14 Times Jurassic Park Lied To You About Dinosaurs

I bet Ross Geller had A LOT to say about these movies.

1. Jimmy Buffett and his margaritas would've actually been safe.

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The feet on actual pterosaurs wouldn't have been able to pick up prey the size and weight of a human.

2. Dr. Grant DEFINITELY would've gotten eaten by staying still.

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Dr. Alan Grant suggests when the T. rex escapes in Jurassic Park that the creature can't see them if they don't move. In actuality, tyrannosaurus had excellent vision. And even if it couldn't see, it could sniff Dr. Grant out easily.

3. Dinosaurs would've been falling down all over the place.

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In the Jurassic Park movies, the dinosaurs are shown waving their tails quite a bit. In reality, these tails would be rigid and used to balance the animal. Therefore, if the tails on large creatures like the T. rex flailed everywhere like the movie, the T. rex would run a much larger risk of losing balance and beefing it.

4. That terrifying badass neck fan that dilophosaurus had in the movie is bogus.

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The dilophosaurus that took care of Wayne Knight in the movie actually doesn't have that giant neck fan. But, the real dilophosaurus was about the size of the velociraptors portrayed in the movie. So it would've been much bigger, but it didn't have that frill.

5. And Wayne would've been just fine because they didn't spit venom either.

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Paleontologist Reuben A. Rodriguez de la Rosa proposed some dinosaurs transmit venom in a similar way to venomous snakes. Scott D. Sampson of the Utah Museum of Natural History hypothesized that dinosaur bites could’ve been deadly due to large quantities of bacteria in their mouths (similar to Komodo dragons). However, in both theories, they’d be incapable of projecting the venom onto their prey.

6. Velociraptors probably didn't have "zombie wrists".

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You know the standard dino position: elbows at your side, arms in, and wrists all the way down. Well, scientists think that it might be incorrect. Instead, the wrists of the velociraptors would've been turned inward like the velociraptors were constantly holding a basketball. This would've made it much more difficult for the raptors to open the door to the kitchen.

7. Also, the velociraptors aren't even velociraptors.

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Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton was inspired by paleo-artist Gregory Paul, who wrote the book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. In the book, due to the similarity of the anatomy of velociraptor and deinonychus, Paul grouped the two together. However, the creatures that Crichton describes in Jurassic Park are more similar to deinonychus. They match the same height and have a protruding toe just like deinonychus, but "velociraptor" sounds cooler.

8. If they were modeled after real velociraptors, you probably would've just been able to kick them out of the way because they would've been turkey-sized.

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Real velociraptors are estimated to have been about the same height as a medium-sized dog. They probably wouldn't have gone past your knee.

9. In the movie, velociraptors are crazy-intelligent lizard demons, but IRL, they had their fair share of feathers.

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We can't blame Crichton or Spielberg for this one, but we can blame Colin Trevorrow. The American Museum of Natural History confirmed that velociraptors had feathers in 2007, 24 years after the start of the Jurassic Park franchise and 8 years before Jurassic World. The research was there, so where were Echo and Blue's feathers?!

10. A T. rex couldn't outrun a car.

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Previously, T. rex was thought to be able to reach speeds of 40 MPH, making the scene where it runs after Ian Malcolm and his Jeep convertible intense. However, new studies suggest that T. rex could only run 15-25 miles an hour, meaning if you were on foot, you'd be no match for him, but your car would help you escape.

11. Mosasaur wasn't as big or scaly as the movie made it out to be.

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Mosasaurs did not have the same texture as a crocodile. IRL, they were smooth with small scales. Secondly, the Mosasaur in the movie was exaggerated in size. Mosasaur was big, but in the movie, we see it snack on Indominus Rex, which is larger than T. rex. In reality, mosasaur reached lengths of 50 feet, and T. rex would've been roughly 40. Lastly, mosasaurs wouldn't have been able to power their body through the water fast enough to make the kind of breach they do in the movie to munch on the shark.

12. The excavation scene in Jurassic Park is 8000% wrong.

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A full skeleton that close to the surface that is completely intact and requires little dusting off is highly unlikely. Researchers spend extensive time in the field to locate and safely uncover fossils. Bones that are exposed like that are extremely brittle, meaning that someone couldn't casually pick the dirt out of a velociraptor's nose without a very high risk of damaging the remains.

13. Also, the whole "cloning dinosaurs via amber" thing isn't exactly possible.

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Researchers from the Faculty of Life Sciences at The University of Manchester tried to harvest DNA from young sub-fossilized insects preserved in copal (the precursor to amber) to no avail, suggesting that the likelihood of finding ancient DNA in a specimen much older is much less likely.

14. Dinosaur DNA is just too old to read.

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A team of paleogeneticists at the University of Copenhagen and Murdoch University determined that after 1.5 million years, the nucleotide bonds in DNA would be too short to get any meaningful data. Dinosaurs are said to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, so any nucleotide bonds between their DNA strands are most likely unsalvageable.

All that being said, I'm kind of relieved that Jurassic Park stretched the truth. Sure, if it were real, we'd be able to experience this:

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But we'd also probably experience this:

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And, TBH, I'm good without the possibility of being eaten. Let's clone wooly mammoths instead. What would you clone if you had the opportunity? Tell us in the comments below!

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