Watch with Stew: Jurassic Park (1993)

00:00:00               Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) remains the most successful dinosaur movie ever.  The logo, the core idea (of cloning dinosaurs to put them in a zoo) and some of the dialogue, as well as the dinosaurs themselves are imbedded in the popular consciousness.  With the fourth film, Jurassic World coming next summer, I thought I’d take a look at the original.  Now, I know Jurassic Park isn’t scientifically accurate.  Both intentionally and accidently the dinosaurs differ from what you’ll find in modern scientific texts.  But, scientific accuracy is a moving goalpost and not the purpose of a mainstream movie, so I shan’t dwell on that.

I remember this coming out in 1993 and being desperate to see it.  For reasons I can’t recall I got given Michael Crichton’s book and was told I couldn’t see the film until I’d read the book, which I did.  As much as I love it, my view of it the film has always been coloured that.  I won’t say that one is better than the other; they’re very different beasts.

00:00:52               The film opens with this sequence where a mystery animal in a crate is being transported to a high security pen.  It serves to create suspense and also ties in with the end of the film where the animals in question escape.  All three Jurassic Park films have used this opening scene to tease the island and the dinosaurs on it – in the second one it’s the little girl and the Compsognathus and in the third one you don’t actually see the dinosaurs, but something kills the crew of the speed boat.

00:01:08               First Jurassic Park logo.  This film loves reminding you what you’re watching.  There must be a drinking game where you drink each time you see the park logo.  Actually, forget you read that.  Always drink responsibly.

00:01:15               Here’s the late Bob Peck as Robert Muldoon, the park’s game warden.  This is one of his best scenes, as in the middle act of the film he has some really clunky dialogue to contend with – “We should’ve had locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!”

00:01:49               Here’s the graphic letting us know where we are.  On the Blu-ray version I’m watching it says “Isla Nublar 120 miles west of Costa Rica”.  These look like they’ve been redone for high-definition and I’m sure that my old DVD and the original theatrical version said “Isla Nublar 120 miles of Costa Rica”.  If anyone can substantiate, please leave a comment below.

00:02:21               Peck’s delivery here is wonderfully weary. “Loading team, step away.”  It’s almost “Do I have to talk you through this every time?”  It suggests this is something that should be routine by now but these idiots in overalls keep making mistakes.

00:02:44               Not sure why the cage rolls backwards.  It seems like someone forgot to lock something down.  Muldoon didn’t say “Now lock the thing” so maybe it didn’t get done.  Still the whole bit with the cattle prods is great.  Shame they don’t reappear later in the film.

00:03:33               Martin Ferrero as Donald Gennaro or "Exposition Man", which is the primary function of this character.  Here he’s visiting a mine to deliver some exposition.  This amber mine is called Mano de Dios – Hand of God.  Now I’m not from the Dominican Republic so I don’t know how they feel about amber, but that seems like a rather grandiose name for a place where a semi-precious rock is dug out of the ground.

00:04:40               Gennaro should have concussed himself or at least have a bruise from the bang when he hits his head.  It would’ve been sort of funny for him to have a bandage on his head before they even get to the dinosaurs.

00:05:07               This shot of everyone looking at the amber with the mosquito entombed inside has a very Indiana Jones feel.  The way they gather round and the torchlight and the vocals on the soundtrack give the impression of having found an ancient relic with strange powers.

00:05:22               The scene at the dig in Montana.  The velociraptor claw being unearthed is a different colour to the rest of the skeleton and also to the rock the fossil is embedded in.

00:06:17               The sonar machine that maps the skeleton by shooting sound waves into the ground might be based on real science although I’m sure they’d dig them up.  I think it’s based on fact, but I’m not sure.  Google it.

00:07:03               Alan Grant (Sam Neill)’s techno-phobia is an interesting idea but it’s so heavy handed that it detracts from his character rather than adding nuance to it.

00:07:15               Grant suggests an evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds.  This is probably the first time this was said in mainstream media.  However raptor doesn’t mean “bird of prey” in taxonomy, it means “thief”.

