Dino Fact or Fiction? 'Jurassic' Series Paleontologist Reveals What the Movies Got Right and Wrong

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‘Jurassic World’ (Photo: Universal)

Steven Spielberg would flunk Dinosaurs 101. Just ask his professor.

Jack Horner, the world-renowned paleontologist who has served as technical advisor on all four Jurassic Park films, including Jurassic World, and was a model for the Sam Neil character in the original, isn’t afraid to tell Spielberg that he made a mistake when it comes to his cinematic creatures.

Case in point: Horner would have preferred if the big-screen dinos were covered in feathers and brightly colored, which is how he believes they looked. While Spielberg (and the subsequent Jurassic directors) generally deferred to Horner’s expertise, the filmmakers ultimately decided that feathered, Technicolor dinosaurs weren’t scary enough.

Further, our general understanding of prehistoric animals has evolved since the first Jurassic Park came out more than 20 years ago. Horner, who has named 12 of the roughly 800 known dinosaur species, sat down with Yahoo Movies amid the fossils at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History to sort out Jurassic fiction from paleontological fact:

How do we know what colors dinosaurs were?
We don’t really know the colors of dinosaurs, but they’re related to other reptiles and birds. Most lizards and birds are very colorful. From my point of view, dinosaurs could be any color birds are, and that includes pink, which is not a popular dinosaur color, I can tell you. Pink flamingos are pink! Try to convince a sixth grade boy that a T. rex might have been pink. It won’t work.

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Velociraptors in the third ‘Jurassic Park’ movie (Photo: Universal)

Could a Velociraptor really open a door as it does in the first movie?
Yes, because dinosaurs are like birds. When their arms are folded, like us… they have a wrist that [twists]. They could easily open a door.

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A feathered Velociraptor (From National Geographic)

Why aren’t Pterosaurus (the various flying ones in World) and Mosasaurus (the huge swimming one in the new movie) not really dinosaurs?
To be a dinosaur you have to be a reptile with your legs directly beneath your body. If you look at mosasaurs, they’re related to lizards that sprawl — they have flippers, really. Pterosaurs are very closely related to dinosaurs.

Jurassic World has a scene with flying Pteranodons and Dimorphodons picking up humans and dinosaurs. Really?
There are no flying animals that have ever lived that could pick up a human.

Could they really dive under water?
I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t. They seem to be fish-eaters. They might have just floated though because they’re so light. But so many birds do. I don’t know how we would figure that out exactly.

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Paleontologist Jack Horner (Photo: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)

In the movie, they do a lot wing flapping: Did they flap or glide?
They were flappers.

Could you really train Velociraptors to fight in formation to defend humans or answer commands like “stand down”?
I think so. The thing is people usually think of dinosaurs as not being smart enough to do that — but we know their brain-to-body ratio is the same as a mammal’s, so there’s no reason we couldn’t train them at least like we train birds.

Did they really communicate like pack animals?
We have very good evidence at that Velociraptors took down prey in groups.

Did dinosaurs move in herds?
Yes. We have very good evidence of this.

Did dinosaurs really roar?
We don’t know what any dinosaur sounded like. We have them growling and making really loud noises in Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, but I doubt dinosaurs made any of those sounds. In the Museum of the Rockies [where Horner chairs the paleontology department] we have dinosaur sounds. And I know for sure they’re dinosaur sounds because I have recorded bird sounds and lowered them and made them deeper. Birds are dinosaurs; therefore they’re dinosaur sounds.

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T. rex in 'Jurassic Park,’ 1993 (Photo: Universal)

Could I really avoid getting eaten by a T. rex if I stayed really still, like Sam Neil’s character insists in the first film?
I think you could avoid being eaten simply by being alive. I don’t think they were much for eating humans. I think they were scavengers. If you were too still they might think you’re dead and then they’d eat you [laughs].

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Mosasaurus, as depicted in 'Jurassic World’ (Photo: Universal)

Could Mosasaurus really jump out of water, Shamu-style?
I don’t see why not.

Did dinosaurs really eat each other?
Of course. We know for sure T. rex ate Triceratops, duck-billed dinosaurs [hadrosaurs], pachycephalosaurs, and other tyrannosaurs — it was a cannibal.

Is there a scary dino we haven’t seen yet, one you’re saving in your back pocket for a sequel?
Maybe.

Did dinosaurs sneeze — as the Brachiosaurus did in the first movie?
That’s a good question. I don’t know.

Did dinosaurs hunt during the day or at night?
They were diurnal: They hunted in the daytime.

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Therizinosaurus (From jurassicworldnews.com)

What other genetic recipes did you ponder before landing on the final mix for Indominus Rex?
I wasn’t there for the final mix. I started the process with a dinosaur called Therizinosaurus that has big grasping arms. That was the most important thing — the grasping arms and its color. It’s white.

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Scientists argue the T. rex may have been more colorful and feathery (Photo: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Mind)

I know the Indominus Rex is fictional, but it is said to have infrared senses — is that possible?
Indominus Rex is made as a transgenic animal — meaning we’ve taken genes out of one animal and put it in this one. If infrared is something that any animal can do on this Earth, then yes, we could do it.

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Depiction of a feathery dinosaur (From National Geographic)

Would the dinos in the original movies look different if they were made today, given the research of the last two decades?
For sure. We know that dinosaurs were more colorful and more feathered. Many of the meat-eating dinosaurs would have been more feathery. I don’t know whether Steven [Spielberg] would have made ‘em that way because he wanted scary dinosaurs.

What are other dino facts we’ve discovered since the earlier movies?
We’ve learned an awful lot since those movies. One of the things that’s in the new movie that we did change is how the juvenile Triceratops looks. Although we don’t see a juvenile Triceratops in the first movie, we designed some… We now know horns of a juvenile Triceratops are shaped differently than an adult’s. The babies you’ll see in the new movie actually have their horns curving backward — that we know they did.

Are we anywhere closer to actually being able to genetically resurrect or clone a dinosaur?
Yes, but so far we haven’t been able to find [complete] dinosaur DNA… I know in my lifetime we will see something like a dinosaur… a “Chickenasaurus.” Birds carry some part of ancestral dinosaur DNA. I’ve started a program to take a bird and turn on characteristics that are more dinosaur-like. Recently at Harvard they turned a bird beak into a dinosaur mouth — we can set teeth back in birds. We will make a dino-chicken pretty soon but a Velociraptor is a long way off.

When it comes to dinosaurs, what from the Jurassic series is 100 percent accurate?
Nothing.