DNA” hand-wave, Darren notes, is where suspension of disbelief really has to do the heavy lifting.
Crichton’s source novel comes in for its own gentle critique: a floppy, enveloping tongue on the T. rex, a superficial reliance on New Scientist rather than primary literature, and a recurring anti-science undercurrent that Darren links to Crichton’s later, well-documented skepticism about anthropogenic climate change.
🏛️ Dinosaurs in the Wild: A More Accurate Vision
Darren served as technical consultant on Dinosaurs in the Wild, a commercial visitor attraction that ran for 13 months across Birmingham, Manchester, and London before closing in September 2018. Conceived by Tim Haynes — the producer behind Walking with Dinosaurs — the experience placed visitors inside a fictional Late Cretaceous research base (Montana, 67 million years ago) operated by a time-travel company called Chronotex.
The CG animals — Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, giant sauropods, and a fully feathered Dakotaraptor — were designed to reflect current science: fuzzy tyrannosaurs, brightly colored animals, and a robust, ground-stalking Quetzalcoatlus rather than the conventional wispy soaring version. Over a quarter of a million visitors attended, and audience feedback scores were, Darren reports, genuinely high.
🐔 Jack Horner’s Dino-Chicken
The conversation turns to Jack Horner‘s long-running project to reverse-engineer a more dinosaur-like bird — the so-called “Chickenosaurus” — by reactivating dormant developmental genes. Blake recounts a conversation with a local researcher who had successfully switched on the gene for chicken teeth, only to terminate the embryos before hatching (ethics board, not enthusiasm, being the limiting factor).
Darren is gently skeptical of the photogenic payoff: dromaeosaurid-type dinosaurs — maniraptorans broadly — already looked like large, feathery chicken-adjacent animals. Triggering tooth and finger genes in a chicken would produce a fully feathered creature whose most dramatic modifications (teeth inside the mouth, fingers hidden under plumage) would be largely invisible. The scientific spin-offs from the evo-devo research — understanding which genes govern beak shape, tail segmentation, and related structures — are the genuinely interesting part.
🦴 Paleoproteomics: Soft Tissue in Ancient Fossils
Blake raises Mary Schweitzer‘s controversial work identifying apparent soft tissue — blood vessels, blood cells, and collagen-like proteins — in T. rex bone. Darren places himself carefully on the fence: Schweitzer and colleagues have published extensively, ruled out fungal and bacterial contamination to their own satisfaction, and produced results that Darren finds “compelling.” But equally credentialed opponents argue the chemistry has been misread and the results cannot be independently replicated.
The broader point may be more significant than either side of that debate: fossilization is demonstrably not simply “things turning to stone.” Modern taphonomic experiments — including work by Darren’s former PhD supervisor Dave Martill on shrimp mineralized within hours due to local water chemistry — show that organic content can be preserved under the right conditions far more readily than classical models assumed. A recent paper on Dickinsonia fossils (~558 million years old) claiming detection of cholesterol molecules further stretches the conventional picture.
🐗 A Digression: Feral Pigs, Cambrian Body Plans, and Stephen Jay Gould
The conversation wanders productively. Blake’s observations about feral hogs in the American Southeast — domestic pigs reverting within a few generations to something functionally indistinguishable from wild boar, only considerably larger — prompt Darren to note that the same process is underway in parts of southern England, where wild boar has been officially extinct since the 1600s but hybridized escapees are cheerfully digging up gardens with no natural predators to check them.
A mention of Rhonda Shearer — Stephen Jay Gould‘s widow — and her unexpected deep-dive debunking of the Hogzilla giant-pig photographs leads to a brief consideration of Gould’s Wonderful Life thesis — that the Burgess Shale fauna demonstrates life’s radical contingency — and the pushback from Simon Conway Morris, whose convergence-heavy counter-argument Darren finds only slightly less overstated than Gould’s original claim.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History 💵 by Stephen Jay Gould
– 📚 The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals 💵 by Simon Conway Morris
– 📚 Jurassic Park 💵 by Michael Crichton
– 🎬 Jurassic Park 💵 (1993, dir. Steven Spielberg)
– 🎬 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 💵 (2018)
🔗 Related Links
– Tetrapod Zoology — Darren Naish’s blog
– Darren’s #JurassicParkTrivia Twitter thread
– Dinosaur Renaissance (Wikipedia)
– Deinonychus — the real animal behind the Jurassic Park “Velociraptor”
– Maniraptora — the dinosaur group that includes birds and dromaeosaurids
– Mary Schweitzer and dinosaur soft tissue research
– Paleoproteomics (Wikipedia)
– Jack Horner — paleontologist and Chickenosaurus project
– Hogzilla (Wikipedia)
– Quetzalcoatlus — giant pterosaur featured in Dinosaurs in the Wild
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
This weekend (Oct 6 & 7, 2018) Darren Naish is hosting TetZoo Con #5. It’s also been 25 years since the release of Jurassic Park. To celebrate, and promote Darren’s convention, I thought it would be fun to talk dinosaurs with a paleontologist. It was.
An extended (and somewhat NSFW) version of this interview is available to Patreon supporters of any level.
Links to additional reading on topics covered in this episode
- Paleoproteomics
- Darren’s Jurassic Park Trivia thread on Twitter
- Jack Horner’s Dino-Chicken
- Rhonda Shearer on Hogzilla
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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