The most comprehensive study of the iconic dinosaur reveals a very different animal from the one portrayed on film.
The fading sun beat down on our backs after an already long day in the field. Exhausted, we toiled over shovels and dug with our bare hands to clear away the sand. We were in the heart of dinosaur country on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, working in the middle of the Navajo Nation to determine the ages of two skeletons of Dilophosaurus wetherilli that had been unearthed there previously. We had spent this hot June day in 2014 hiking up and down the badlands to measure the rock beds and fill our backpacks with geologic samples. And now we had to excavate—not a new dinosaur but rather our truck, which had gotten bogged down in the sand dunes and was buried up to the axles. The life of a globe-trotting field scientist is rooted in the mundane—applying for permits, taking notes, cooking meals and washing dishes in camp, reviewing the day's data by light of the campfire—rather than the swashbuckling of the movies. We never see Indiana Jones or Alan Grant digging out a stuck pickup truck.
In the summer of 1993 dinosaurs and paleontologists exploded onto movie screens around the world. Adapted from the 1990 Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park made instant stars, and villains, of several little-known species. Names such as Velociraptor and Dilophosaurus joined Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops in the public lexicon. The dinosaurs of action movies are typically not the animals that scientists know from nature. Yet one of the elements that made the Jurassic Park franchise so successful (it broke box office records in 1993 and topped the charts again in the summer of 2020) was its narrative reliance on the state of the art in paleontology and genetics. Author Crichton and director Steven Spielberg brought a modern look at dinosaur science to audiences for the first time, and the image they portrayed of active, intelligent animals still resonates today.
Of course, Crichton and Spielberg took artistic liberties to tell a compelling story, dramatizing not only the scientists but also the dinosaurs. The animal that departed most from the fossil evidence was Dilophosaurus. In the movie, it takes the form of a golden retriever–sized creature with a rattling frill and venomous spit that kills the computer programmer–turned–dinosaur embryo smuggler, Dennis Nedry. What was Dilophosaurus really like?
The Real Dilophosaurus Would Have Eaten the Jurassic Park Version for Breakfast
The fading sun beat down on our backs after an already long day in the field. Exhausted, we toiled over shovels and dug with our bare hands to clear away the sand. We were in the heart of dinosaur country on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, working in the middle of the Navajo Nation to determine the ages of two skeletons of Dilophosaurus wetherilli that had been unearthed there previously. We had spent this hot June day in 2014 hiking up and down the badlands to measure the rock beds and fill our backpacks with geologic samples. And now we had to excavate—not a new dinosaur but rather our truck, which had gotten bogged down in the sand dunes and was buried up to the axles. The life of a globe-trotting field scientist is rooted in the mundane—applying for permits, taking notes, cooking meals and washing dishes in camp, reviewing the day's data by light of the campfire—rather than the swashbuckling of the movies. We never see Indiana Jones or Alan Grant digging out a stuck pickup truck.
In the summer of 1993 dinosaurs and paleontologists exploded onto movie screens around the world. Adapted from the 1990 Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park made instant stars, and villains, of several little-known species. Names such as Velociraptor and Dilophosaurus joined Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops in the public lexicon. The dinosaurs of action movies are typically not the animals that scientists know from nature. Yet one of the elements that made the Jurassic Park franchise so successful (it broke box office records in 1993 and topped the charts again in the summer of 2020) was its narrative reliance on the state of the art in paleontology and genetics. Author Crichton and director Steven Spielberg brought a modern look at dinosaur science to audiences for the first time, and the image they portrayed of active, intelligent animals still resonates today.
Of course, Crichton and Spielberg took artistic liberties to tell a compelling story, dramatizing not only the scientists but also the dinosaurs. The animal that departed most from the fossil evidence was Dilophosaurus. In the movie, it takes the form of a golden retriever–sized creature with a rattling frill and venomous spit that kills the computer programmer–turned–dinosaur embryo smuggler, Dennis Nedry. What was Dilophosaurus really like?
The Real Dilophosaurus Would Have Eaten the Jurassic Park Version for Breakfast