(no subject)

[treehat]

I finally watched Jurassic Park tonight. I've somehow managed to go years without seeing it, even though I had - and still do, to some extent - a fascination with archaeology and paleontology. Now I finally understand what my 3D graphics instructor was nerding on about. It's probably also telling that early on, I went "Hey, it's that guy from Space!"

Have I mentioned I'm severely pop-culturaly impaired?

Oh, I'm going to have crazy nightmares tonight. I'm having difficulties convincing myself that my face is not going to get gnawed off by velociraptors in my sleep. God I'm pathetic.

Comments

[haunter-uk.livejournal.com]

I don't see why. Jurassic Park didn't contain any Velociraptors. Velociraptors were about the size of turkeys, iirc. Highly carnivorous, killer, turkeys, but turkeys all the same (although they're alot longer than a turkey. Dromaeosauridae seem to all have huge tail compared to body size). Just because characters in a movie misidentifies a dino as a velociraptor doesn't mean the dino is a velociraptor. Even if the director thinks the dino is one, and volociraptors are about knee high on an adult so about half the size of a child.

Too small to be a Utahraptor, though, assuming they were both fully grown. Utahraptors are 7m long and slightly taller than an average human adult, whereas they were both about as tall as a human ten year old, maybe slightly taller, (So... 4', say?)... Hard to find a dromaeosauridae that's a specific size without manually trawling wikipedia and finding that it doesn't bother giving the size on half of them.

...Sorry. Quite a few people who are big dino fans watch the British sci-fi drama Primeval and comment about it. They were ecstatic that the dinos in 2.1, weren't misidentified as velociraptors but instead simply referred to as raptors (iirc. They're certain that they were utahraptors, so the thing might have been explicitly named in the script rather than them using their collective dinosaur knowledge to identify the things) but peeved that various large, non-dino lizards, were misidentified as dinosaurs in the first series (which, for a weekly drama about 'creatures from the past coming into the present' was surprisingly lacking in dinosaurs - The only episode to have a dino in so far is 2.1, we're up to 2.4 now, so that's 10 episodes and only one dino... Heck, the only ones with 'big lizards from the past' being the monster of the week were 1.1, 1.4 and 2.1. And in 1.4's case it was a red herring)

In conclusion - From Jurrassic Park, you shouldn't have any difficulty sleeping due to fear of velociraptors. It's a bigger species of raptor that you might be worried about chewing off your face than velociraptors, since the raptors in Jurrassic Park were bigger than velociraptors :)

Pleasant dreams~

[eikenboom.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't really expecting anything close to scientific accuracy from something Michael Crichton was involved in.

I was going to just say "raptors", but I didn't want to start confusing them with birds of prey. That'll teach me to avoid confusion. :P

[whatupwidat.livejournal.com]

Actually, during the writing and eary screen plays the dinosaur Deinonychus was being put forward as the first "man-sized" Velociraptor species. But the idea was rejected by scientists about halfway though the filming, so it was too late to change it.

However, even if Deinonychus was to be seen as a type of Velociraptor, it STILL wouldn't have looked like it did on Jurassic Park as scientists believe it had feathers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus

[haunter-uk.livejournal.com]

Utahraptors are still cooler.

[haunter-uk.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally - Saw a repeat of the QI episode the pic you're using is from last night.

I think I was begging Alan not to say Brontosaurus more this time round than I was last time round.

[rkniner.livejournal.com]

Is that an xkcd reference?

[eikenboom.livejournal.com]

Not precisely, but now I finally get all those jokes there.

[whatupwidat.livejournal.com]

Wow, you'd never seen it? I remember seeing in the cinema.

Seems fecked up to think that was 15 years ago.