Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park is so ingrained in the public consciousness that it needs little introduction. It began as a best-selling novel by Michael Crichton, which, in addition to featuring lots of suspense-filled scenes of dinosaurs running amok and terrorising people, is also a dark musing on the hubris that can infect science and capitalism, and the dire consequences of human interference with natural law. So promising was the novel as a film vehicle that a furious bidding war involving several major studios and some top Hollywood directors erupted before the book was even published in November 1990. Among the first to indicate interest in the property, Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment ultimately emerged victorious.

Though there are some differences between the novel and the film, the basic premise is the same. Both are set on Isla Nublar, an island off the coast of Costa Rica, where 15 dinosaur species have been successfully cloned by a team of genetic engineers hired by eccentric millionaire John Hammond. Hammond’s dream is to create the ultimate theme park – Jurassic Park – and, after five years of top-secret development, it is nearing completion. To satisfy anxious investors, Hammond invites a small team of scientists to inspect the soon-to-be-opened facility and give it their stamp of approval. Among the luminaries are palaeontologist Alan Grant, palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler, and mathematician Ian Malcolm, whose work on chaos theory seeks to uncover underlying patterns in seemingly random phenomena, such as weather systems. Also along for the excursion are attorney Donald Gennaro, there to represent the investors, and Hammond’s visiting grandchildren. After the group embarks on the tour, a computer shutdown deactivates the electrified fences that surround each dinosaur paddock and, within hours, chaos of the prehistoric kind is unleashed upon the park.

Over the 30-plus years since Jurassic Park was released, there have been five sequels, with a sixth, Jurassic World Rebirth, due for imminent release as of this writing. So, what better time to look at the dinosaurs in the long-running series, to see what the movies got right, what they got wrong, and how they brought the extinct animals back to life, using both groundbreaking CGI and state-of-the-art animatronics. And what better place to start than with the T. rex, Tyrannosaurus, the most iconic and well-known dinosaur of all – not only in the Jurassic franchise, but, arguably, in the world at large.

The first Tyrannosaur teeth were found in Colorado in 1874, during the height of the Bone Wars, when rival palaeontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh competed to find and name as many new dinosaurs as possible. In 1900, a partial skeleton of a Tyrannosaur was found in Wyoming; two years later, another was unearthed in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. It was clearly a massive carnivorous dinosaur, the largest then-discovered, measuring up to 12 metres in length and weighing 9 tonnes. With its huge, 1.5 metre-long skull and 25 cm-long serrated teeth (60 in total), it probably delivered the largest and most powerful bite of any terrestrial animal in history. It lived 66 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period, right at the very end of the age of the dinosaurs, and it likely preyed upon large herbivorous dinosaurs such as Triceratops.

In 1905, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, named the creature Tyrannosaurus rex, or ‘King Tyrant Lizard’, to emphasise the animal’s size and perceived dominance over other species alive at the time. Today, Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps the most widely known binomial (two-part scientific name) in the world.

During the pre-production of Jurassic Park, when the artists were drawing the dinosaurs that would appear in the film, the team had access to Jack Horner, a famous palaeontologist who had been hired as the movie’s primary ‘dinosaur consultant’. At the time, Horner was curator of palaeontology at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies and was Michael Crichton’s model for the book hero – though Horner once wryly noted that Alan Grant is ‘better funded.’

Horner was eager to ensure the film’s dinosaur designs were grounded in scientific discovery rather than movie fantasy. For a start, he argued early on for more colouration on the dinosaurs’ skin. Horner says, ‘[We] knew at the time that raptors were likely to be feathered – today, we know that without doubt – and that there should have been more colour to them. But that was a creative choice that Stephen [Spielberg] made. He wanted them without feathers and with reptilian colours.’ Spielberg’s reason was that he thought feathered, technicoloured dinosaurs wouldn’t be scary enough. Indeed, although he often listened to Jack Horner’s advice regarding dinosaur anatomy, he also wasn’t afraid to allow room for creative license. Spielberg reminded his team that the animals depicted in Jurassic Park were not real dinosaurs – their genome sequences had been tinkered with, possibly extensively – so they didn’t need to look exactly like how palaeontologists thought they did.

While there are certainly many things scientifically wrong with the dinosaurs in the movie, especially looking back at them 30 years later with our increased knowledge (and I’ll get on to some of those mistakes shortly), Jurassic Park, at the time, nonetheless presented the most realistic depiction of dinosaurs seen up until that point. Dinosaurs in older films were often depicted as dumb, sluggish, lumbering creatures, with their tails dragging along the ground. At the same time, T. rex was usually shown standing in a very upright posture. Jurassic Park introduced a more realistic posture for the Tyrannosaur, with the huge reptile’s body more or less horizontal to the ground, its massive head balanced by a large, thick, stiff tail held out behind it. Since there is no evidence, as yet, of T. rex possessing feathers, its depiction in Jurassic Park still remains quite similar to what palaeontologists believe a real Tyrannosaur looked like.

