Short Wave - How Realistic Are Movie Dinosaurs?

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Jurassic Park: Rebirth is the latest installment in the Jurassic World series. And while dinosaur paleontologist Matt Lamanna has loved dinos — and the Jurassic Park franchise — his whole life, he says some of the films are more accurate than others. So how accurate are the ones unveiled in this latest movie? Matt gets into it with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber, who got a tour of the dinosaur exhibits where Matt works: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. They also discuss the accuracy of the beloved giant creatures in the newest Jurassic World film, as well as some of the hits from the franchise's archive — like the dinosaur he was partially responsible for discovering. Want us to cover more natural history? Tell us by emailing [e-mail]! We'd love to know what you want to hear from us.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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. Picture you're sitting in the plush seats of a movie theater, popcorn in hand, sour patch kids next to you, and on screen you're staring at an enormous T-Rex chasing its prey. That's part of the plot of many movies in the Jurassic Park franchise. And as a scientist, as much as I love some movie magic, I've always wondered how close are those dinosaurs on screen to the creatures that actually walked, flew, and swam on Earth millions of years.

years ago. So the scene in Jurassic Park. This is the OG Jurassic Park. You know, where you can't see us if we don't move. It's actually extra problematic with T-Rex because it probably had one of the best visual acuity in any dinosaur. That's Matt LaManna, a dinosaur paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He's loved dino's his whole life. I told my parents I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was four years old, supposedly. I recently took a trip to the museum to talk Jurassic World with Matt. He's one of the curators who helped design the dinosaur exhibits at the museum. He gave me a tour. Most of what you see in the dinosaur gallery are real fossils. So there's about, you know,

roughly 250 specimens on display, and about 75% of those are the actual fossils. So those three are real, for instance. These like fishy looking ones, they're real fossils. Yeah, yep. But these are what are called ichthyosaurs. So just for the people that see the Jurassic World movie that mostosaurus is described as a swimming dinosaur, it's not. It's actually more closely related to lizards. Matt and I got to talk about the latest movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, released July 2nd. Jurassic World Rebirth. It's in theaters now.

It's about a group of mercenaries led by Scarlett Johansson and a paleontologist played by Jonathan Bailey. And they're hired to extract blood from three of the largest dinosaurs living in this fictional present day. In this story, the blood from all three creatures is the key to creating a cure for heart disease. If we get this DNA, millions of lots are saved. But putting movie magic aside, Matt told me the series definitely gets some things more right than others. So dinosaurs weren't the only giant reptiles that were around during the Mesozoic era, commonly known as the age of dinosaurs, that also included many groups of different marine reptiles that aren't dinosaurs, including mosasaurus, and these guys here, which are called pterosaurs. A lot of people call them pterodactyls, and they're not quite dinosaurs. And when it came to this new Jurassic World series, Matt got to play a role in a dino's design.

A dinosaur he helped discover. So today on the show, dinosaurs on screen. We talk with the paleontologist about the beloved giant creatures in the newest Jurassic World film and the accuracy of some others in the franchise. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Matt, you said you loved dinosaurs since you, like, were a little kid. was it like seeing Jurassic Park for the first time, that first film? So I was in high school when the first Jurassic Park came out, and I remember very distinctly, like, when the first scene of that brachiosaurus walks on screen, like, you know, it's the classic

scene where the paleontologist Alan Grant grabs the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler's head and they get out of the Jeep and there's this gigantic, majestic animal there, you know, browsing from the top of a tree and trumpeting and all these things. My brain must have just, just gone into like overdrive or something. Like it was like, it was like somebody had put on the big screen what I'd been imagining my whole life. And it was totally, totally mind-blowing to see that, you know, on the big screen. So you loved Jurassic Park movies.

And then like later in your life, you actually got a chance to be part of one Jurassic World movie. Like you and your team discovered a dinosaur called Dreadnoughtus. And this dinosaur showed up in the last movie, Jurassic World Dominion. How did you find this new dinosaur dreadnoughtus? Well, so it's from southern Patagonia, Argentina, in particular Santa Cruz province. It's near these two beautiful glacial lakes. I walk up the side of a mountain because I always do this.

I'm always like the best-looking rocks are going to have the best-looking fossils in them, and I've got to get up to the side of the hill. So I'm playing music and I'm walking up, prospecting the whole time, and I found virtually nothing that day. But I turn around and I see my three Patagonian friends, Lucio, Gabrielle and Marcello gathered around this very, like, nondescript looking spot of Badlands, but they were all standing there for a long time. So I was like, something is going on. So I came down the hill and I joined them. And when I got there, they had already uncovered the

six foot three, so 1.9 something meter long femur thigh bone of what would become dreadnoughtus. And so then we, this was when it got really cool. Like it's one thing to find a, an isolated bone of a giant dinosaur, but we dug towards the, you know, kind of the knee end of the thigh bone, and lo and behold, there was the shin bone. And then we dug a little further, and there was the ankle bone, and then there was some tail vertebrae over here. And we, this was the first day we were there. And so we knew right away that we have part of a skeleton of a giant titanosaur, a giant, you know, sauropod dinosaur. So titanosaurs are a type of sorrapod. And so Dreadnoughtus is a sauropod dinosaur. So every dinosaur you've ever seen in your life that looks like a brannosaurus, so to speak. So with a small head, a long neck, big elephant-like body and long tail, these are all called sauropod dinosaurs. And Dreadnoughtus is another kind of sauropod. So it is, and it actually is fairly closely related to brachiosaurus from that original Jurassic Park.