00:07:36               “More like a 6 foot turkey.” Grant’s description of raptors hunting is wonderfully gruesome.  I didn’t notice, until I watched the film for this commentary, the vulture noises on this sequence.

00:09:11               Why does Grant hate kids?  Between this and his inability to operate machines, he seems like a bit of an arsehole for the first half of this film.  This is a particular problem as he’s our point of view character.  It’s an ensemble cast, but he’s the one we spend most time with.  We need to relate to him, but these two facets of Grant make him a caricature.  Another issue is that Ellie (Laura Dern) and Grant have very little chemistry.  Clearly they are meant to be a couple as at some point they must’ve had a conversation about starting a family.  But there’s no warmth here and I don’t believe Ellie and Grant ever even got off.

00:10:20               Enter the late great Richard Attenborough as John Hammond.  This Hammond is a much jollier and more likeable character than in the original novel.  The book’s Hammond is a cynical capitalist and seems to be on bad terms with all his employees.  I think this different take on the character was due to Spielberg casting Attenborough.

00:11:26               I said I wasn’t going to dwell on scientific inaccuracies but this is something I’ve not seen picked up on before.  Hammond says that he’s spent 5 years setting up the preserve in Costa Rica.  But when they get there all the dinosaurs in the park are adult sized.  Perhaps we know more about dinosaur growth rates than we did in 1993, but logically after hatching from an ostrich egg, a brachiosaurus could not reach a length of 22 metres in just 5 years.  That’s a growth speed of over four metres a year, not to mention an expediential increase in weight.  Perhaps the scientists developed accelerated growth or something to get round that problem.

00:13:11               Hammond convinces Ellie and Grant to come to the island less than three minutes after they’ve met him.  Obviously they need to go in order for the film to continue, but they’ve only just met and he doesn’t tell them what’s on the island.  Also I’d question whether getting funding for their branch of science is so hard that need to take this kind of dubious offer.

00:13:19               The Dodgson - Nedry scene; it’s not made crystal clear here, but Lewis Dodgson is an high ranking executive in a rival genetic company called Biosyn and is paying Nedry to steal the embryos from Jurassic Park so his company can reverse engineer them and create their own dinosaurs.  He is the main antagonist in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park novel.  You can get an overview of this character here; http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lewis_Dodgson.

This scene, which was very obviously filmed in Hawaii, shows waves crashing in the background but San Jose, Costa Rica is actually nowhere near the sea.  When the film was shown in Costa Rica, this graphic was removed.

00:13:38               Wayne Knight is great as Denis Nedry.  You really buy him as a disgruntled employee and this scene perfectly sets up his story.

00:15:18               Hammond tells Ellie and Grant that he has a jet at Choteau (a city in Montana) but it does look like they’ve taken this little helicopter all the way from Montana to Isla Nublar, i.e. the entire length of the US and central America.

00:15:32               Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm steals most of the scenes he’s in, particularly in this first hour.  All the chaos theory stuff serves to foreshadow what’s going to happen later on.  There’s so much more chemistry between Laura Dern and Goldblum than between her and Sam Neill.  Which wouldn’t be an issue where it not for the fact that Ellie and Grant are apparently discussing starting a family.

00:16:35               Hammond points out the window and says “There it is” but he appears to be sitting facing the back of the helicopter so wouldn’t be able to see the island.

00:17:24               The bit where Grant ties two seatbelts together is dreadful.  Not being au fait with computers is one thing, but not being able to do up a seatbelt is ridiculous.  We’ve established he’s not technology-minded but this makes him look like an idiot.  Also by tying two seat belt ends together not only has he endangered himself in the event of a crash, but left Ellie with no protection at all.  Why would she want to have kids with this guy?

00:18:19               There’s a distractingly large dent in the helicopter door as Hammond etc. are getting out.

00:18:43               Why does the helicopter leave?  Considering the potential risks on the island and apparent lack of medical facilities, they should have a helicopter or some other means of reaching the outside world on hand at all times.  It would certainly save a lot of bother later on.

