Found on the Isle of Wight, bones of a dinosaur as big as a double-decker bus
A FOSSIL hunter has found the bones of Europe’s largest meat-eating dinosaur on the Isle of Wight.
Around the same height and length as a double-decker bus, the crocodile-faced White Rock spinosaurid was as big as a Tyrannosaurus rex and walked the Earth 125 million years ago.
The bones were analysed by scientists at the University of Southampton.
PhD student Chris Barker said: ‘This was a huge animal, exceeding 10m (32.8ft) in length and probably several tonnes in weight. It’s a shame it’s only... a small amount of material, but these are enough to show it was an immense creature.’
The bones of the White Rock spinosaurid – named after the geological layer in which they were found – include huge pelvic and tail vertebrae and some limb fragments, but no skull or teeth. They were found by Nick Chase, who has since died, near Compton Chine, on the island’s south-west coast, and are on display in the island’s Dinosaur Isle Museum in Sandown.
A spinosaurus was the main ‘villain’ in the movie, Jurassic Park III, and the Isle of Wight bones are from the same family.
Darren Naish, co-author of a study of the bones in the journal PeerJ, said: ‘We hope that additional remains will turn up.’
Jurassic World Dominion (12A, 146 mins)
Verdict: Last bite at the box office ★★★☆☆
NEXT June it will be three decades since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. I know that because it was the very week I became a parent, little realising that I was in for years of bloodcurdling roars and terrible, wanton destruction. The dinosaurs have been a handful, too.
We were also blissfully unaware back in 1993 that the mighty franchise, as it was to become, had barely shown its teeth. But with Jurassic World Dominion, the last film of the second Jurassic trilogy and sixth overall, it appears to have bellowed its last. We can only hope.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a dinosaur flick as much as the next cinemagoer, but there comes a point — and in the back row of Cineworld Leicester Square on Tuesday evening I reached it with half the film still to run — when scaly monster fatigue sets in. I can’t really narrow it down to a single moment or a particular creature. Let’s just blame it on the Beginningtoborus.
The story follows on from that of the last film, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but this time, as with all the best valedictory gigs, the whole band reassembles. That means Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum from the first trilogy joining latter-day heroes Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Several plots are fused, too, making it way more complicated than it needs to be.
Dinosaurs, no longer confined to an island, are now co-existing with humanity, mostly benignly but with occasional spots of bother... toothy brutes from the late Cretaceous period munching whole oil rigs, that kind of carry-on.
MEaNWHILE, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Dern) is convinced that a devastating plague of giant locusts has been genetically engineered by Biosyn, a shadowy biotech company run by dastardly scientist Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) and based for no apparent reason in the Dolomites. There, he has slyly programmed the locusts to devour all the world’s crops except those grown from Biosyn seed.
Ellie seeks out her old mucker, paleontologist alan Grant (Neill), to help her prove her case. Still fancying her rotten after all these years, he agrees. But there is a parallel narrative going on, involving 14-year-old Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon,) who, you might recall from last time, was cloned using her brilliant mother’s DNA.
according to the artful Dodgson, this makes her ‘the most valuable intellectual property on the planet’. It is also why velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Pratt) and his girlfriend, former Jurassic Park manager Claire Dearing (Howard), having adopted Maisie, are trying to keep her hidden deep in an american forest. But not for long. Soon she is kidnapped by rascally mercenaries and on her way to the Dolomites.
This development, almost exactly the opposite of what you might call a turn-up for the books, enables director Colin Trevorrow to embark on some cloning of his own. Even without a granite-jawed Liam Neeson in hot pursuit of the kidnappers, the Taken movies echo loudly. So, for that matter, do the Indiana Jones and James Bond films.
Biosyn’s mountain lair is interchangeable with any of Blofeld’s; and more shamelessly still, Jurassic World Dominion even gives us a sexy lesbian pilot (DeWanda Wise), just like Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964).
In fairness, Trevorrow has now been involved either as writer or director in all three of the Jurassic World films, so maybe even he is running out of T. Rex ideas.
Still, he is a skilled choreographer of action sequences and there are two or three terrific examples here, with the usual slick computergenerated effects, though it gets a little wearisome knowing (and I really don’t think this counts as a spoiler) that even the most ruthlessly carnivorous dinosaurs seem to prefer the taste of baddies.
It’s also good to see Goldblum back again as wise-cracking boffin Dr Ian Malcolm, who gets most of the movie’s best lines.
But on the whole this is not a Jurassic classic, just an overlong attempt to get one more bite at those box-office dollars, with a solemn evolutionary message at the end designed to kid us that we’ve seen something profound.
On my way to the cinema on Tuesday, a good pal of mine, also an Ian, happened to call me. He asked what I was going to see. I told him it was the sixth film in the Jurassic series. Quick as a flash, he said: ‘Is this the one where they die out?’ If only.