?Jurassic Park 4?: Bring On The Feathered Dinosaurs!

The news of Jurassic Park 4 probably sent a lot of you scrambling for your brain's groan button, and I can't blame you. Though the original film is an important milestone in special effects, and boasts the last decent score John Williams ever wrote*, it preserved Michael Crichton's dubious grasp of human nature and the book's b-movie philosophizing - and the less said about the sequels, the better (especially the second film, which seems to consist largely of references to classic monster movies).

Still! The dinosaurs, even the ones created using paleolithic CGI back in 1993, look insanely great, and given the advances in special effects that have occurred just in the 12 years since Jurassic Park 3 we can look forward to even more spectacular sauropods. But it isn't just CGI that has advanced in the last twenty years; paleontology has also made some rather amazing discoveries.

Beginning with the discovery of the feathered Sinosauropteryx fossil in 1996, over 30 new specimens have been found, and scientists are beginning to conclude that almost all dinosaur species probably had a coat of feathers. That sounds like a small difference, but it's huge when you consider how radically that changes the appearance of these beasts.

Despite the fact that the first feathered fossils of Archaeopertyx were discovered in the 1860s, dinosaurs were still seen in a largely reptilian context until quite recently. The 1970s and '80s saw some major breakthroughs (among them the acceptance of the asteroid collision theory of dinosaur extinction), but even though the relationship between birds and dinosaurs was becoming more fully understood, that context remained the norm.

Now, it would be a mistake to assume anything in Crichton's novel is scientific, but his book did make great effort to plausibly reflect…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/jurassic-park-4-bring-on-the-feathered-dinosaurs/

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