00:20:10               Ellie is examining a leaf from a species of plant that became extinct in the cretaceous period.  The shot where she picks it was in the trailers but isn’t in the film.  How did they recreate extinct plants?  This is never explained.

00:20:20               Our first full shot of a dinosaur!  The special effects in this film still stand up, even after 20 plus years.  The brachiosaurus in these shots actually looks better than the ones in Jurassic Park 3, which are sluggish, flabby and camouflaged, which makes no sense for the 22 metre long, 35 tonne animal – where’s it going to hide?  Anyway back to this film.  These first shots of the brachiosaurus are great and in 1993 they just blew everyone’s mind.  It really felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Ellie and Grant’s reaction is interesting; immediately debunking outdated assertions about dinosaurs; “this is a warm-blooded animal” and so on.

00:21:32               From seeing the brachiosaurus, Gennaro starts talking about how much money they’ll make.  As a lawyer representing companies or individuals that have invested in Jurassic Park, it’s not clear how he stands to profit from its success.  This is the result of two factors.  The first is Hollywood’s tendency to present lawyers as money-grabbing bastards.  The second is that in the novel and early drafts of the script there was a character called Ed Regis, the park’s PR manager.  In the novel it’s he who pees his pants and runs just before the T. rex escapes.  Seems the characters of Gennaro and Regis were merged, leaving the lawyer with some lines that sound a bit like he’s working for Hammond.

00:21:42               “We have a t. rex!” This is an odd way to introduce the idea of the tyrannosaurus rex being in the park.  It has nothing to do with what they’re talking about and it would have been more of a surprise if saved until they were on the tour.  They say T. rex so many times in this film, I think it popularised the use of the term, in the UK at least.

00:22:13               The wading brachiosaurus in the long shot don’t have any water running off them as they come out of the lake.

00:23:37               The out of a job/ don’t you mean extinct? Exchange is based on something stop-motion effects veteran Phil Tippet said when he saw the first CGI dinosaur test shots and Spielberg had it put into the script.

00:24:02               Would Hammond really have done this acting to the screen every time the film was shown once the park opened?

00:24:53               The Mr DNA film expertly dresses up a lot of exposition in a nice package and in a way that perfectly fits with the context of the film.

00:28:10               As they enter the lab we hear Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) over the tannoy reminding everyone to be on time for the boat.  But why is everyone going home for the weekend?  Plot wise, it reduces the cast to the core characters (something they didn’t bother to do in the sequel) but realistically there should be more people on this island; they’re trying to get the place ready to open and this is the first time the park’s had visitors.  Not only is there the safety issue, there’s also the issue of providing food and room service.

00:28:14               B.D. Wong as Henry Wu.  Like many of the supporting characters, Wu has a much larger role in the novel.  Amongst other things, he argues for engineering more docile versions of some of the dinosaurs.

00:29:21               So here’s our second dinosaur; the hatching baby raptor.  It never blinks.

00:29:39               Malcolm and Wu talk about the dinosaurs breeding.  Again looking at the novel, the issue of the dinosaurs reproducing is much more significant.  There are three conditions for maintaining control of the island; keeping the dinosaurs in their cages, keeping them on the island and preventing them from breeding.  In the book all three of these fail pretty early on.  It might have been nice to have this framework in the film, thus adding a few more threads to the plot.  Once the systems are back online, they could have contacted the boat to get it to turn around, thus delaying the characters’ escape from the control room.

00:31:41               The raptor pen.  I like this location and the way its look contrasts with the white walls and smooth lines of the Visitor Centre.  But if they bred 8 raptors originally, surely this pen is too small; no wonder they were trying to escape.  This is also the first of many enclosures with far too much vegetation - more on that later.

