In ‘Jurassic World Rebirth,’ Paleontology Is Still The Star

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora Lichtman, and this is Science Friday.

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Jurassic World Rebirth opens today. On the podcast, the film’s paleontologist advisor pulls back the scaly curtain.

STEVE BRUSATTE: Dino neck-nuzzling is one of those things where I think we have to take some artistic liberties because we don’t for sure how they would have made it.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: The movie stars Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali. Their characters make a dangerous journey to an island chock-full of dinosaurs. They want to get their hands on some dinosaur blood to make a life-saving heart medicine. But unfortunately for them, and luckily for us, things do not go as planned.

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– This island was the research facility for the original Jurassic Park.

– We need DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs. Do we have to get a sample from an egg?

– I suppose we could try and get it from the parent, but they’re a flying carnivore the size of an F-16.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: SciFri producer Dee Peterschmidt saw the movie and is here with a behind the scenes look. Hey, Dee.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Hi, Flora. Yeah, I wanted to get a paleontologist perspective, and we knew just the person– Dr. Steve Brusatte, who’s the film’s scientific consultant and paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. Hey, Steve.

STEVE BRUSATTE: Hey, there.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Steve, how many Jurassic movies have you consulted on now?

STEVE BRUSATTE: I’ve worked on the last two. So Jurassic World Dominion, that came out three years ago and now Rebirth. And of course, I’m a big fan of the franchise, so I’ve seen all of the other films many times over, and it’s a great joy to be able to contribute to the newer films.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, I assume this is like the dream gig for a paleontologist.

STEVE BRUSATTE: It certainly is a dream gig for me, and it’s just an amazing thing to have the opportunity to take all of this esoteric knowledge about dinosaurs that we develop as academic scientists over all the years that we study and to make it relevant, to use it to help shape these movies that are seen by millions of people around the world.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: I mean, speaking of that academic integration here. Does it ever feel like a little absurd to go from journal revisions to a director asking if a baby triceratops could fit in a backpack?

STEVE BRUSATTE: Yeah, it does. It does. There would be times I’d be on calls with Gareth Edwards, the director of this film. And I’d get a ping on my phone, a question from one of my students or a peer review reminder from a journal. Because that stuff is 99% of my job. That’s my real job. The chance to work with Hollywood is just a little perk, but it’s one that I greatly enjoy.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah. So let’s talk about the stars in this movie. I’m not talking about the humans, obviously. Who’s on the dinosaur walk of fame in this film?

STEVE BRUSATTE: I will say the human stars is a whole new cast, which is great. And we have a paleontologist portrayed by Jonathan Bailey. He makes us look great. But of course, it’s the dinosaurs really that are the stars to me.

And there’s a lot of dinosaurs in this film. There’s various dinosaurs that pop up that have been there throughout the franchise, whether it’s the T. rex, whether it’s the Dilophosaurus, the one that spits poison, and there’s a whole bunch more.

But the big new dinosaur stars here. There’s a new type of giant long-neck dinosaur we call the Titanosaurs. And then there’s Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus is the huge dinosaur with the sail on its back that was a good swimmer.

We now that Spinosaurus was huge. It was probably bigger than T-rex. It was probably something like 50 feet long or so. It had a long snout, like a crocodile. It had lots of sharp teeth in that snout.

It probably did spend a lot of time eating fish with that snout because there’s other fossils that tell us that Spinosaurus spent quite a lot of time in the water, including new fossils of its tail. It had this really deep, muscular tail that it would be able to move back and forth to propel itself through the water. So none of that was known when Spinosaurus first appeared in the Jurassic franchise over 20 years ago.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah. And then you’re just talking about the Titanosaur, which is this enormous, long-necked dinosaur with a huge tail. In the movie, we see this sort of G-rated, affectionate mating display–

STEVE BRUSATTE: [LAUGHS] Yes.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: –where there’s some neck-nuzzling happening. Is that dino neck-nuzzling backed up by science?

STEVE BRUSATTE: Dino neck-nuzzling is one of those things where I think we have to take some artistic liberties because we don’t for sure how they would have made it. We know that they would have had to go through some kind of courtship and mating process.

And this is where in the films, really, we get into the actions of the dinosaurs, the activities, the behaviors that we don’t often have direct evidence from fossils, just because these kind of things don’t fossilize. How are you going to get a fossilized dinosaur mating dance? But we can look to modern animals to draw comparisons and to come up with plausible scenarios.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah. Well, I was wondering about the plausible behavior. When you’re talking with the director about this, how does that conversation go? Do you really push for certain things? Do you push back on others where you’re like, I’m putting my foot down. We’re not having this T. rex doing backflips.

STEVE BRUSATTE: One of the things– and that’s true of both the last film and this film. There have been a few things. In the last film, we got feathers on some of the dinosaurs, which I was very happy about. That was something that the franchise didn’t really do. We know that so many dinosaurs had feathers. That from actual fossils.

The problem is Jurassic Park came out in 1993. The first fossils of dinosaurs with feathers were found in 1996. So Steven Spielberg–

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: So close.

STEVE BRUSATTE: –didn’t know. so close. You just wonder how movie history would have been different if the timing was slightly different. But that’s an example of something that we really push for.

Another thing is the arms of the dinosaurs. You see so many dinosaurs on the big screen, the ones like T. rex or the Raptors, that only walk on their hind legs. They would use their arms to do other things.

And you often see those arms drooping limply, like a limp noodle. And we know that’s not true. Their wrists could not move in that direction. They would have to hold their palms inward like they were holding a basketball. They couldn’t move their wrists in all kinds of directions like we can.

