Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Ruffles Some Feathers (Part 1)

The latest film in the Jurassic Franchise opened yesterday.  Dutifully, I marched to the theater to see the elephant.  JWFK pleases on many different levels.  The film makers should be commended for including actual dinosaurs in their dinosaur movie this time.  The mind recoils in horror at the memory of deadly hybrid whatchamacallits run amok in JW.  Imagine my surprise to find my Facebook feed overflowing with all manner of savage complaints.  There was peace for only three short years, and now the drooling musings of the scientific-accuracy fanatics boils over into my dinosaur Elysium.  By far the shrillest complaint I read was about feathers.  Tyrannosaurus Rex had feathers, velociraptor had feathers, on and on, and on.  Let’s put our dinosaur movies into perspective, shall we?

Sinosauropteryx (1996)

The paleontological report of feathers on a dinosaur dates to 1861 and the German discovery of archaeopteryx.  However, the first discover of fossil evidence on a non-avian dinosaur was not made until 1996 with the description of Sinosauropteryx.  If we contrast the timeline of discoveries of feather impressions with the timeline of asset development described in Jurassic Park (the novel,) and Jurassic Park (the film) it is instantly discernible why our dinosaur friends in JP, LWJP, JW, and JWFK do not have feathers.

The novel Jurassic Park, in the last paragraph of the first section date the events of book as August 1989.  The first film was released June 11, 1993.  If we are to assume that the animals in both the book and/or the film were not created overnight then we could reasonably argue that the work of creating these animals took place no less than two or three years before the events described.  Therefore, Ingen created the original dinosaurs for Jurassic Park sometime 1987 and 1990 depending on what source you choose to consider canonical.  This also means that the creation of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs predates the discovery of feathers on non-avian dinosaurs by at least 6 years.  While it may rankle the captains of scientific-accuracy, without a time-traveling DeLorean, there is no possible way to make the visual “science” of a film reflect a discovery that will not happen for another 6-years.  

Richard Owen

Part of the reason that this ill-conceived feather debate is so exceptionally offensive is that from the very beginning Dinosaurs have been our “best guess,” and products of the time of their description.  England is where, circa 1822, Gideon Mantell made the first discovery of the fossilized remains of what became known as Iguanodon.  Mantell’s discoveries were rejected out of hand, after all, the entire idea that any animal could go extinct in the first place was a hot and dangerous subject anyway.  Within 20-years however, science was more willing to accept the wild ravings of Darwin.  In 1841, Richard Owen coined the term “dinosauria” to refer to an entire class of extinct animals.  Owen, now where have we heard that name before?

Dinner in the Iguanodon

 The problem with Mantell, Owen, and all the other early paleontologists is that their discoveries look like the worst kind of cryptozoological bunk science we have ever seen.  The best, most open and forward thinking scientific minds of the 1800s could not conceive of an animal that did not fit their preexisting prejudices and assumptions about life on this planet.  The consequence is the creation of the models of Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace Park in the 1850s.  Despite the fossil evidence surrounding them, the anatomical models look like some kind of farcical chimera with the body of a bulldog and the head of an alligator.  Everyone loved them.  In fact, on the 31^st of December, 1853, the scientists had themselves a celebratory dinner inside one of the models to congratulate themselves on their achievement (except for Gideon Martell who dropped dead in November of 1852 and was regrettably unable to make the event.) 

Poor Iguanodon.  A large cache of 38 specimens of Iguanodon was unearthed deep in a Belgian coal mine in 1878.  All of these animals were excavated, and ended up becoming the first mounted skeletal specimens displayed to the public in 1882.  Additional specimens and casts found their way around the world and into the prestigious collections of the Oxford University, Cambridge and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences among others.  When you go to the Museum today, and you stand and marvel at all the dinosaur skeletons you owe a debt of gratitude to Louis Dollo and the Belgians for coming up with the idea of hanging a dinosaur skeleton in a life-like pose.  The only problem with the “life-like” pose is that is every bit as much a product of preexisting prejudices and assumptions.  In order to give the animals an upright posture the tail bones of the Iguanodon were essentially broken.  Seriously, a blind man can see what is going with the hind end of Dollo’s Iguanodon.  

Now that we have sobered up, our dinosaurs have a relaxed stance that does not require their spines be broken and placed in absurd positions.  In each iteration the depictions of dinosaurs have dutifully followed the skeletal mounts as described by the minds of science.  Rudolf Zallinger’s 1925 mural that adorns the Great Hall of the Yale Peabody Museum extends this stiff legged nonsense to all the other dinosaurs, and not just Iguanodon.  The images reflecting these scientific realities are so poor we blush that children might accidentally see them and be scarred in some unspeakable way.  So, what does this have to do with feathers, and Jurassic Park?  The dinosaurs of the Jurassic Franchise are the entirely natural evolution of a cultural process that has been taking place since the 1820s when western civilization first started to take notice of these strange things buried in the ground.  Part One. V1.N1