What’s that crashing through the trees again?

DINOSAUR EXPERT STEVE BRUSATTE ON JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION AND WHY SCOTLAND IS PALEONTOLOGY’S NEW FRONTIER

IN the early summer of 2018, Steve Brusatte received an email which changed his life – no small feat for a man who, as one of the world’s leading paleontologists, has had his fair share of Wow! moments in the field as complete dinosaur skeletons have emerged from the earth in front of his eyes.

Over a Zoom link from his Edinburgh home the genial American takes up the story. Picture the scene: a click of the mouse and the message opens.

“It was very brief. It said: ‘Hi Steve, my name’s Colin. I make scientifically inaccurate dinosaur films. I’ve just read your book and I’d like to talk more’.”

The book, The Rise And Fall Of The Dinosaurs, had been published just a few weeks earlier. It tells the story of the dinosaurs’ reign and eventual extinction, lays out some of Brusatte’s own findings – the 38-year-old Illinois native is currently Reader in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Edinburgh – and sets them in the context of a discipline in which old theories are constantly revised as new ones are aired, based on an ever-growing number of discoveries. It’s what makes fossil hunting so exciting: you never know what you will find and what that will mean for the science.

The correspondent purported to be one Colin Trevorrow. Brusatte knew the name, of course. What dinosaur expert wouldn’t? Trevorrow is the American director and co-writer of the first two titles in a new instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise which began in 2015 with Jurassic World. A sequel, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, followed in 2018. To date, the movies have taken over £2.3 billion at the box office.

Unsurprisingly, Brusatte thought the email was a joke. “It wasn’t from some official studio address or anything so I thought it was my students playing a trick on me or some colleague thinking: ‘Steve’s got a book out, let’s keep his ego in check’.”

Wrong. It was the Colin Trevorrow. Brusatte eventually replied and a phone call was arranged. “We chatted and he said: ‘I’m coming up to Edinburgh for the Fringe.

Let’s meet up and talk dinosaurs’. I said: ‘Colin, do you like whisky?’”

And so the pair met in the august surrounds of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society on Queen Street. It was too early in the day for uisge beatha so they drank coffee instead. But they talked for hours. About dinosaurs, obviously, but specifically about Jurassic World Dominion, the third film in the Jurassic World franchise and the one Trevorrow was about to start writing.

“Colin said: ‘I want to introduce a bunch of new dinosaurs and I want to put feathers on some of them and I’d love you to help me do it’. So he put his cards on the table right away. I said absolutely. At that point I was still just a fan of the franchise. But he showed just through the conversation