Remarkable fossil find confirms that 'Jurassic Park' got it all wrong.

Astonishingly well-preserved in amber for almost 100 million years, the tail of a tiny dinosaur that was related to Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Velociraptors has feathers, not scales.

But, damn, set aside the paleontological debates about dinosaur appearances and just look at that thing. It appears as though it could have been encased in the amber a couple of months ago, but its age is estimated at 99 million years!

:-O

Story on CNN

Saw this on Reddit, pretty awesome to find something that old in such amazing shape.

Dino's look cool with feathers.

Of course Jurassic Park got a lot of things wrong. It was a freaking sci-fi novel/movie, not a documentary. On the list of stupid things about Jurassic Park, the fact that the T. rex didn't have feathers is among the least stupid things that one could mention.

But, yeah. The more plausible scenario for making a real world "Jurassic Park" wouldn't be to try to revive dinosaurs, but to reverse engineer bird to look like dinosaurs. Birds-with-teeth is actually a thing.

Whoa, you mean to tell me that a fictitious movie wasn't 100% accurate?

did they really have that blue ring around the eyes?

It was really more aquamarine.

All sci-fi is rooted in reality

in defense of Michael Crichton (writer of Jurassic Park) he wrote the book before a lot of scientific discoveries were made. Jurassic World also had a good line on the subject -- basically saying their genetic tampering allows them to create what people think dino's were like as opposed to what they were actually like.

I know that sci-fi is rooted in reality (hence the "science" part) and I know that the book was written before a lot of discoveries were made (which is usually the case with science fiction). I was just commenting on how humdrum it is to see "Jurassic Park got it wrong" when people have been complaining about how Jurassic Park "got it wrong" ever since Jurassic Park came out.

Anyway, the thing that I think is most "wrong" about Jurassic Park (the movie, I don;t remember the novel as well) is the whole anti-science undertone. Sure, things went bad, but that was mostly the result of some stupid decisions which easily could have been fixed. Yet, the second that our protagonists arrive on the island, Ian Malcolm starts spouting off about how wrong it is to tamper with nature and how that's going to destroy everyone. And he ends up being right, even though he had nothing to base that on. I actually love the hell out of the movie and think it's one of Spielberg's best, but the underlying sentiment is just wrong. It's the most wrong thing in the entire movie.

Well, yeah. It's been know long before Jurassic World came out that Theropod dinosaurs almost certainly had feathers. Also, real Velociraptors are about the size of chickens; if the movies knew their stuff, they would have used Deinonychus or Utahraptor instead. Also, T-Rexes being blind to non-movement is one of the stupidest thing I've ever heard, putting aside the fact that fossil analysis shows they most likely had excellent sense of smell.

Lesson of the day: don't get your science from Hollywood, or even mainstream media like CNN.

In Jurassic World they address it, the Asian doctor guy says they are unnatural and would look different.

To be fair as well, in the original, in almost the opening scene they are being compared to birds.

JP got lots of things wrong especially velociraptor but it would not be as scary being chased by something the size of a turkey and coverd in feathers.

I read an interview stating in the past that stated that Crichton had read a book which made the (now discredited) claim that equated the two species as being of the same family (or something similar). Anyway, Crichton wanted the cooler dinosaur with the cooler name, so he took a liberty with the mishmash loosely based on the information available at the time.

Crichton does this a LOT in his books (and I personally enjoy it although I can understand why the sci-fi intense crowd dislikes it). He takes some scientific fact/basis and loosely integrates it into his stories while making subtle changes to it that the layman won't immediately pick up on and balk at.

Well, in Taxonomy terms, the do share the same Family; they're all Dromaeosaurs (Family: Dromaeosauridae). The problem here is that they are not the same Clade or Genus, or even share the same geographical or temporal distribution for that matter. Both Deinonychus and Utahraptor were discovered in North America and dated to early Cretaceous, while the Velociraptor was a late Cretaceous animal found mainly in Mongolia. So yeah, if the claim was that they were closely related enough to be basically equivalent, then that's easily discredited.

I'm well aware that Michael Crichton never wanted to be known as a genre writer, primarily because he wanted to broaden the appeal, and therefore the market, of his works. I don't even begrudge him or any other fiction writer for playing loose and fast with scientific facts; I write a lot of fiction for fun in my spare time, and I play loose and fast with facts all the time myself. I just think threads and discussions with titles such as "Jurassic Park is wrong" is a little bit silly; everyone who has even a bit of scientific knowledge know films like Jurassic Park are factually erroneous. Like I said, no one should get their science facts from Hollywood or mainstream media.

It's not that Jurassic Park was wrong, it's more that they were not right. Nitpicking? Maybe, but you gotta remember the whole thing was that you had the hero of the movie was this archaeologist who was laughed out of academia for saying the dinosaurs evolved into birds! Animals with feathers.

So yeah maybe Michael Crichton was wrong in portraying dinosaurs without feathers, but he did have a feather correlation. The important thing is that they were on to the right trail!

But yeah, it's a movie (a book, actually)...so, calm down, people.

The theory that birds evolved from Theropod dinosaurs has been strongly supported since the 19th century; when Achaeopteryx was discovered. It then became the consensus among the Palaeontology community when other Dromaeosaurs were discovered in the second half of the 20th century. The scientist character would not have been laughed out of academia; it was already a widely accepted theory in the 90s.

But, you know, fiction and all that.

It looks as though there may be an ant trapped in that amber as well (center, top). The poor little guy's been there for 99 million years, so I guess he deserves a call-out, at least. Perhaps he'll even be the inspiration for a new movie: Jurassic Ant Farm

:-)

It was probably family, I'm recalling this all from memory (or attempting to - Dang it, man! I'm a programmer, not a paleontologist! :-P

I completely agree with you, though. I'm not begrudging Jurassic Park (the book or movie). I just shared that information because I think it's interesting. While Jurassic Park took some liberties with the source, it's still cool to know what facts formed the basis, and the fact that he designed the velociraptors as deinonychuses gives the creatures a little more grounding, I think.

A rose by any other name, yada, yada, yada.

My mind is blown, I thought all Hollywood movies were 100% true and accurate, how will I go on now?!?

Don't worry about it, mate, I'm not a green-blooded hobgoblin.

Yup. I won't deny Jurassic Park was a quality piece of entertainment, and used some loose semblance of scientific fact to achieve it. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters.

This isn't surprising, I did an oral report in college Paleontology class in the mid-90's in support of that line of dinosaurs having feathers, backing the theory by a prominent paleontologist.

The dinosaur they called Velociraptor in the movie was actually Deinonochus.

@vfighter: "My mind is blown, I thought all Hollywood movies were 100% true and accurate, how will I go on now?!?"

Are you the smartest person in Internet history?

I dont get what JP got wrong. They never portrayed dinosaurs to have scales, they had thick leathery skin and no feathers. Which not all dinosaurs or dinosaur types fit into a one or the other category. Some raptors had feathers, some didnt. But whatever, the whole feather thing was established well after JP.

Maybe.

The reason that is in the picture is because we moved away from the dull, colorless dinosaurs of the past and went more toward what we currently see. Which given a relation to birds, coloring around the eyes was probably pretty common.

How could Jurasic Park have gotten it wrong when it never claimed to have gotten it right? I'm pretty sure they have a discussion in the original film about how he's just creating glorified animatronics to fit public perception of what dinosaurs are like, rather than an accurate revival of the species. That and the dinosaurs are made of frog DNA or something.

Interestingly, that point was central to the setup of the sequel (both the book and the movie). It's what allowed the dinosaurs in the story to procreate.

Edit: And it was a central theme of Jurassic World. This isn't merely a throwaway comment you've touched on as it seems to be pretty central to the story's universe. Good point to bring up.

100 million years... wow! I love this kinda stuff... so fascinating.

Since when Jurass is Park is some sort of Scientific America news ? It's a fvcking movie TC, hell in Jurrasic Park there's even pterodacts with T Rex heads.

Total BS, The earth is only 600 years old per the bible an koran and torah

He was basing that on his knowledge being...whatever kind of scientist he was, wasn't he? That "nature finds a way"

That may be the case in the sequels, but not in the original (movie, I don't remember the novel quite so well except for it being a lot more violent and gory). They were actual revivals of the different species, and they only used frog DNA to fill in the gaps in the dinosaurs' genome. They weren't tailor-making designer dinosaurs, because they hadn't advanced the technology enough to do that yet. They were merely trying to get functional dinosaurs at that point. And aside from the lysine contingency, any extra DNA that they inserted was just to get actual functional dinosaurs.

That's still pretty stupid. He specialized in chaos theory. Which I'm not going to pretend to understand beyond the most superficial layman's level, but my understanding is that it basically deals with how small changes in complex systems can generate big differences in the final results. While I'm not going to try to claim that that's a bunch of hooey (after all, it's based on mathematics and from what I understand is well established and based on fact), my problem is that Ian Malcolm makes the prediction that it's a bad idea simply because life involves complex systems.

In other words, you've got two opposing viewpoints here. John Hammond says that it's fine everything's going to work out okay. Ian Malcolm says that it's going to end in disaster because we're playing God, that "life finds a way", and we don't know what we're doing. Here's the thing...Ian Malcolm never gives off any SPECIFIC insights as to what's being done wrong (such as giving total control of the park's security systems to a clearly disgruntled employee), he just makes vague "this is bad" comments based solely on the notion of "life is complex and therefore we can't destroy it."

And, like, it doesn't work that way. Do you know where else we try to control and contain living organisms? How about zoos? Yet, it's not exactly as if zoos are having tigers and lions and hippos break out and run amok all the freaking time. Even though life is complex and "life finds a way", you can't just apply a blanket rule that keeping animals in a park is going to end in disaster. If that were the case, then zoos would be banned, pet ownership would be banned, and cattle farms would be constantly having cattle escape the premises and run around the city trampling everyone they see. If "life finds a way" meant that we can't exercise control over certain living things (such as the animals in a park), then there'd be no reason for species conservation. After all, what the hell is the point of trying to save a species from extinction if you believe that it's going to "find a way" to survive despite all of our best efforts to drive it to extinction? Ian Malcolm ought to also be against owning dogs or saving whales.

