WARNING: RANTING AND SWEARING AHEAD

Here are a few points as to why they didn't have to complain:

1. It's a fucking movie!

2. It's fiction, meaning it's not fucking real!

3. the Dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptile are genetically fucking engineered, so the scientists could have altered the genes to make the Mosasaur bigger, and for all we know it might be the D.N.A. from some as-yet undiscovered species of super-large Mosasaur that they managed to get hold of by sheer luck

Did paleontologists not take any of this into account, you guys have to realise there's a line between being factual and entertaining, If you saw the Walking with Dinosaurs movie you'll know exactly what I mean, I'm all for a factual Dinosaur documentary, but really!? 90 minutes!? I got bored after 20, how the hell's a kid supposed to stay interested, if it was just some pathetic little 7 meter Mosasaur then the kids, and the average viewer won' be that impressed, but make it 25 or even 50 meters, now you've got the audiences attention.

Though admittedly Universal could have avoided all this bullshit if they had smoothed the skin, changed the jaw and flippers, coloured it black & white and called it a Leopluradon, those fuckers reached 25 meters long:

Rant over.

also, am I the only one that thinks 'Leopluradon Pit' sounds so much better than 'Mosasaur tank'

3838685 Don't forget the rapters, dude. The rapters were way too big but that was believed by many fans/viewers that they grew that big.

3838695 I do believe Spielberg actually later turned around and said that they were Deinonychus, not Velociraptors, it was because they were referred to as just raptors (At least i remember it that way, I don't remember them ever being specifically labeled as velociraptors) that paleontologists thought 'They must mean Velociraptors, those ill informed amateurs! '

Seriously though, the Paleontology community does piss me off at times when it comes to things like this, they never seem to have the capacity for suspension of disbelief.

3838685 3838695 Wait.... You mean that WASN'T a Liopleurodon?!

Well I can see being bugged by that, but then again Jurassic Park has been playing fast and loose with actual dino physiology since day one.

Also during that whole raptor controversy in the first movie, Dr. James Kirkland and Rob Gaston unearthed the real-life giant raptor that was shown in the movie only bigger!

The standard JP Raptors are clearly Deinonychus size. Also they DID identify the species as Velociraptor in the first movie, but that was like one scene they did and kept referring to them as just raptors in pretty much EVERY movie since. I mean they stuck the name raptor on them so they gotta stick with it. While not accurate, Deinonychus IS within the Dromaeosaurid class and has the same characteristics. Difference being size obviously.

As for nitpicking from the Paleontologists goes, why not be angry that the raptors don't have feathers now?! I mean it's been discovered they had them, in 2007 they found hard evidence that they did and yet in the trailer they clearly don't!

I'm not mad about it personally because

1: It's been 21 years since the first movie and in EVERY movie the raptors have been portrayed without them. Suddenly HAVING them with feathers would be confusing to a LOT of people since in the Jurassic Park Universe Dromaeosaurids apparently DIDN'T have feathers!

2: It's a movie series that uses fake, yet real sounding, science to clone dinosaurs from fossilized mosquitoes, and using FROG DNA to fill out the gaps they find. In fact, THAT fact alone should be enough to assume that there would be differences! They have to MESS WITH THE ORIGINAL DNA TO MAKE THEM!

3838757 actually, the JP3 male 'Raptors' had quill-like feathers on the head and neck, it wasn't much, but that, coupled with the subtle differences in skin colours (There was a bit of red and dark blue, as well as a white stripe), was enough to make some difference.

where as the females retained the classic look

3838767 True, but then again it's been stated they were COVERED in feathers like so

Mark my words, that will be an issue once the movie comes out. Really the only reason they complain is so the average person not interested in paleontology will listen to them for a small amount of time.

I've always seen it like this. There's being educational and boring, there's being educational and fun, and then there's just being fun. People got to the movies, generally speaking, to have FUN. If they learn something fine, but when they go to see a Jurassic Park movie they expect to see dinos mauling people!

3838784 Yep, 'Factual' and 'Cinema' don't really go together, unless it's Morgan Freeman narrating it (March or the Penguins anyone?)

Walking With Dinosaurs: The Movie was a fucking insult to the original series, it tried to be entertaining and failed miserably. It would have been so much better if they got rid of the voice acting and made it in the style of a real nature documentary like the original series. with the original natator too, not some mexican dude (no offence intended, i just couldn't take him seriously).

