4 Reasons the Real Jurassic Park Wouldn't Be as Cool as the Movie

Jurassic Park was a technical effects triumph when it was released, and spawned a media franchise as well as a fear of velociraptors in the general populace so intense that even NASA contractors obsess over it daily. Unfortunately, in giving us various entertaining ways prehistoric reptiles could maim and eat us hairless apes, Jurassic Park author Michael Chrichton and director Steven Spielberg stretched scientific truth to the limit. Here's a list of just some of the reasons we can sleep easier at night, knowing enthusiastic British millionaires aren't creating creatures that have the ability to astound (and eat) the entire planet.

1. The T-Rex

In the film, the T. rex is considered the ultimate Jurassic badass. He roams the park, killing and eating. If something gets in his way, the T. rex eats it, his prehistoric calorie-counting be damned. But before you decide to name your car, band, or first-born child after a dinosaur, consider this: like faux-hawks, nu-metal and chia pets, the T. rex may not have been as cool as it seems in fiction. First off, there's the question of whether a T. rex could have even gotten close to chasing a Jeep as seen on-screen. The speeds of prehistoric animals are calculated by using the stride length of fossilized dinosaur tracks and the length of the animal's legs, but as no definitive T. rex footprints have ever been found, this method is useless. At one time, enthusiastic scientists believed the rex could reach speeds of up to 40 mph. Recent research indicates that a T rex going that speed or faster would have to have leg muscles up to 86% of its entire body weight. More recent estimates peg the T. rex top speed at anywhere from 15-25 mph- which means a human sprinter or athlete could outrun the beast on foot, while us pudgier specimens would be forced to resort to a car, motorcycle, or, perish the thought, a road bike. Let's face it: that scene from The Lost World would have been a lot less cool if the T. rex had collapsed on the roadside after vainly trying to catch the paperboy. The T. rex's ridiculously slow turn radius (estimated as taking as much as two seconds to pivot its body 45 degrees, as opposed to the fraction of a second it takes humans to) means that the paperboy, obnoxious prick that he is, could then circle the exasperated lizard and pelt him with the daily edition. Threatening, intense cinema this would not make.

But wait, it gets worse. According to paleontologist Jack Horner, T. rex might have been a scavenger, rather than an active hunter. That's right, instead of eating hapless humans sitting on the can, the fearsome beast would steal a thigh of some rotting heap after everyone else was finished with it. The smaller, more active predators probably treated the T. rex like the one nonathletic giant who the school coach had his players practice shooting over.

There is some good news, however. First off, the speeds and behavior of T. rex are still only theorized, so he still could turn out to be a Cretaceous Rambo, if the scientists are finished trying to crush our dreams. Besides, even if you can't catch prey, having teeth the size of steak knives has to count for something. By the way, the whole "his eyesight is based on movement" gimmick present in the film is bull. T-rex had forward facing eyes, giving the dinosaurs binocular vision better than that of hawks. If a T-rex has eyesight better than a bird whom we reference as sharp-eyed and with excellent vision, do you think the predator is going to miss the tasty appetizers sitting four inches in front of his face?

2. The Raptors

Those raptors you saw? Yeah, they never existed. The raptors in the film are based on the genus Deinonychus, but those predators were only around five feet tall, so Spielberg increased the dino's size for dramatic purposes. The real velociraptors? Perhaps this size comparison will do something for you: Yeah, that's right. The fearsome man-sized raptors were in reality creatures as tall as that annoying jack russell terrier down the street and covered with feathers. So much for much of the world's fears about scalies snatching you in the night.

3. The whole 'Park' thing

Zoos are tough to maintain with the animals we have on the planet, let alone freaks of nature that scientists too busy playing god to comprehend the moral implications of their haphazard rush for glory and riches create. If dinosaurs were lumbering, ectothermic creatures like modern lizards, their food intake would be fairly easy to provide for. But the current theory of dinosaurs as active, warm-blooded (endothermic) animals- as seen in Jurassic Park- means that Isla Nublar would soon be deforested faster than you can say "slash and burn". The largest elephant ever recorded weighed 26,000 pounds. Brachiosaurs, large sauropods as depicted in the film, weighed about 80 tones - that's 160,000 pounds. If elephants consume 300-600 lb of food a day, guess how much the sauropods would eat. Entire forests would be razed by a herd of these bovine tanks. And that's assuming that the brachiosaurus are as good as elephants are in digesting their food (not very); an elephant passes 60% of what it eats undigested. So not only would you not have forests any more, but you'd be stepping between tree-sizes piles of dung. But that's just the sauropods. I'm sure we could keep the raptors content with a daily supply of park workers. But there's another issue with bringing long-dead creatures back to life: disease. Much like how Europeans and American natives passed diseases to each other, dinosaurs would be in an environment where they had no resistance to anything. They'd get fungal infections from plants or respiratory illnesses. No one would want to come to the park because they'd all be on the verge of death. But I guess you could just clone more... on the other hand, if there was such an epidemic going on at a modern zoo, it would be shut down before you could say "worker exploitation."

4. The whole cloning dinosaurs thing

Oh, right. Unfortunately, just gathering up mosquitoes in amber and sticking a tube into their prehistoric posterior isn't going to get you the DNA you need to create a dinosaur. hey, Jurassic Park notes this and has frog DNA substituted in. But just pasting in some random nucleotides doesn't mean that the resultant organism is going to work out. Given how many diseases and crippling birth defects are caused by tiny pieces of chromosomes being malformed, damaged, or missing, the true legacy of Jurassic Park would be a massive mound of horribly mutated dinosaurs in the waste bins. So sleep tight, everyone, because dinosaurs aren't likely to terrorize your streets any time soon.

(Yet.)

(We hope.)