00:32:52               Enter Muldoon.  All this talking about the raptors feels like overkill.  So it’s saying dinosaurs weren’t stupid and that’s a good thing, but the “extreme intelligence” isn’t really born out onscreen.  So they open some doors; cats and dogs can do that.  Also, they don’t need to be this super intelligent ultimate hunter; they just need to be smarter than we think they’re going to be.

00:34:02               The harness that lowered the cow in emerges torn and broken (but not bloodied?) – what a waste of harnesses.

00:34:32               “We can charge anything we like.” – More Ed Regis dialogue from Gennaro.

00:38:08               Enter the kids, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello).  Yes they’re annoying but, as Hammond says, they’re the target audience and actually when they’re not being used very baldly for comic relief they give really good performances.  In the novel the kids’ ages are reversed and Tim is both the dinosaur and computer fanatic.  The 8 year old Lex in the book serves very little purpose.  Here their characters are much better balanced.

00:40:27               The park control room; this is a great set, with the round windows and the fossils in the pillars.  If you watch in the shot where the theatre/ ride revolved to reveal the lab earlier, you can see the control room on the far left.  I imagine that in the full version of the ride Mr. DNA went on to talk about the control room “...where our advanced computer systems keep y’all safe while you’re out in the park” or something.

00:41:42               Malcolm’s line referencing King Kong as they enter the park unnecessarily flagpoles the fact that the gate is based on the one from the 1933 movie.  It’s like they wanted to make sure everyone got that piece of intertextuality, rather than just slipping it into the film quietly.

00:41:57               The tour voice is indeed Richard Kiley, American stage and screen actor who also narrated the Planet Earth documentary series in 1986.  Kiley is the tour voice in the book and it’s nice they got him for the film.

00:43:10               Here we see Nedry on the island and get a bit more of his backstory.  Of all the supporting characters, Nedry is probably the best written.

00:49:01               We see the boat at the east dock.  In the book Tim and Grant see the boat from the tour and see raptors on the deck, leading to a subplot where they have to get the boat to turn around before it reaches the mainland.

00:49:58               50 minutes into the film we see our third dinosaur.  The sick triceratops is the only animatronic dinosaur we see out in the open in broad daylight.  We see it from multiple angles and the actors are touching it and interacting with it.  This takes things to a sense of realism beyond the CGI long shots from earlier and you see the characters getting really taken in too.

00:51:03               Here is Dr Gerry Harding, another supporting character whose part is greatly reduced from the novel.  It’s a shame we don’t get to find out what’s wrong with the triceratops.  Ellie seems to get half way, then the scene stops after the dinosaur poo gag.

00:53:04               The piles of dinosaur poo are ridiculously huge and compacted.  Also I don’t think they check them properly.  This is the beginning of the film’s obsession with dinosaur bodily excretions.

00:54:50               Hammond laments the first tour and here is the problem with this section of the film; the enclosures are so full of plants any dinosaurs would be hidden.  I see why they did this; to build suspense until the fences are shut down and the dinosaurs escape.  Another reason is that in 1993 the effects technology was new, it was expensive and they had to use the shots where it really counted, which is in the second half of the film once the dinosaurs have escaped.  Still, having foliage so dense that a 7 tonne T. rex can disappear, stretches credulity too far.  Maybe they could’ve hinted at the T. rex like with the raptor in the opening sequence or had another herbivore on show just to make for a more plausible zoo experience.

00:55:50               The scene where Grant and Malcolm talk about kids in the car feels so contrived; would you really have that conversation with some you’ve known for a day?  Also Malcolm’s “always looking for a future ex-Mrs Malcolm” line makes him sound like such an arsehole.  All it seems to do is fill in time while Nedry gets to the lab, which is right next door to the control room.

00:57:11               And here Nedry is, stealing the embryos.  He’s told by Dodgson to get all 15 species, but we only see 7 species in the flesh (Brachiosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Dilophosaurus and Gallimimus).  In addition we see Proceratosaurus, Metriacanthosaurus and the misspelt “Stegasaurus” embryos being put in the shaving foam container.  It’s not clear what the other 5 species are but you can probably add dinosaurs from the sequel such as Pachycephalosaurus and Compsognathus.

