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Quote:

Originally Posted by Crazy Jetty

They sadly weren't even representations of Deinonychus. The Velociraptors speilberg used were completely fictional. Deinonychus were 13' long, which puts them at being around 4' tall. Maybe 5' for some of the larger.
In the original book though, the Velociraptors were true to life size, and played a much smaller part.

Yeah, from what I understand, Crichton based his novel on Gregory S. Paul's taxonomy which referred to Deinonychus as Velociraptor antirrhopus. But that terminology fell out of usage by the time the movie was made. Also, Spielberg purposely made them even larger in size, due to their increased role as antagonists. The funny part about that is that after the film came out, larger skeletons of Deinonychus were found that roughly matched the sizing depicted in the film.

That's the biggest problem I see when doing anything involving dinosaurs. The science and our understanding of dinosaurs is fluid - it changes with each new piece of data. I distinctly remember a time when it was thought that no dinosaurs had feathers (even though they were considered ancestors of birds). Now there is conclusive proof to the contrary.

Grimlock from G1 is a prime example of this as well. When his toy was first made, his dinosaur mode was considered a (mostly) accurate version of what a T-Rex would have looked like. Now we know that it was way off.

I have seen the Dinosaur Train show and toys (my daughter is a big fan) and I applaud the show's creators for trying to be as accurate as possible given the style and theme. And IIRC, they had accurate versions of both Deinonychus and Velociraptor.