Jurassic Park 2015

[Grey]

In fact, the inspiration seems to have been between a very large Deinonychus specimen and Achillobator. In the novel, they are described with a 60 cm skull and from Mongolia. The official website lists their weight at 150 kg, the raptors from the previous movies were between 80 and 120 kg in the official charts.

Personnally I'm now used to the non-feathers case, I'm curious to see the making of the movie, the director seems to have longly thought about the question. I like to think that there's still an absolute minor chance for that some species evolved with few or no feathers, even if that's extremely unlikely. On the official website of the park, a fiction comment from a paleo-enthusiast visitor hints that the genetic manipulations by Hammond et al. seems to be the reason for the lack of feathers, being the only point he didn't like during the visit of the attractions. I find this quite cool ahah.

The criticism of Chris Pratt's character is interesting regarding the hybrid creation "they're dinosaurs, whoa enough !".

[theropod]

You’ve already told me that much earlier, I know what the inspiration was and what they were officially supposed to be. I’m just describing what I’m seeing, they look even larger than before, but that might just be my memory; if that’s the case, then from the start they were on the large side even for Achillobator (Of which only a maxilla is known in terms of cranial material, which does not appear to be from a 60cm skull unless the skull was over twice the length of the maxilla).
Everything there is to say about the feathers has already been said by pretty much every scientist or amateur with a serious interest in dinosaurs. Maybe there is at least hope that there is going to be some attempt at adressing the issue in the film, either self-ironic or as a serious try to explain them.

[Grey]

Achillobator isn't supposed to have a 60cm skull itself and being roughly the size of lion (Holtz listing) ? Their weight in the new movie is about 150kg...

Presumably we could expect feathers in eventual sequels/reboot. Now this will not prevent me to appreciate the movie if it's really good :

[theropod]

The point being that the portrayed animals are not "at best large Deinonychus" or in any way based on D. antirrhopus. Achillobator is an animal with 1.57 times the tibia lenght, ergo almost 4 times the mass, and if anything these are big for Achillobator (at least if they are really supposed to have 60cm skulls, I’m obviously not able to tell that from the footage).
Either way, 150kg is too small for what is shown there, too small for Achillobator and also too small for a dromaeosaur with a 60cm skull.

As I wrote, there is only a maxilla left of A. giganticus’ skull. According to the theropod database it’s 29cm long. Depending on its exact cranial proportions, perhaps it was 60cm long, perhaps it wasn’t. But usually theropod maxillae are more than half their skull length.

[Grey]

[Grey]

www.ew.com/article/2015/05/25/meet-new

An interesting interview, Colin Trevorrow explains what the Indominus rex represents and why it was created (in the movie context). It represents a criticism of our modern bad western tendencies to always want more and to overlook what we already have.
A real life example of this how we want to recreate Mammoths (even though it will never be a real Mammoth) and yet we fail to appreciate and save our elephants and rhinos...
The same criticism can be applied to the movies.

He also confirms Indominus is based on genetic material from Giganotosaurus and Majungasaurus plus modern animals (probably explaining the high intelligence).

I really appreciate that he confirms and mentions Giga and Majunga. Indeed this beast is quite reminescent of these guys, quite sure its size is based on Giganotosaurus.

[blaze]

theropod

Assuming similar proportions to Hartman's Deinonychus a 29cm long maxilla can suggest something close to 60cm in greatest length (57cm).

[spinodontosaurus]

You could also use the skull of Dromaeosaurus, seeing as it is closer related to Achillobator. There is this reconstruction< from Currie (1995), and this one< from paleofile.com. Both skulls appear to be reconstructions of the type specimen, AMNH 5356, and both yield an estimated maximum skull length of 66-67 cm when scaled to a 29 cm maxilla.

For completeness' sake I decided to scale using Velociraptor too. Using Jaime Headden's skull reconstruction yields a skull length of ~55 cm, whilst using Scott Hartman's yields ~62 cm.

So yes it does seem entirely possible that Achillobator's skull was 60 cm long or more. And although it isn't strictly related to the topic at hand, the largest Utahraptor femur is some 18-19% larger than the Achillobator femur associated with the 29 cm maxilla, to give you an idea of how big it's skull could have been.

Also as theropod says, 150 kg is way too low for an actual Achillobator. I'm pretty sure big Deinonychus specimens could reach 100 kg if femoral circumference equations are to be believed. Achillobator's femur is some 50% longer than the largest Deinonychus specimen, MCZ 4371, which would imply it weighed over 3 times more than said specimen (~3.4 times more in fact).

I think the JP Raptors are closest to being a liberally sized Deinonychus with ridiculous leg proportions, hence their Utahraptor-rivalling height. Which makes sense given their original basis was Deinonychus.

_________________


Kind of looking forward to this as a monster movie. But I still wish they hadn't gone with models some 30 years out of date. They could even justify why the older Jurassic Park movies had inaccurate models by brushing it off as older cloning methods being less accurate or something. And maybe then we could have been done with the skinny runt that is the JP Raptor and bring in an actual heavyweight like Utahraptor.

[Deleted]

Just saw some nonsense in the JW trailer that reminded me of bad memories from CoTD, and felt the need to vent it out.

Forgive me guys.

fav.me/d8v1pz7

[Ceratodromeus]

There's no need to complain about the innacurate depictions in a science fiction movie. i know you like your sauropods, but damn dude.

[creature386]

Broly probably knows this. I guess his behavior is more similar to the fiction fan who hates to see his/her favorite character lose all the time.

[Grey]

There is an embargo for the reviews but the first reports are really optimistic, I've seen a 9/10 from a VIP viewer tonight in Paris.

[Deleted]

Indominus rex, based on the official site's ~12-meter length figure, compared with Acrocanthosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Giganotosaurus:



The movie states that Indominus is even larger than Tyrannosaurus, but it sure doesn't really look that way...it actually seems to be roughly on par with it and the other theropods in this chart.

The Indominus is based on MANUSAURIO's Indominus, while the Acrocanthosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Giganotosaurus are from Scott Hartman.

[theropod]

Especially since their T.rex was supposed to be enourmous (wasn't it?). Perhaps this time they are actually using an average individual, something more along the lines of stan in terms of length.

EDIT: The JP wiki states the one from the first film to be 43ft long, although I've read elsewhere that the model was actually 12m long.
The one from the 3rd film was claimed to be 37ft and sub-adult, but since that's far too large for a subadult, maybe it's most realistic that these claims are BS, and that the T.rex in the films conforms to realistic adult sizes of the species.

[spinodontosaurus]

In a fairly similar vein to what Broly posted:



That is the Jurassic Park Velociraptor, granted (well technically the JP3 female), but the data on the Jurassic World site would place the new one at essentially identical size to it despite looking like they should be bigger in the trailers.

Utahraptor would be terrifying in a film like Jurassic Park I reckon.