00:59:47               The guy with the pipe on Nedry’s desk is J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb.  A comment on the misuse of scientific power perhaps?

01:00:46               Conversely to their previous scenes, the exchange between Grant and Malcolm when he gets back in the car is good; it feels natural and it’s kind of funny.

01:01:47               As a piece of action, the T. rex attack on the two cars is practically faultless.  The suspense is built brilliantly in elements such as the vibrations in the water glasses and the snapping cables.  The reveal of the rex is awesome too.  Then we see most of the attack from inside the tour cars which makes it so much scarier because it feels like it’s happening to us.  Also with touches like the dinosaur’s breathing and the contracting pupil the rex is much more like a hunting animal than a movie monster.  This is the longest sustained sequence of dinosaur action in the film.

01:09:12               One slight detractor is that the geography of the scene here is confusing or confused.  The T. rex appears to push the wrecked car back through the fence it broke but now there’s a 100 foot chasm behind it, which wasn’t there a few minutes ago.  It’s like we’ve changed location without moving.  This sequence with Lex and Grant below the car is the first of several where characters are in peril that doesn’t directly relate to dinosaurs.

01:09:41               The wrecked car crashes down into the tree.  I’m unconvinced Tim would survive that.

01:12:04               Nedry and the dilophosaurus; this scene plays out brilliantly, with Nedry not recognising the threat from the dinosaur until it’s too late.  The way the sounds change when the dilophosaurus reveals its true nature is wonderful.  The colour and textures on this dinosaur, particularly the one in the car, is slightly reminiscent of the bad gremlins (Gremlins, 1984).  Nedry’s death could have been more gruesome (it certainly is in the novel) but then this film pushed the boundary of what you could show in a PG as it is.

01:14:23               The can of embryos getting covered over with mud feels like a set up for a sequel (it wasn’t).

01:17:53               As the mangled tour car falls through the tree it should be forced away from the trunk by the branches.  The way it’s falling here is a little neat and convenient.  This is another sequence that ups the danger but doesn’t feature a dinosaur.

01:19:26               Malcolm is found under the wreckage of the restroom, but his shirt is undone and he has a tourniquet on his leg.  I don’t think he could’ve done that whilst under the wreckage, so did he cover himself up again?

01:20:53               The T. rex jeep chase sequence; this must’ve been one of the first digital sequences finished for the film because the shot of the jeep smashing through the fallen tree followed by the rex was one of the few shots using CGI in the trailers and TV spots. I recall that there were no CGI images in the pre-publicity for this film, which is hard to imagine when you look at modern summer blockbusters.

01:21:31               For a film with so many special effects, the back projection behind Malcolm really looks bad.

01:23:41               Grant takes the fossilised raptor claw out of his pocket and throws it away.  Surely it would have broken by now?

01:24:51               The gift shop is full of actual film merchandise.  It also has sabre-tooth cat soft toys, which seems a little off message.  Maybe they came mixed in packs with the dinosaur toys.

01:27:30               Why is Ellie so sure the park in unsalvageable?  As far as they know 1 dinosaur has escaped, 1 person has died and 1 is injured.  Alright Grant and the kids are missing but I not sure this warrants writing the whole thing off.

01:28:34               In the book, Grant and the kids spend the night in a maintenance building in the triceratops paddock, which makes sense; seeking refuge in something man-made.  Also they could’ve dressed their injuries, maybe tried to call for help.  A baby triceratops was made for such a scene before it was cut and the action moved to the tree with the brachiosaurus – and the dinosaur snot.  So we’ve had, poo, spit and snot.  Let’s be grateful they stopped there.