3838802 Or that Lemur movie.... Which name escapes me at the moment.

And that's just it isn't? Walking with Dinosaurs, and later Walking with Prehistoric Beasts(Also there was Before the Dinosaurs), anyway! Point is they delivered what they were selling. An actual, documentary styled look at dinosaurs. It was entertaining, to me at least, but then again I've always liked nature shows.

The movie... All they did was rip off Disney's Dinosaur!

Yeah if you EVER wanted a sub-par sequel to that movie? The Walking with Dinosaurs movie has ya covered!

3838826 I've always preferred Documentary style productions when it came to dinosaurs, though Disney's Dinosaur was good, because it didn't try to make it a documentary, it went for a straight up adventure movie with talking dinosaurs, not a Big Brother-esc drama like...*urgh* 'THAT'

Also, if you like documentaries, you might like this

It uses CGI to help explain how predators are so good at what they do, and it's narrated in a soft Scottish accent, so that's a plus.

Link to a playlist with the full series: You're welcome

I never thought the battle for survival between a bed of molluscs and a fucking snail(!) would be so interesting (I kid you not, that's one of the sections in a later episode)

I think the real problem is that people that know little too nothing about prehistoric animals will believe this info, and as a dino nerd it really annoys me when people say pterosaurs or plesiosaurs are dinosaurs and other stuff like this, but I have accepted the fact that Hollywood simply doesn't give a s**t about being factually correct, especially when it comes to prehistoric creatures.

Tl;dr: People are complaining because it's spreading misinformation about their jobs and their studies in ways that are very easy to remedy and take only a few seconds of a writers' time. Also because reality is often much cooler than fiction. Take the mosasaur, for instance. While mosasaurs never got that big, they were a lot skinnier and faster and still reached the size of a right whale. Plus, they had a reinforced snout made to work like a battering ram at the front of their heads. Bad. Ass.

3838685

It's a fucking movie

Which would be harmless, except many people can't tell the difference and so get the wrong idea about our trade. This franchise is why I have to explain to people in the museum why our Dilophosaurs a) don't have frills, b) didn't spit acid and c) were about double the size they thought they were. It's also why I have to explain to people again and again that T-Rex could see motionless prey and that was just a really stupid plot point in that one movie they saw. Sort of like the paleontology version of this.

3838784

It's fiction, meaning it's not fucking real

People go to the movies, generally speaking, to have FUN

Except it's presented in a realistic style, tries to have the "creation of dinosaurs" excuse seem plausible and, most tellingly, hires professional paleontologists for every movie to help chip in on advice. It's clear they want to seem realistic, which is inherently problematic because it gives the impression of accuracy without actually having said accuracy.

Walking With Dinosaurs has this problem, too, actually. Many of the animals they portray living together didn't (such as the Utahraptors in Europe with the ankylosaur and the Iguanodons, which never would have happened because Europe was actually a set of tiny islands like Malaysia is today way back then and couldn't support dinos that big. Instead, Europe had miniature tyrannosaurs called Eotyrannus that likely also hunted in packs), several of the animals have been given names that don't match up (the allosaur in Spirits of the Ice Forest is probably not an allosaur and is known only from footprints, the mammal ancestors in New Dawn are from unnamed material and yet are given another cynodont species' name) and several animals are scaled up (Ornithocheirus--the "giant of the skies"--was about half as big as they showed it being, and this despite their being a pterosaur bigger than it was shown to be in the show called Hatzegopteryx from the same region that came only slightly later in age.).

Even the "Liopleurodon" you posted is vastly oversize. The real Liopleurodon was tiny. HOWEVER. There was a mystery animal about that size that took a bite of an animal named Liopleurodon and left teeth grooves the size of tyrannosaur heads in the bones.

Also note--I love Walking With Dinosaurs and I'm a huge Jurassic Park fan (the book more than the movie, but still). I mean, they contain dinosaurs and celebrate everything that was amazing and wonderful about them. They encourage and inspire people to become paleontologists and enjoy the magical world of prehistory, much like The Land Before Time did for me and The Lost World did for people before that. I just wish these sources were more careful to advertise the fact that not everything they are presenting is true and some of the things they've done is exaggerated for entertainment's sake. Walking With Dinosaurs released an awesome, awesome book doing basically just this called Walking With Dinosaus: The Evidence, and its other literature (which is worth reading because it's got a different set of storylines from the original documentaries) is also quick to point this out. Jurassic Park's book (and to a lesser extent the first film) handles this nicely by making it more obvious that these dinosaurs are not real dinosaurs but rather messes of frog-dino-and-other-species-DNA, and thus don't get all their traits from real dinos (which is why the Rex can only see movement (common among some giant predator frogs) and why the raptors have no feathers).