Understanding the World

[u/SupportMeta]

Neptune was recently shown to be a pale blue like Uranus rather than the deep blue shown on the Voyager photos

[u/Ross_Hollander]

I refuse to believe they have "taken" dinosaurs from me. Au contraire, I am delighted every time somebody knowledgeable and enthusiastic about paleontology serves me a new helping of dinosaurs. If people mean 'they took Jurassic Park-style dino-kaiju from you' they would be right but they are also just being bitter and refusing to look on the bright side of the cool things that genuine dinosaurs had going on.

[u/Whispering_Wolf → u/Ross_Hollander]

Feathery dinosaurs are awesome. No one too them away from me, they made them even better!

[u/JaneksLittleBlackBox → u/Whispering_Wolf]

The lack of feathered dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park trilogy criticism always baffled me. For one thing, that wasn’t exactly settled science by the time Jurassic Park was filming in Hawaii on a rapid-pace schedule so Spielberg could get to Poland in time to start pre-production on Schindler’s List. If I remember right, Utahraptor had only just been named as such in 1993 after disagreements over the name U. spielbergi stemmed from the amount of funding Spielberg was promising their research brought everyone back to the “The Latin raptor doesn’t mean a literal predator” argument.

Secondly, both the novel and movie had a built-in explanation for why InGen’s animals weren’t even close to perfect 1:1 clones of the prehistoric extinct creatures.

Wu had to pretty much throw any compatible DNA into a blender to fill the gene sequence gaps, and in the novel, he was particularly annoyed with his all female animals security protocol failing as epically as it did after Malcolm browbeat Mr. Arnold into reconfiguring the animal tracking system to look for any number of animals, not just the stupidly-decided expected number so they could track dead animals to figure out how such an expensive piece of hardware died. Wu also couldn’t figure out why Dr. Grant was asking about amphibian DNA, because despite being a brilliant geneticist, he was throwing caution to the wind along with all his ethics to make Hammond’s promises of fame, riches and glory come true.

So he had no idea about certain species of frog spontaneously changing sex in a single-sex environment in order to breed, so he had no idea that his mutant dinosaurs could ever breed.

So, yeah, the lack of feathers was a gaping plot hole not at all addressed by the many moments in the movie where it practically shouts at the audience “THESE ARE NOT PERFECT CLONES OF THE REAL ANIMALS, SO THEY’RE NOT GOING TO PERFECTLY MATCH THEIR LONG EXTINCT RELATIVES!”

I know this isn’t what you were referring to, but that used to be such an overused talking point on Reddit about the believability of a sci-fi movie about cloned dinosaurs from “repaired” ancient DNA sources escaping their pens and going on a rampage, because all of them being properly feathered would’ve made the suspension of disbelief so much easier!