[webz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crazy Jetty

@webz,
Amen, brother.
I was 13 when JP came out. When I first saw the raptors (once I got over how amazing they looked on their own merrits, my first reaction was "Ugh. They don't have feathers."
I never understood why they didn't use the Deinonychus, which, while smaller than the fictional JP Raptors with completely different heads, were much more compairable. Plus, they were actually found in north america, where Grant was looking for them.
It'd be easier to buy the raptors in JP actually being Deinonychus, than Velociraptor.
Also, glad to know that someone else has a realistic idea of velociraptor's proportions, and an equal appreciation for the power a dromae of that size had.
6 feet long is not the same thing as 6 feet tall, people!

The brachs were actually Giraffatitans? That's a new tidbit for me (So congratulations to you!). I must admit I'm not terribly familier with the titanosaurid branch of the sauropod family.

The reason they Crichton used velociraptor in the JP book was because when he was doing research on dinosaurs for JP in the early 80's, there was a push by a scientist to combine deinonychus with velociraptor, as members of the same genus, with velociraptor being the type species, having been discovered before deinonychus. Crichton never bothered to change that before the book went to print, so the movie carried it over as well.

As for the brachiosaurs, yes, they are technically Giraffatitans. Back in 2008 or 2009, the scientific community FINALLY agreed, after several decades of arguing, that the brachiosaurs of Colorado and the Tanzania were two totally different, and unrelated species. In fact, the famous head that brachiosaurus has in all the pictures, movies, etc, is actually the Giraffatitan skull. The American Brachiosaur's skull was never found, until very recently when a museum was cataloging some old fossils and realized that a box of bones from the early 1900's, labeled as camarosaur, was actually a brachiosaur. The distinctive skull crest... not there... just a slightly raised bump, very similar to camarosaurs.