Short Wave - Dino-mite! Meet The Real Stars of 'Jurassic World: Dominion'

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Move over, T-Rex. There are new, (mostly) more accurate dinosaurs to squeal over in 'Jurassic World: Dominion', the sixth and reportedly final film of the Jurassic film franchise. Join us to get to know them a little more with help from Riley Black, a paleontologist and author of the book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.Want to hear more about the science in pop culture? Or maybe just want to show your support for our continued coverage of dinosaurs? Let us know by e-mailing [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. For going on 30 years, we've been dreaming about what it would be like if the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were let loose on the world. Well, now we have an answer. The newest movie in the series, Jurassic World Dominion, takes place four years after dinosaurs escaped into America and started to spread. And our heroes are variously scattered in different places. Some are digging up more fossils.

Some have changed career tracks entirely. Some are hiding out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Riley Black is a paleontologist and author of the book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. She's written extensively about the scientific joys and shortcomings of the Jurassic franchise. And the big thing, I guess, that's trying to move this movie forward, right, is the Locust Plod. They're multiplying like crazy and they're not dying. What part of this, don't you understand? Well, I do understand.

This is going to be a global foreman. A company called Biosin has been secretly modifying the DNA of locusts with DinoD DNA. And Biosin is also managing all the world's dinosaurs, it seems, and their own private compounds. Blyison bought this land for the Amher deposits back in the 90s, but we've managed to turn into a safe haven for about 20 displaced species. All our characters sort of converge on this area in like the Dolomite Mountains where the Biosin compound is, where they're trying to unravel this nefarious plot to destroy the world's food supply, well, there are also dinosaurs running around. And that's about as clean a through line as I can find for this. This is the equivalent of when you're a kid and you get your first set

of dinosaur toys and you take them to the sandbox or amongst your Lego set or whatever, and you just have them fight each other. It's kind of a $100 million plus version. So today on the show, we face down some of the most spectacular new prehistoric stars of the final Jurassic Park movie. And we explore how studying dinosaurs will always require a hearty dose of imagination. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Thera podcast from NPR. Okay, Riley, the best part of this film was for sure the new dinosaurs that we get to meet. And that reminds me a bit of an article you wrote in 2013 a couple years before the first Jurassic World movie came out, where you described several dinosaurs that you wanted to see in the new films based on the latest science.

It's almost like the filmmakers read your article because one of the most scene-stealing new dynos was your top pick from 2013. Would you please introduce us to Therazinosaurus? Oh my goodness. Therzinosaurus is just, it's such a wonderful dinosaur. With a wonderful name. Yeah. So this is like a T-Rex-sized sloth dinosaur with claws that are more than three feet long. on each of its hands, which seems incredibly like overkill, like it's a definite like Freddie Kruger kind of luck

and we're still not entirely sure what it was doing with these things. We think that it's some kind of herb before, but we don't really know. But that was one of my favorites because, like, how can you see this animal and not want to see it alive? It really instills the wonder of what dinosaurs were, the fascination with it being like, okay, how does this animal work?

It's kind of this mishmash of all these different anatomical points behaving in this strange way. And I read that one idea is maybe they use the claws to, you know, like, claw through the underbrush or trees and, like, scoop up their food. But, I mean, these claws, they're like this size of baseball bats. Yeah. Speaking of, I mean, the Jurassic Park movies have always been obsessed with the apex predators. It took fish and wildlife three years to catch the T-Rex. The T-Rex is here.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. This newest film has a new big batty. Don't move. Gigonadosaurus or giganadosaurus. Introduce us to this big, terrifying meat eater. Right. Well, I mean, T-Rex has always been the dinosaur to beat, right?

Since 1905, it's always been heralded as the biggest and the most ferocious. But particularly in the 1990s, we started finding fossils, particularly in South America, of these large carnivorous dinosaurs called carcarid dinosaurs and the biggest of them is giganodosaurus and we don't know exactly how big it's going to be. We don't have complete fossils of this particular dinosaurs.

We have this bit of jaw and this bit of jaw is really huge. So if we scale that up, you know, with the body proportions that we expected it had, it was as big if not slightly larger than Tyrannosaurus tracts. So it certainly would have been able to go toe to toe a T-rex if they ever met, which they wouldn't have, because they lived on different continents, millions of years apart.

But it was a different kind of predator, really. When you look at T-Rex, you can see how big and bulky that skull is. It's all about bite force, really, being able to crush bone. Gigonotosaurus and its relatives, its mouth isn't really as powerful, doesn't have as powerful a bite. It's more about shearing flesh. And to your earlier point is very much like kids in a sandbox being like, My dinosaur can beat up your dinosaur.

I mean, it's just always throwing somebody against T-Rex. I feel like there's that aspect as well. You have the kids who just want to smash the dinosaurs together, and then there's the kids like me. It's like, well, actually, they never would have met. And, you know, that's why I get kicked out of the sandbox. Oh, man, I would be over with you. While we're talking about the biggies.

Is that a cat's a co-atlas? Late Cretaceous should have stayed there. who are introduced to when it rips apart our hero's airplane. Yeah, so that was a great moment as in, like, it was just absolutely absurd because Quetzelcoatlis is this terrosaur, right? So it's not a dinosaur, it's a relative of dinosaurs, one of the biggest ones we know of. And they're the flying creatures like pterodactals and whatnot, right? That's right, yeah.