Most of the dinosaurs seen in the original Jurassic Park were created using a combination of CGI and animatronic animals – and the T. rex was no exception. A full-sized animatronic T. rex (minus the legs and feet) was created; it weighed over 4 tonnes and measured 6 metres tall and 12 metres long. It proved to be by far the most labour-intensive build on the entire movie – the roof of one of the workshops had to be raised to accommodate the giant dinosaur. The supporting armature, made of aluminium, chicken wire, and fibreglass, was an engineering feat in itself and was built to withstand the weight of nearly three tonnes of clay needed to sculpt the T. rex. It took nine sculptors and artists 16 weeks to complete it, working on raised platforms and scaffolding to gain the necessary height.

Stan Winston, the special make-up effects creator who specialised in puppets and practical effects, was in charge of this massive endeavour. Winston had worked on big blockbusters before – he had created a variety of animatronic characters such as the Alien Queen in Aliens and the endoskeletons in The Terminator and its sequel. But Jurassic Park and its many dinosaurs proved to be the biggest undertaking of his career (at least until the sequel came around a few years later). Winston and his crew worked with hydraulics engineer Craig Barr to design an inner hydraulics system for the life-sized T. rex, which boasted 57 different functions. Although Barr had ample theme-park experience and had worked on Universal Studios’ Jaws and King Kong rides, the T. rex, unlike typical commercial animatronics at the time, needed to move with true realism and subtlety. ‘It needed to come to a stop, like a real animal, a dead stop,’ says puppeteer and visual effects supervisor John Rosengrant. ‘Not a wobble or a wiggle. So we had to figure out how to program this hydraulically controlled character [to look realistic].’

The solution came to Winston in a dream: the Waldo. The Waldo was a performance-capture device – a miniature T. rex armature – rigged to the full-sized version. Controlled by four puppeteers, its movements corresponded exactly to its much larger cousin, giving those operating it pinpoint control over its every move. ‘So any movement we gave to the small T. rex as a puppet – holding onto it as a puppeteer and moving its tail or head, for example – would go right into the big dinosaur and he would do what we wanted, in real time,’ Winston explained. ‘It worked beautifully.’

One of the most pivotal scenes in Jurassic Park occurs about halfway through the film. During a strong thunderstorm, the park’s electricity goes out, cutting the power to the electric fences that contain the dinosaurs. The tour cars, which are run by an electric track, are stopped at the most dangerous place on the tour – the T. rex paddock. Earlier in the film, the tour car passed the paddock with a no-show from the T. rex. That scene was filmed on location on Kaua’i Island, Hawaii. However, because the later scene took place during a storm, the production crew needed to control the elements, so they recreated the T. rex paddock and surrounding areas from Hawaii inside the soundstage. With the fence now un-electrified, it doesn’t take long for the giant dinosaur to break out of its enclosure.

Both live-action (animatronic) and computer-generated versions of the T. rex were used for the scene. Generally, the close-up shots used the animatronic T. rex, while the full-view and more distant shots used CGI. One of the biggest problems the crew encountered during the scene was the effect the ‘rain’ had on the animatronic T. rex. This enormous animatronic was, of course, electrically powered, and although Stan Winston had planned for the T. rex to be exposed to water, with various methods employed to waterproof the creature’s foam rubber hide, it was never meant to be in a direct downpour.

‘The rain was supposed to be in the foreground,’ remembers Rosengrant. ‘That changed when Spielberg decided it would be compelling to see the dinosaur in close-up, with droplets of rain glistening on its skin. As the director got his shots, the creature got drenched, and its foam rubber skin started soaking up water. And when it’s wet, it’s like a sponge.’ At points, the water threw off the finely calibrated mechanics inside the dinosaur. ‘Once that skin was soaking up water, it started shuddering and doing everything that you wouldn’t want it to do,’ Rosengrant continues. Trying to keep the Rex from going off the rails, Winston’s team was forced to constantly attend to the creature. ‘Suddenly, all of Stan’s kids would run in with big shammies, used at the carwash, and they’re slapping the rain off the T. rex and trying to dry it off,’ says Spielberg.

Despite its exposure to the elements, the dinosaur performed on cue for the most part. But there were teething troubles of a very different sort. ‘The mechanical T. rex wasn’t 100 per cent accurate, so sometimes, as it’s attacking the car, it would actually hit the car harder than they meant it to, and some of its teeth would fall out!’ says Sam Neill, who plays Dr Alan Grant in the movie. ‘And so they’d have to stop everything and put the teeth back into this T. rex! Half a dozen of them would fall onto the studio floor – that always made me laugh!’

As the animatronics were being worked on, sound designer Gary Rydstrom was hired by Steven Spielberg to oversee the audio landscape of Jurassic Park, including the dinosaurs’ sounds. He began his immense task by looking at the animatics, which are a string of rough storyboard images edited together to illustrate how a sequence will flow. ‘I’d take the animatics to Gary in preproduction,’ says stop-motion animator and longtime dinosaur buff Phil Tippett, who served as the ‘dinosaur supervisor’ for Jurassic Park, ‘and then we’d spend a couple of weeks finding the voice for the raptors and the T. rex.’ For Rydstrom, it was the perfect chance to experiment or, as he puts it, ‘throw some sounds against [the animatics] and see what worked.’

