The Jurassic period, according to history textbooks, was not renowned for etiquette or polite manners.
In the recently released "Jurassic Park,"a delegation from that time in the Mesozoic era makes a general mess of their tropical island home, ignores traffic rules, eats people and spits.
Mammals began to evolve just before the Jurassic, 215 million years ago,but they never made it past the nocturnal, tree-dwelling, embarrassing rat-like stage until the dinosaurs became extinct. Wonder why? Just see the movie -- for the 150 million years they were roaming around, the dinosaurs must have been just completely out of control.
In the theater you will witness an extraordinary scientific breakthrough, one that has brought the dinosaurs back to life after their bones lay dead in the ground for millions of years, long enough for birds to evolve flight and mammals to learn genetic engineering.
But this breakthrough doesn't come from the field of biotechnology-- rather, the science of computer animation. An advance in the technology of movie-making suspends disbelief over the fanciful accomplishment portrayed in the movie, the use of fossilized DNA to resurrect dinosaurs.
According to Newsweek, the movie's special effects were based on those used in "Terminator 2" to create the machine that looked real but unnatural. The challenge in Jurassic Park was to create animals that looked real but natural, too. Director Steven Spielberg made equal use of animation and life-size models to create his dinosaurs.
Spielberg's star, a small, smart, human-sized carnivorous dinosaur which stood upright, called Velociraptor, has a real-life natural history which changed modern evolutionary theory.
As explained in a book by science journalist John Wilford, the discovery of this animal's fossilized bones provided the first proof that not all dinosaurs were slow and sluggish reptiles, but rather that some were warm-blooded and agile, like the hyperactive beasts in Jurassic Park.
Man first discovered this creature in the Mongolian desert in the first half of this century, but it was re-discovered in the 1960s when paleontologists uncovered a slightly different skeleton in Montana with a twelve centimeter, saber-like claw on each three-toed foot.
Scientists believed that in order for the animal to use its legs to kill, it would have to jump and slash. A modern-day reptile can move quickly, but cannot use its hind legs in this fashion, as do some flightless birds, warm-blooded, that kill small prey with their claws. The animal was given the name Deinonychus, meaning "terrible claw."
Scientific inquiry into dinosaur physiology continued since then and led to the new vision of dinosaurs depicted by Spielberg.
Although "Jurassic Park" has none of the science, little of the plot and only a tiny fraction of the action contained in the book of the same name by Michael Crichton, it is enough for a terrific movie.
This was the only film I've ever seen that caused a packed theater to scream, which made it a lot of fun. The material is not suitable for small children, and if you own a goat or a cow, definitely leave it home.
Sam Neill is good as Alan Grant, a role based on a renowned American paleontologist. Jeff Goldblum is very amusing as the cynical mathematician Ian Malcolm, and Wayne Knight is brilliant as the sloppy, corrupt and doomed computer programmer Dennis Nedry. The music, written by composer John Williams of Star Wars and Indiana Jones fame, sets different moods of terror and drama well.
I was baffled by one line in the credits -- "Any similarity between events portrayed in this movie and real events is purely coincidental." And also, the credit for "animal trainer." Exactly which animals was this person training? My theory is that in order to make the movie, Spielberg actually had to clone miniature dinosaurs. Imagine that... little jungly beasts, running around on the set, maybe eating somebody's dog. But whatever your dinosaur theory, make sure you see Jurassic Park.