In other words, Ian Malcolm's position seems to be that it's INHERENTLY a bad idea to bring back the dinosaurs since we can't know the effects of doing so and that life is a complex thing that tends to "find a way". That's shaky as hell, you could apply the same general logic to ANY attempt to "control" life. You know, such as domesticating animals. Or freaking AGRICULTURE. But in reality, Jurassic Park was just a zoo. And zoos have been around since ****ing forever (or at least a long time). Of course things will turn out bad if you run the zoo like a freaking idiot. But that doesn't mean that it's inherently a bad idea because "life finds a way", it just means that you need to not be such a f***ing idiot when you design your zoo. Every single damn thing that went wrong in Jurassic Park should have been easily avoidable if John Hammond wasn't a dumbass. The only possible exception being that the dinosaurs were breeding (I don't think anyone could have realistically seen that). But even in that case, it still shouldn't have caused any major life-threatening problems if the zoo was well stocked and people were actually monitoring what the f*** the animals were actually doing. The big problem with Jurassic Park was that John Hammond spent these absurd amounts of money to make dinosaurs, and then just severely understaffed the park (as well as hiring shitty staff). I mean, for christ's sake...the protagonists make the amazing discovery that the dinosaurs are breeding by just randomly walking through the forest and happening to find a dinosaur nest. That should not happen. John Hammond has brought back dinosaurs. He must have done that a long time ago too, at least a decade ago seeing as how the park isn't just populated with juvenile dinosaurs but also fully grown tyrannosaurs and sauropods. It takes time to put that much mass on an animal, and yet in that entire time he never bothered to hire a team of scientists who would have freaking noticed that the animals were breeding if they were actually watching them? That's a problem of piss-poor management, not the inevitable result of tampering with nature.

100m yr old amber fossil is all well and good but almost everyone has something that's many many times older than that, gold.

All of the gold on earth was made before the earth even existed so your gold ring, chain etc etc are at the very minimum 5 billion yrs old.

I highly doubt any paleontologists would point at Jurrassic Park and claim that movie was a hundred percent accurate regarding dinosaurs. And In the film itself they do state that the "dinosaurs" are altered genetically since the Dino DNA is old and damaged so they substitute the damaged areas with that of frogs. Thus such a drastic change of DNA would cause mutations that might make them look entirely different then what they originally did.

That said, it is a interesting thought of Dinosaurs, or atleast some of them, potentially having feathers.

That number is way too low for even the Bible.

@LJS9502_basic:

Hehe, I think someone got lost on the way to YouTube comments.

@sonicare:

More like 6000 years according to the Bible

Maybe you can find your way back?

they actually poked at that the dinosaurs were never dinosaurs in jurassic world. the asian scientist that was in the first one is like a rockstar figure head in world. he alludes that he designed the creatures to be as people thought of them and not as they truly were, in that scene where he is arguing with what the audience takes to be a "producer" of the park.

there have been statements and theories since before the first movie that dinosaurs were mostly very feathered and probably had lots of colors as well. or the males mostly at least. much like birds.

Some of you take your damn feelings way too far. Going all ham about a comical quip like your protesting the world not going your way.

TBH, the feathers are better than the scales.

Longer than 5 billion years ago, gold, like all elements with the exception of hydrogen is created when massive stars collapse and explode.

Stars can fuse everything up to iron just fine (stellar nucleosynthesis). After iron, supernova fusion is required for the heavier elements (supernova nucleosynthesis).

Paleontologists have known Jurassic Park to be wrong since pretty much it's original release in novel form.

What they couldn't prove (they theorized about it for quite a while) was how early feathers really started developing. There haven't been many examples of them being preserved.

But that's the thing about science. New evidence comes along, and it adapts to suit the new evidence and everyone involved grows in knowledge.

That, and in order to bring about the "birth" of the dinosaurs, they needed to splice in reptilian DNA. It's all in the interactive tour they took in the first movie.

Absolutely incredible find. Makes you think what kinds of finds we've missed out on if someone were to pass up a random buy like this one.

I wonder how accurate the four-legged dinos are in our mind. Surely a Brontosaurus (which yes is a thing although contested) had no need for feathers. Same goes for the Anklyosaurus.

i came across another set of thoughts about dinosaurs that considered that many that were designated as their own species were actually just a particular stage in the development of what was considered a separate creature. looking up the anklyosaurus brought that to mind.

You read the theory that the "dinosaurs" in Jurassic Parks aren't real dinosaurs right? They admit that they spliced reptilian DNA to fill the "gaps" they had in the partial DNA they got from the amber, so the creatures in the park is more like what people expected dinosaurs to look like than accurate representations of dinosaurs. That theory is further reinforced in the latest movie where they didn't even bother creating a dinosaur that actually existed but one that's completely fictitious using the same genetic splicing/manipulation process (since the head scientist was the same as the original park).