Early conversations with palaeontologists gave the sound designer considerable latitude. Rydstrom remembers, ‘The good ones like Jack Horner would say, ‘We have no idea what dinosaurs sound like – have fun!’ With no existing reference, Rydstrom drew inspiration from sound design legend Ben Burtt, a veteran of the Star Wars movies who created iconic sounds for lightsabers, R2-D2, Chewbacca, and Darth Vader’s helmet. ‘I learned from Ben that you have to give these creatures a personality. The T. rex had to sound single-minded: I am the king of this world! I’m going to find you! I’m going to sniff you out! So, therefore, breathings and sniffs were really important.’

To simulate the T. rex’s exhalations, Rydstrom recorded the sound made by whales breathing through their blowholes. He also layered different pitches of sounds together to create the T. rex’s signature roar. ‘I wanted to find a high-frequency element, a middle-frequency element, and a low-frequency element and blend them together into a single voice,’ Rydstrom says. Finding low-to-middle-frequency elements was relatively easy – he utilised an elephant trumpeting, the guttural growl of an alligator, and even the roar of lions and tigers. The high-frequency sound was, however, more difficult. On a visit to what was then known as Marine World/Africa USA, an aquarium and animal park in California, Rydstrom had a stroke of luck. ‘They brought out this baby elephant, and it made this high-pitched scream,’ he recalls. Sitting above the frequency range of the low-register audio elements, the sound was exactly what he needed to give the T. rex its personality. ‘The frustrating thing is, when you record animals, you have no control over when they’ll ever do it again,’ he adds. ‘And this baby elephant did one, maybe two screams, at the most, and never made another peep!’

The deafening roar of the T. rex may be one of the most memorable and recognisable sound effects in cinematic history, but palaeontologists now believe that dinosaurs probably didn’t roar at all. We will never know for sure certain things about these extinct animals, so we have to make conjectures and draw conclusions from their descendants and relatives in the modern world, such as birds and crocodiles, neither of which roar. Birds tend to chirp, sing, screech, and hoot. The closest dinosaurs might have come to a roar was something like the rumble of a crocodile or the booming of an emu.

The speed of the T. rex in the movie is also thought to be inaccurate. At one point, the giant predator chases a Jurassic Park jeep as it races through the jungle. And earlier in the film, John Hammond claims the T. rex has been clocked running at 32 mph. To be fair, this is based on what scientists believed at the time Jurassic Park was made. Newer studies, however, have concluded that T. rex almost certainly couldn’t have moved so fast. In fact, its top speed is thought to have been somewhere between 12 and 25 mph, with the lower range being more likely. This relatively leisurely pace wasn’t due to Tyrannosaurus being lazy, but because (as suggested by advanced AI simulations) they literally couldn’t run any faster without breaking their leg bones due to their massive weight.

And one other thing Jurassic Park got wrong about T. rex – its vision. Alan Grant, the movie’s foremost dinosaur expert, says just a few minutes into Jurassic Park that the T. rex’s vision is ‘based on movement’, so you essentially become invisible to it if you keep absolutely still. Palaeontologists think this is completely untrue, though. T. rex is thought to have had very good vision and a wide field of view, due to the large opening in the skull for the optic nerve, which transmits information from the eye to the brain. Based on advanced CT scans of its braincase and inner ear, it is believed that T. rex’s hearing and smell were also extremely good, so even if it somehow couldn’t see you standing still, it would probably still easily hear or smell you. Of course, it should be mentioned that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park have had gaps in their genome sequences replaced with DNA from frogs, many of which do have movement-based vision. In fact, some frogs will starve to death if surrounded by food that isn’t moving.

Despite the fame and popularity of T. rex, there is much that we still don’t know about it. Although it is generally believed to have been an apex predator, some think it might have been mainly a scavenger. And despite over a century of speculation, we still don’t really know what T. rex’s short, puny arms were used for, if anything. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who gave the T. rex its name, thought that they might have evolved to somehow support the animal during copulation. Others have since suggested that they helped the dinosaur get up off the ground, or they were involved in pinning down prey.

But perhaps these arms didn’t actually have a use. Maybe they were, in essence, vestigial appendages that were no longer needed. After all, T. rex had a truly massive head, so it’s possible that it needed small forearms so as not to overbalance and topple forward. Could these arms have been slowly evolving out of existence? If the dinosaurs hadn’t died out and T. rex had continued living and evolving, would its arms have eventually disappeared altogether? In truth, we simply don’t know.

The T. rex became the standout dinosaur seen in Jurassic Park, so it should come as no surprise to discover that it has reappeared in every sequel so far released. Next time, we’ll continue looking at the Tyrant Lizard, in particular the ones we see in Jurassic Park‘s first two sequels, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III.