Dinosaur movie a world away from scientific fact

IT IS only hoped that the “good incentive for academic performance” (“Jurassic thrill for next gen”, TB, 23/ 6) was intended as a reward/ bribe for the Year 7s viewing Jurassic World in 3D, and not as a learning experience.

It is just a pity that the executive producer Steven Spielberg did not hire as a technical adviser one of the palaeontologists so critical on social media of the movie.

Even the zoologist in the 1999 BBC mockumentary Walking with Dinosaurs captures his first dinosaur, a mononykus, with a pillowcase to show it had brightly coloured feathers.

When speculation was mounting about what new scientific theories would be advanced in the current monster/ mad scientist movie, the director tweeted “No feathers”.

There was, however, the juxtaposing of a blackbird and a slide viewer of prehistoric lizards in the opening scene and an unintelligible commentary about the evolution of birds still playing in the evacuated display room under siege from the genetically modified monster.

It is also debatable whether it was necessary to create a new hybrid gigantic dinosaur indominus rex except to make the point consumers are insatiable in their desire for something bigger and better.

They apparently already had feeding sessions with an apinosaurus aegyptiacus, an aquatic predator that was the biggest to have ever existed.

Two land- dwelling predators larger than tyrannosaurus rex were also known to have thrived, giganotosaurus and spinosaurus. Like the raptors, these hunted in packs. Evidently they didn’t eat their siblings.

Jurassic World is a self- reflective self- parody, very conscious of its spinoff products. Jurassic World merchan- dise is now in toy departments in the form of plastic dilophosaurus, stegosaurus, and pterodactyl.

While Clive Palmer’s T- rex Jeff became extinct after an electrical fire, it is mooted that the tyrannosaurus rex may not have died out but evolved into one of the 10,000 species of birds alive today.

It is also claimed that we may have again a planet inhabited with large reptiles and small mammals, as was the pattern produced 55 million years ago with global warming. WILLIAM ROSS,

Cranbrook.