Nathan Myhrvold’s day jobs include his roles as CEO at Intellectual Ventures and as vice chairman for TerraPower, but he’s also made a name for himself as the author of the “Modernist Cuisine” cookbooks — and as the co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed research papers about dinosaurs. He often refers to himself as the world’s foremost authority on dinosaur vomit.
We spoke with Myhrvold and University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz about dinosaurs and “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest progeny of a movie franchise that’s spawned seven dinosaur tales over the past 32 years. You can check out the Fiction Science interview and podcast — and as a bonus, we’re passing along Myhrvold’s spoiler-laden list of detailed observations about “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
But first, here’s a list of 13 creatures that are featured in the film, as described by the movie’s producers:
- Mosasaurus: A massive marine reptile that’s a little bit like a whale, and a little bit like a crocodile. The film’s producers say it’s the “Jaws” of the Late Cretaceous Period, only bigger.
- Titanosaurus: One of the biggest sauropods ever seen, weighing in at up to 70 tons and measuring 100 feet in length. This plant-eating dinosaur is noted for its long neck and long tail.
- Quetzalcoatlus: A gigantic pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous, with a 30-foot wingspan.
- Spinosaurus: This massive, amphibious predator made its first appearance in “Jurassic Park III.” It’s about 39 feet long. with a 6-foot-high “sail” of raised vertebrae along its back.
- Aquilops: A horned herbivore that is a petite relative of Triceratops. It lived around 100 million years ago in what is now Montana. It’s the movie’s cutest dinosaur, befriended by a little girl and nicknamed Dolores.
- Tyrannosaurus rex: A “Jurassic” classic, shown swimming for the first time in this movie.
- Mutadon: A failed lab experiment that was made up for the movie. A cross between a raptor and a pterosaur, weighing about 500 pounds.
- Distortus rex: Another failed experiment that’s totally fictional. DNA fragments were “recklessly introduced” into the T. rex genome, resulting in a 20,000-pound monster with four legs and two arms. It can barely keep its misshapen head aloft.
- Anurognathus: A tiny pterosaur that weighs less than a pound, slightly resembling a tree frog.
- Velociraptor: The on-screen versions of these carnivores from the Late Cretaceous are bigger than they were in real life.
- Dilophosaurus: A meat-eating dinosaur that sports a brilliantly colored crest in the movies. It made its first on-screen appearance in the original “Jurassic Park” movie. The real-life version of this dinosaur was much larger than the venom-spitting version shown in the movies.
- Ankylosaurus: A well-armored herbivore from the Late Cretaceous, weighing about 10,000 pounds. Its strong tail club packs a powerful punch.
- Compsognathus: A small bipedal theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Period. Roughly the size of a chicken, with sharp teeth.
Here’s Nathan Myhrvold’s detailed critique of “Jurassic World Rebirth” … SPOILERS AHEAD!
First some nice things:
- You go to a “Jurassic World” film to see dinosaurs eat people, and almost but not quite eat the heroes. They delivered on that.
- Nice in-joke about the paleontologist wanting to die in a shallow sea and be quickly covered with silt.
- Cool that the “flying velociraptor” (Mutadon) had warm breath (scene with the girl in the deli case). This is a direct reference to the first film.
- The cute little ceratopsian (Dolores) looked like Psittacosaurus, except it was missing the spines/quills.
Things that were less than accurate. Not everything because that would be too big a list. And I don’t want to appear to be a killjoy.
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- The plot hinges on a heart medicine derived from dinosaurs, because they lived a long time.
- But there are plenty of animals that live a long time TODAY which are much closer in biology to a human – such as the right whale, which is estimated to live 200 years.
- Of the three “dinosaurs” they want to sample, only one is a dinosaur! Mosasaurus is not a dinosaur, and neither is Quetzalcoatlus.
- Why would you need to sample all three?
- Another big plot point is dinosaurs needed the oxygen content of equator.
- O2 level is not different at the equator!
- Best current evidence is that the air had LESS oxygen in the Triassic than today. But more O2 in the Cretaceous than today.
- Also, if O2 level was killing dinosaurs in captivity, then indoors you could easily increase the O2 level. So you still could have a dinosaur zoo.
- The plot hinges on a heart medicine derived from dinosaurs, because they lived a long time.
- Besides dinosaurs, there are some other animals from quite different times.
- There is the severed head of a Dunkleosteus in the fishing net. Why just the head? Is it because only the head had bones so we don’t actually have fossils of the tail? Did somebody not tell them that there WAS a tail in life.
- Also, Dunkleosteus was a Devonian-era creature, at least 358 million years old. That’s much older than the oldest dinosaurs.
- But there is a Carcharodon megalodon jaw in the bar scene, that’s only 2 million years old.
- There were several shots of what looked like Permian salamander sort of things – but they had them climbing trees at one point.
- I had no idea that those weird creatures (Mutadons) were supposed to be flying velociraptors! They didn’t look like velociraptors! And if you did try to make them fly the wings would never be big enough. So that was a pretty silly.
- Some issues with their sampling.
- You wouldn’t shoot a Titanosaur in the neck! It’s mostly a gullet and windpipe. There is no blood to sample there. You’d shoot for the body.
- You couldn’t remove that much amniotic fluid from a Quetzalcoatlus egg and not kill the egg.
- In modern contexts, wild-animal DNA is sampled via feces. It wouldn’t be quite as heroic seeing Scarlett Johansson grabbing test tubes full of shit.
- It sounds so nice to give the dinosaur DNA to humanity by making it open source. Except that …
- Who will fund the FDA trials? You don’t go instantly from an open-source gene sequence to medicine.
- So, it will wind up being a pharma company anyway, or several of them. Whoever does fund the FDA trials will need to get paid back, so there is no guarantee of free access to the world immediately.
- Distortus rex is quite ridiculous.
- The D. rex had 6 limbs! They claim genetic manipulation but wow, how do you do THAT.
- Further, two of the six limbs are useless T. rex-style vestigial arms. How or WHY would you want those?
- D. rex mouth is way too small. I think they copied a toothed whale, like beluga. What is that dome head for? In a whale it is for sonar, but that won’t work well in air.
- I think D. rex was actually inspired by the monster in Cloverfield.
- The movie says that people didn’t want to look at the gross mutant dinosaurs. So then they made a gross mutant dinosaur.
- A cheat that every “Jurassic World” film has done is to show the dinosaurs at different times for dramatic effect. OK, but D. rex is shown grabbing and destroying a helicopter! But in the next scene it is grabbing and eating a person. It had to shrink between scenes!
But here is the THE MOST SILLY THING in the film – they say people lost interest in dinosaurs! WTF!!!! SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE!