I was ten years old when I saw the preview poster for Jurassic Park hanging in my local small-town cinema. It was fairly innocuous - the simple, not-yet-classic logo in red and yellow against a plain black background. There were no air-brushed shots of fading movie stars' faces, no wacky 90s' graphics or even hyperbolic paid-for quotes from dubious media sources. It knew already that the dinosaurs themselves were to be the real stars. In fact, a lot of the page was actually made up of credits, names that meant nothing to me then but would end up firing my imagination for years to come. The only part of the poster that really stood out was the tagline. "An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making", it promised. That sounded pretty good to me.
So here we are, twenty years later, salivating over two minutes worth of footage that what we hope will be the first worthy sequel to the original 1993 masterpiece. I don't mind admitting I've watched the clip probably a dozen times already yet every time it's one part that truly stands out. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Chris Pratt's cynical hero. I'm wondering why the Raptors are in the greyhound traps. I'm as tantalized as anyone else as to why we don't get to see a T-rex. But there's only one part that made the hairs on the back on my next stand up. And that's the Mosasaurus. "The whatasaurus??" I hear you ask. Well let's have a look, shall we?
Anyone who's watched the excellent documentary Blackfish will know the perils of the marine park. Jurassic World takes it up a notch in a continuation of the series' "greed is good" morality. In a spectacularly visual metaphor we are shown our world's most dangerous predator, the Great White Shark, become a simple snack for one of the prehistoric era's own. In front of several huge stands of paying visitors that resemble half a football stadium, poor Jaws' corpse is hung, without dignity, above the water from a giant fish hook. He might as well be a stickleback as a carnivorous, aquatic lizard surges out of the water and takes him in one bite back down below the surface, drenching the cheering crowd in pacific seawater (and probably some blood and guts too). Hope that didn't wreck all the product placement phones we got to see them using.
There's always been some poetic licence with the beasts in Universal's adaptations of Michael Crichton's work and this one is no difference. If the shark is indeed a Great White then adults reach about three to five metres and, as it easily fits in the Mosasaurus' jaws, our on-screen monster is a lot larger than the 15 to 18 metres that palaeontologists estimate. What else do we know? The name derives from the Greek word "saurus" meaning lizard (as with other dinosaurs) and "Mosa", the latin name for the Meuse River - a major European waterway which flows through France, Belgium and the Netherlands, said to be one of the five oldest rivers in the world. This is where the bones have been found, beginning in 1764 near the city of Maastricht. The Mosasaurus is a genus of the Mosasaur family – a group which contains several subsections of over thirty large, extinct marine reptiles. Like other Mosasaurs, Mosasaurus had four flippers, with the front larger than the rear and would have lived in the late Cretaceous period (98-65 million years ago).
The trailer's idea of a Mosasaurus leaping out of the water may not be so far-fetched. They were thought to have poor eyesight and therefore lived close to the surface, preying on smaller fish and mammals for their food. Their jaws appear much like today's crocodiles, elongated and filled with razor-sharp teeth. It should also be made clear they are not actually dinosaurs but are reptiles related to the snakes and monitor lizards of today. They would have been powerful streamlined swimmers that breathed and gave birth to live young. How much these amazing creatures will feature in the new film beyond the sensational Seaworld parodying scene is unfortunately unknown at the moment but for now, they're the star of the show.
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