Friday, May 8, 2020

Jurassic Park's biggest mistake

The book and movie Jurassic Park got some discrepancies with later 1990s palaeo consensus - like that velociraptors were large with crocodile-like hide. By the early 1990s their affinity to birds was getting too close to ignore; even then I think serious palaeontologists were mooting feathers for those genera. We forgave Crichton that because, after all, that these creatures weren't following the rules was his book's point. His "dinosaurs" were monsters bred out of frog DNA.

Ineffable Island yesterday relayed a more serious problem: velociraptors evolved toward a pattern where the young hunted their own food. Mammals suckle and (more to the point) chicks eat other birds' regurgitations. That isn't seen in baby raptors.

Raptors grew up more like komodo dragons: other dragons see a clutch of dragon young as a free meal. So baby dragons run up trees to hide from their elders; and here, eat eggs, nuts, squirrels and what have you. (All of which were available back in the Cretaceous.)

To be fair to Crichton, I would have written the 'raptors in the same way as he did, before yesterday. Raptors were so birdlike that one might well assume their immaturity to be birdlike too; and since they were landbound one might moot them to be social like dogs and monkeys.

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