Titanosaurus is what the huge like sauropod dinosaur is called in this new film Jurassic World Rebirth. It's so humongous. It's got this really, really long neck and these really, really, really. really long, skinny tails. Are any of those features real? Well, so titanosaurs are, they're a group of sauropods. So they're like a, you know, a family of sauropods. You know, think in a loose sense, like a breed of dog or something like that. And so titanosaurs, the group, were super diverse, you know, again, ranging in size from a humpback whale to a cow, lived on every continent, you know, ranged in time for tens of millions of years. So there was a new dinosaur in this one. Probably, this dinosaur was probably one of my favorites in this movie. This new little,

like, baby-like dinosaur. It almost looked like a pet. It almost, it acted like a cat or a dog. Equalapse is how I would pronounce it. It's an older, so geologically older and much, much smaller, hornless relative of triceratops, like distant relative of triceratops. And it's, yeah, I've seen little clips of the, of the thing, and it looks adorable. Can you tell me the best example of, like, accurate dinosaurs, accurate dinosaurs in the franchise? Oh, that's a good question. The T-Rex is pretty awesome, I will say. And what I've heard is the new T-Rex, the one that's in the current movie, is even more accurate than previous. But in the first movie, when the paleontologist Alan Grant tells the kids, you know, freeze if you, you, it can't see if you don't move. this was back then not defensible and now is not defensible at all.

T-Rex, I mean, certainly could see you if you didn't move. In fact, it probably had some of the best vision of any predatory dinosaur. It's a big thing in the movie. Yeah, exactly. Well, the other thing is, like, it's based on this idea that the paleontology consultant for the original Jurassic Park is one of my all-time heroes, a guy named Jack Horner. and he had this long-standing idea that T-Rex was primarily a scavenger, and so it had a really big, well-developed sense of smell.

But on top of that, in that scene, if you remember it, the T-Rex actually nuzzles the people. And so if it, like, has a good sense of smell, it's going to eat you anyway. So there's so much wrong with that scene. I can't even take it. This is the dumbest thing that they did in Jurassic Park was make the T-Rex not only not be able to see you, but also not be able to smell you. It makes for an incredibly dramatic scene, and I will give it that.

Like, you know, you think for sure they're goneers, right? And that was the point. But I feel like there's other ways they could have done that where, you know, they didn't turn this, you know, one of the most awesome killing machines that's ever evolved into this completely inept, like hapless, like thing that can't see you or smell you. In the latest Jurassic Park, well, in the latest Jurassic Park movie, I found a couple things interesting. One of the things I found really interesting is that they keep on talking about how the dinosaurs wouldn't survive outside of the tropics. Like, this is a new thing for the series, and all of a sudden the dynos are only kind of isolated to near the equator.

Why would that be true, if it would be? Well, it's probably not true. It is true that the age of dinosaurs, the Mesozoic era, was much warmer on average than it is today. However, we have dinosaur fossils from the north slope of Alaska. all the way down to 500 miles from the South Pole in Antarctica. These areas, they would have certainly been warmer than they are today on average, but they would have been very seasonal environments, I think. Think of the Pacific Northwest, but mix it up with Alaska such that you have several months of darkness every year,

because geographically, Alaska and Antarctica were more or less in the same places they are now, so they would have had months of darkness on end. and climates that were, you know, temperate, you know, so not tropical for sure. And dinosaurs live there anyway. We have extensive fossils from Alaska. We have extensive fossils from Antarctica. And so we know that dinosaurs lived virtually from pole to pole during the age of dinosaurs. So another thing about the movie, like, is this whole idea in this recent movie that people would be bored of dynos once they were here.

What do you make of this premise in this? this plot being nobody cares about dinosaurs anymore? I think that I find that a little bit hard to believe. I mean, of course, I'm not your normal, you know, like I'm a middle-aged man who studies dinosaurs for a living, so I'm not exactly like the objective mind here. But I do find it really hard to believe that the public would ever tire of dinosaurs, especially if we were, you know, if, you know, this magic from Jurassic Park happened and we were able to resurrect a few of them. dinosaurs are huge now and all we have are you know in the best case scenario we have a complete skeleton or maybe a few smattering of skin and feathers you know the public is absolutely fascinated by

these animals they come to our museum by the hundreds of thousands a year to see them and so it's really hard for me to imagine like if we had living dinosaurs walking around that people would just be like me whatever thank you so much matt for talking to me today absolutely Regina. Thank you so much, too. If you like this episode and want to hear more, please like, follow, or subscribe to Shortwave now. You'll get a fun, fresh science episode in your feed four times a week. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson,

edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Quacey Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR. Thank you.