The original movie came out 22 years ago this week, and a lot has changed since then. Spoiler: BIRDS ARE DINOSAURS.
Dinosaurs had feathers.
Paleontologists had known that dinosaurs were way more colourful than the muted greens and browns of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs a couple of decades before the movie came out. But it wasn't until three years after its debut that we got confirmation that at least one species had feathers (there were, however, unconfirmed fuzzy specimens found earlier than this).
Chuang Zhao / Via buzzfeed.com
CC BY-SA / Wikimedia Commons / Via commons.wikimedia.org
Brian Switek writes in My Beloved Brontosaurus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013):
The first fluffy dinosaur discovery enthralled paleontologists. At the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in 1996, scientists circulated a photograph of a small fossil that revealed a mane of fuzz along a dinosaur's back and tail.
It was a small theropod called Sinosauropteryx and had a coat of protofeathers that weren't enough for flight, only for show and keeping the dinosaur warm. This and further discoveries confirmed what's possibly the greatest fact you will ever know: birds are dinosaurs.
In fact, most dinosaurs probably had some kind of feathers.
It wasn't until last year when scientists discovered a fossilised feather dinosaur that wasn't an ancestor of modern birds that they realised most dinosaurs could have been at least a bit fuzzy.
"Probably that means the common ancestor of all dinosaurs had feathers," study lead author Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science in Brussels, told National Geographic News at the time.
Andrey Atuchin / Via Science
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