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Thursday, June 11, 2015

11 Things You Need To Know About Jurassic World's Dinosaurs, According To The Film's Dinosaur Expert

Spoiler warning: those Velociraptors aren’t actually Velociraptors.

This is Jack Horner. He's Jurassic Park's resident dinosaur expert.

This is Jack Horner. He's Jurassic Park's resident dinosaur expert.

One of the best-known (and often most controversial) paleontologists in the world, Horner has been the main dinosaur adviser for every Jurassic Park film since the original in 1993, including the new Jurassic World. And he didn't just help the filmmakers get the dinosaurs right – Dr. Grant, Sam Neill's character in the first film, was largely inspired by him.

BuzzFeed Science caught up with him in London to get the lowdown on some of the dinosaurs featured in the new film.

Matthew Tucker / BuzzFeed

Velociraptor

Velociraptor

Velociraptor may be one of the most famous dinosaur species in the world, thanks to Jurassic Park. The only problem is that the dinosaurs in the films aren't actually Velociraptors.

"Velociraptor is really a tiny little dinosaur," Horner confesses. The raptors in the films "are really based on Deinonychus, which we didn't think anybody would be able to say."

"The cool thing about Deinonychus is that they're the dinosaur we do actually have evidence for being pack hunters," Horner adds – although even then, some experts aren't 100% convinced. What certainly does seem to be true is that Deinoychus and its relatives were social animals, at least some of the time.

If you want to know what real-life Velociraptors looked like, they were a couple of feet tall and (like many dinosaurs) they had feathers. A bit like a predatory turkey.

Universal

Mr1805 / Getty Images

Triceratops

Triceratops

Horner's own research had a direct impact on how we see one much-loved creature in the movie. "Triceratops is actually one of the dinosaurs I had to have the artists change," Horner says. "Because we see juveniles in the movie – kids are riding them – and we know that in juvenile triceratops, their horns actually curve backwards. Then as the animal gets older, their horns grow forward. So we had to get the juvenile horns to curve backwards, and the artists did not want to do that..."

Universal


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