So in the early films, you see that drooping. We’ve corrected that in the later ones. That’s something that maybe seems like a very small, esoteric, mundane little detail. But for me, that was an important one to push.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: A win is a win, Steve.

STEVE BRUSATTE: A win is a win. And I tell you, for me, just seeing dinosaurs with those droopy hands, it’s just one of those things that automatically is going to capture my attention and is going to make me annoyed. So those are the kind of things that I would push for.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: I want to talk a little bit more about the feathers because the dinosaurs in this movie are basically bald. And I was wondering how much of a choice that was. Which kinds of dinos had them and which didn’t? But I want to go back to how much of that was a choice.

STEVE BRUSATTE: In this film, you’re not going to see this riot of plumage that is true of the dinosaur world just because the dinosaurs that star in this film are not the types of dinosaurs that would have had a lot of feathers as far as we know.

The big stars in this film are the giant dinosaurs, like the Titanosaurs, those huge long-neck dinosaurs. The Spinosaurus might have had some feathers, but it would have been like the hair on an elephant. They probably would have been very minimal. So if this was a film where there was a whole lot of small, meat-eating dinosaurs, a whole lot of raptor dinosaurs as the main characters, and those didn’t have feathers, that would be an issue.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: I want to go back to the first Jurassic Park. There’s just a lot of skepticism in that movie about the hubris of science. It’s probably best summed up by this exchange with Jeff Goldblum.

– I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before.

– Yeah, yeah. But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: In this movie, the scientists are portrayed, I think, a little differently. And I was wondering just how intentional that was.

STEVE BRUSATTE: Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I love in this film. You’re seeing a different type of scientist character in Jonathan Bailey’s character, Dr. Loomis. I don’t want to give away too much, of course, but just to say the scientist here really is a hero. He’s a hero that is an unexpected hero. And he’s somebody who sticks up not only for science, but really for the role of science in helping humankind.

In the original Jurassic Park, both in the film but also Michael Crichton’s book, very critical, not of science, necessarily, but just of the capabilities of science– if it goes too far, if scientists move too fast, if they tweak genes too much of doing harm, of having unintended consequences. And this film is, to me, very much a counter to that.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Well, at the risk of being just the slightest bit spoilery, I was kind of surprised watching it. And Jonathan Bailey has this moment where– talking about this heart medicine that they’re getting the blood for. He talks about open sourcing this medicine for free instead of letting the evil pharma company make millions off of it.

And when I heard it, I was like, I was not expecting a scientist in a Jurassic movie to use the word “open source.”

STEVE BRUSATTE: No.

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DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Can you talk about that moment a bit, of how intentional that was?

STEVE BRUSATTE: I loved it. I should say that my role, as a consultant, I don’t work on the script. But when I first saw the script and I saw that in there, I loved it. I said, wow, this is really in the weeds. The open source movement getting into a Jurassic film. How cool is that?

And I think it’s great because it does raise this issue to a big audience, that there is a movement in science that a lot of scientists are behind. The information that we discover about the world, it should be made available for all, that it should be made available in some way for the greater good.

There’s great debate about that, of course. But the fact that this makes this into the storyline of the film, it’s really quite central to how the story unfolds. It’s a real driving force to the narrative of this film. So I’m excited for people to see that and to, again, get maybe a new view on science that’s not as pessimistic as in the original Jurassic films.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, especially in light of everything against the attacks on science right now, too.

STEVE BRUSATTE: Yes. And I think this is important as well. But when the film first came together, we were, as scientists, in a very different world, a different administration. And you didn’t have these attacks on scientific funding, the withdrawal and the termination of billions of dollars worth of research grants of health studies and the attacks on universities.

The film really has nothing to do with these things. These have all developed so, so quickly. But I think having a film like this that portrays, to me, science and scientists in a positive light, that’s a good thing for us right now.

Really, every way we communicate science, whether it’s a blockbuster film, whether it’s the books that I write, whatever it is, as scientists, I think it’s just very important right now to articulate to the public what we do and why it’s important and why it’s valuable for society.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: OK. Going in a different direction now. If you were directing the next Jurassic movie, what would you want to see in it? Any specific dinosaurs that haven’t appeared yet in these movies, or plot setups that haven’t been explored yet? I just wonder if you lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling, and you’re like, what if?

STEVE BRUSATTE: Oh, you know, if I was directing the next film, there’d be some serious problems in Hollywood to bring on some scientists to take on billion-dollar franchise. If it were up to me, total creative control over these things, the single thing I would try to do is just continue to introduce new dinosaurs.

There’s about 50 new species found every single year. We’re in this golden age of discovery. And there is a dinosaur, it’s called Deinocheirus. It’s from Asia. This one just– I come back to this one all the time– fragmentary bones found ages ago, newer fossils found more recently.

This dinosaur was crazier than anything anybody could have imagined. It was huge. It was bigger than T. rex. It had a big hump on its back. It had a long head like a horse. It had big giant claws on its hands. I mean, something like this– if Gareth Edwards created this dinosaur, people would say, wow, Gareth, the movie genius. He’s so creative. And he is.

But this is a real dinosaur that was created through natural selection and evolution. And that’s just one of many. So I hope 20 years from now, we’re talking about Jurassic World 10015, and they still have me on board as the consultant but not the director. Let the directors direct.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: [LAUGHS] Stranger than fiction. Well, thanks for taking the time, Steve.

STEVE BRUSATTE: Thanks, yeah.

DEE PETERSCHMIDT: Dr. Steve Brusatte was a scientific consultant on the new Jurassic World Rebirth movie, which is out now. And he’s a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. I’m Dee Peterschmidt.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us if you like the show, and you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear you. Today’s episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt and Kathleen Davis. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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