So, like, the Taranodon that we've been seeing since, you know, the Lost World Jurassic Park. It's, like, basically a larger version of that. like the size of a giraffe, but it could fly. In order to do that, they had to be incredibly light. Their bones are almost like paper thin. You know, I weigh about as much as a Ketzelkolaus would have. So you see it just kind of shredding a plane like it was made out of aluminum foil or something that's like, okay, I don't know how they supercharged this animal.

But, yeah, it's this amazing sort of terrestrial stalker. They kind of folded their wings and they could shuffle around. And they got most of their food by plucking up little dinosaurs are probably smaller than themselves. And terrors have been such a threat through all these movies that that one was also on my wish list. Like, if you want a scary terroesore, think about being on the ground and seeing something that's at giraffe height looking down at you, knowing that I could probably swallow you if it wanted to. And that's a pretty frightening animal. And giraffe height, but with a head that seems almost as big as the body. That's right.

The first Jurassic Park movie came out in 1993, and as you've talked about since then, there's been just an explosion in what we know about dinosaurs, especially how they looked. Of course, the movies have been criticized because they've mostly stuck with the drab-scaly naked reptiles that Steven Spielberg first dreamed up. That really finally changed with this movie, and its portrayal of the Pyroraptor. Tell us a little bit about this critter. Well, you know, dinosaurs have great names, and sometimes the name precedes what we actually know about the animal. You could hold the known remains of Pyroraptor in one hand. And in the film, they're about the size of the movies of the Lost Raptor. Like, they're about human size and covered in red feathers.

And this is the one that dives beneath the ice and is swimming around. When really, like, we know very little about what this animal is actually like. And that's the case for many dinosaurs. Like even though we're naming a new dinosaur species about every two weeks or so from the fossil record, the fact of the matter is most of those are partial skeletons. There's a species of Velasiraptor, for example,

that's only known from one bone in the upper jaw. We can compare them to their relatives and get some idea. But if you were to put the real-life version of Pyro Raptor, which was a little bit larger than like a raven, next to the film version, you might have a few questions about how they got from one to the other. The one thing that it did do that reflects science that I feel like people have been just waiting for is they put feathers on it, which is something that Jurassic Park is so avoided for so long. Yeah, it was nice to see fluffy dinosaurs in this one.

Like we've known that there were many feathered dinosaurs, especially the theropods, the ones that are most closely related to birds, since about the time that the Lost World Jurassic Park came out. But it was still good to see between Pyrorapter, a therzee. dinosaurs and a little tyrannosaur called Moros, and things were much fuzzier than they've previously been. I mean, it seems like in many ways that pop culture tends to treat science as if it's set and sown, and there's even a moment in this film where they're like, science is the truth. It's in the rocks. Oh, my goodness.

But something you read about in your new book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, and you've written about an essays, really clicked with me as I watched the movie. And that is that dinosaurs and paleontology, really exist at the intersection of science and imagination. What do you mean by that? Well, that we need to use our imaginations to bring dinosaurs to life again, and to be able to say anything more than this animal existed. We need to take some of those liberties.

And we do this as well, as much as we might critique the films, the fact is I've read scientific papers, like a new dinosaur will be named, and the researchers will say, it probably dug in the ground and it probably ate insects. Well, based on what? It's like, well, based upon how the skeleton looks. It's like, okay, well, that's an idea, but that's not a conclusion. And I think that's the important part for us to always keep in mind is kind of where does what we know stop and where does our speculation start?

Imagination doesn't have to be a dirty word in science. We are always sort of on the edge of the unknown. So I love the fact that in film and in science, our dinosaurs continue to change really with us and what we think about that. at any given time. So we've been talking about dinosaurs because, of course, that is the focus of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. But your new book argues it's time, maybe, that we start paying attention to what happened after the asteroid hit and the dinoes all disappeared.

So I'd love to end on an early mammal that makes a cameo in the movie. Will you tell us a little bit about it and why you think maybe we should start looking past the dinosaurs? some. Yeah, that's the thing right, is that we think about the Mesozoic world as being like the age of dinosaurs and everything was dinosaurs. And in fact, there are lots of other animals that were there. They had to be there because if nothing else, dinosaurs often needed something to eat. So there had to be other organisms, including mammals. Like during the Mesozoic, you have the first mammals appear at the same time as the first dinosaurs do. And they thrived alongside dinosaurs. And even prior to that, it was proto-mammals. running the show. And there are a couple that show up in Jurassic World Dominion. There's a little one called Lestrosaurus that makes a little cameo in the marketplace.

This thing kind of looks like a pig almost. It's got a beak and it's got tusks. But the one that makes a larger appearance a little bit later is Demetrodon. And this is this classic one. It looks kind of like a supercharged monitor lizard with a big sail on its back. And it lived long before the earliest dinosaurs, but it's more closely related to us. and when you look at the history of life and you look at the way that mass extinctions have affected sort of what species are around and which are most prominent in the landscape,

our own relatives, like those proto-mammals that we see in the latest Jurassic World Film, we're also there, and they're a critical part of the story. They didn't just appear once dinosaurs went off the stage. Our story is very much intertwined with theirs. Riley Black, thank you so much for dreaming about dinosaurs with us. Oh, it's always best to share dinosaur dreams. Thank you so much.

Today's episode was produced by Rebecca T. Rex Ramirez, edited by our senior supervising editor, Giselle Supersaurus Grayson, and fact-checked by Rachel Dreadnottis Carlson. Our audio engineer was Trey Velociraptor Watson, and our programming Titanosaurs, our senior director, Beth Donovan, and senior vice president, Anya Grunman. You know me, I'm just a little fluffy,

Morris Intrepidus. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.