Jurassic Park kitchen scene with scientifically accurate raptors.

AnubisGuard

Master Member
I've seen a few attempts to update Jurassic Park shots with more accurate dinosaurs and they generally look terrible or very amateurish. This guy nailed the look with a very cool feathered raptor design that integrates nearly seamlessly. Absolutely worth a watch.

He claims in the comments that if this gets enough likes he'll do the rest of the dinosaur shots from the film. Probably a joke, but I want eyeballs on this just in case...

 
Love it! But they still weren't that big...

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That was really well done.

That said, there's still something that feels off about feathered dinosaurs no matter how you try to design them, though. I think the problem starts with paleo-art from science books itself, to be honest. When you look at a bald eagle in real life, it looks imposing, majestic and dangerous. Every single illustration I've seen of a feathered dinosaur looks like a traditional, lizard-like dinosaur wearing a feathered costume. Which makes me think they very likely did not look like that. Jurassic Park did an incredible job at making the lizard style dinosaurs look like real animals. With the feathers, I think we're still not there.
 
That was really well done.

That said, there's still something that feels off about feathered dinosaurs no matter how you try to design them, though. I think the problem starts with paleo-art from science books itself, to be honest. When you look at a bald eagle in real life, it looks imposing, majestic and dangerous. Every single illustration I've seen of a feathered dinosaur looks like a traditional, lizard-like dinosaur wearing a feathered costume. Which makes me think they very likely did not look like that. Jurassic Park did an incredible job at making the lizard style dinosaurs look like real animals. With the feathers, I think we're still not there.

This. We barely know jack about the soft tissues of dinosaurs in the big picture. Almost all our knowledge is from the bones.


Having said that, I actually think it's fair to hand-wave a lot of the inaccuracies of the JP movies. Those were not REAL dinosaurs, they were man-made recreations. They only used dino DNA for raw material.

The JP scientists would have shaped the final product a lot more than John Hammond wanted to admit to the public. During the development it would have become clear that the surviving DNA strands were too incomplete to work like the tidy little animation they were showing the tourists. The dinos in the park were Frankensteined together out of various dino DNA samples, frog DNA, and lord knows what else.

The scientists probably created plenty of horrible mutated messes (like the Ripley/Xemomorphs in the 4th Alien movie) before they got usable ones. Hammod would have instructed them to "make animals that look like classic dinos" and the scientists probably followed that order even when the DNA evidence pointed to the orignal dinos looking different.
 
This. We barely know jack about the soft tissues of dinosaurs in the big picture. Almost all our knowledge is from the bones.


Having said that, I actually think it's fair to hand-wave a lot of the inaccuracies of the JP movies. Those were not REAL dinosaurs, they were man-made recreations. They only used dino DNA for raw material.

The JP scientists would have shaped the final product a lot more than John Hammond wanted to admit to the public. During the development it would have become clear that the surviving DNA strands were too incomplete to work like the tidy little animation they were showing the tourists. The dinos in the park were Frankensteined together out of various dino DNA samples, frog DNA, and lord knows what else.

The scientists probably created plenty of horrible mutated messes (like the Ripley/Xemomorphs in the 4th Alien movie) before they got usable ones. Hammod would have instructed them to "make animals that look like classic dinos" and the scientists probably followed that order even when the DNA evidence pointed to the orignal dinos looking different.

Nice take! Yes, what you're talking about here is very much spelled out in the book. Dinosaurs were more like software, complete with version numbers. Hammond wanted to craft dinosaurs that matched people's expectations, not reality.
 
This. We barely know jack about the soft tissues of dinosaurs in the big picture. Almost all our knowledge is from the bones.

To be fair, I don't really agree with movie fan optics trying to rationalize the Jurassic Park dinosaurs within modern scientific perspective. I think it's pretty clear the intent was to suggest the dinosaurs in the park looked just like the real ones did, regardless of how they came to be. That was just how we assumed they looked like in 1993.

All I'm saying is the artistic effort over the years to produce naturalistic looking lizard-like dinos feels more believable to me than the feathered attempts so far. I don't even think this has anything to do with me being used to scaly dinosaurs or thinking they look "cooler" or anything. The feathered ones just look anatomically off most of the time they way they're depicted. But I'm sure it will get to a point when they crack that code.
 
If researchers announced that Megaladon sharks had "feathers" I would not buy it. I can't imagine them being covered in feathers like a flying bird because it makes no sense for a fish that lives underwater.

Modern bird feathers are extremely specialized for flight. They move a maximum amount of air (and shrug off water) for minimum weight. I don't see a real raptor or T-Rex being covered in anything like that, just for practical reasons.

Real dinos may have been covered in what later became flying bird feathers. But on an ancient land predator it was probably more like a layer of furry spikes/scales. That makes more sense.
 
An oldie but goodie

You’d think this was a mosasaur
 
An oldie but goodie

There is a partial explanation for that.

When researchers guess what the living dinos looked like, they try minimize the body weight on the bigger ones. It's because the gigantic weights of the big dinosaurs don't make sense with what we know about bio-mechanics.

The researchers' habit of erring on the lean side makes the dinos look more scary as a side-effect. The limbs & claws & jaws stick out more.
 
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I've seen one or two over the years that looked pretty good. Here's one I have saved that I think works

The head looks good. Not enough of the body is seen to judge that. But looks like all feathers are a similar size and placed in a roughly uniform way over the body, following the underlying shape closely, which is common in paleo-art and doesn't look right to me considering how dramatically the feather cover changes the body shape in modern birds.
 
The head looks good. Not enough of the body is seen to judge that. But looks like all feathers are a similar size and placed in a roughly uniform way over the body, following the underlying shape closely, which is common in paleo-art and doesn't look right to me considering how dramatically the feather cover changes the body shape in modern birds.

The problem artists run into is that if they follow modern feather coverings, the raptors just end up looking like birds. So there's a disincentive there.

velociraptor_mongoliensis_by_danneart_dc6rw33-pre.jpg


eosinopteryx_by_lucas_attwell_dcpud61-350t.jpg
 
We all know the rules: due to biomechanics; giants can't exist...not birds, not people, nothing...except dinosaurs of course.
 
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