01:30:25               Grant finds the egg shells.  So the dinosaurs are breeding.  In the last shot we see tiny raptor footprints leading away from the nest.  So my question is what about the raptors that laid these eggs?  At this point no raptors have escaped that we know about and we’re at least a mile from the raptor pen.  So we find out that some dinosaurs have bred, but it’s not to the point where there’s an unsustainable population explosion. It seems like there was an obligation to keep some elements from the book in the final film, even though they don’t really have any bearing on the story.  Which brings me to…

01:32:23               The lysine contingency; this feels like exposition left from a previous draft of the script.  It serves no function here because it’s not an answer to the current predicament and it’s the only suggestion in the whole film that dinosaurs could leave the island.

01:33:00               Samuel L. Jackson is of course great and it’s a shame he’s in it so little.  I love the line “hold onto your butts” and it would’ve been nice if it has cropped up in the sequels, like a Jurassic Park equivalent of “I have a bad feeling about this.”

01:34:04               The stampede sequence was filmed on the same location as the scene where Indy is chased by the Hovitos in Raiders of the Lost Ark, according to the Making Of book.

01:36:02               Ellie comes down the stairs muttering “something’s happened” and so on.  People talk to themselves a lot in this film.

01:37:58               The raptors have escaped!  If only the three guards we saw earlier hadn’t left for the weekend.

01:41:50               There’s great cross-cutting between Ellie switching the power on and Grant and the kids on the fence.

01:43:10               Tim’s refusal to jump is a bit silly, but not as daft as his being electrocuted which, let’s face it, should almost certainly have killed him.

01:43:48               After condemning the park to Hammond the previous evening, Ellie uses the phrase “back in business” as soon as the power comes back on.  This line feels like it was put in so it could be used in trailers; what you might call ‘trailer fodder’.

01:44:12               Arnold’s arm drops on Ellie’s shoulder, but where’s the rest of him?  Also you wouldn’t get Samuel L. Jackson killed off-screen in a movie now.

01:44:44               Muldoon hunts the raptors; a great scene and one of the only ones where you see a predatory dinosaur essentially doing nothing.  Like the baby, the adult raptors are rather dead eyed.

01:45:30               “Clever girl.” Classic last line.

01:46:53               The Visitor Centre sets are so lavish and detailed.  The murals were inspired by Charles R. Knight’s natural history murals in the Field Museum in Chicago and have a similar blue-green palette.

01:47:11               Here’s a gratuitous shot of Laura Dern’s bum.  She’s limping in this scene but it’s not clear why.  Also her salmon pink shirt has vanished.

01:47:58               After the t. rex attack, the raptors in the kitchen sequence is the standout set piece in the film.  It’s brilliantly paced, suspenseful and dinosaurs in enclosed spaces hadn’t really been done before this.  The unique threat of the raptors, more than their intelligence, is that they can follow you into more places than a bigger dinosaur.  There's also the sense of the unfamiliar in a familiar place, which is always scary.

01:51:59               Raptors can kill grown men but can’t overpower these two children pushing a door? Hmm.

01:52:50               I like that Lex gets the computer system up and running again because it means she achieves something and makes her seem a bit less like baggage.  Not sure what Tim’s doing in this scene though, except possibly trying to rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time.

01:54:42               Why does Hammond yell down the phone not to shoot the raptor?  Would he rather they ate his grandchildren?

01:55:27               When this shot where Lex nearly falls through the ceiling was filmed, the stunt actor looked into the camera, revealing her face.  Ariana Richard’s face was composited into the shot in post-production.

01:56:06               So we get to the finale in the main hall with the dinosaur skeletons which was teased earlier in the film.  The original ending had Grant killing the raptors with a crane, but Spielberg had it rewritten in order to bring the T. rex back, feeling she was the ‘hero’ of the film.  The climax of the film certainly would have felt a little flat without it.

01:57:10               This is the only time the T. rex doesn’t make a sound before striking.  It even manages not to shake the ground.

01:57:44               Now Hammond has given up on his park, but 3 minutes ago he was telling Grant not to shoot the raptor, which suggests he was still thinking it was salvageable.

01:57:58               The T. rex kills the second raptor and destroys its fossil counterpart.  Yay, dinosaurs are great!

01:59:04               There’s this moment where Ellie is looking at Grant and the kids, like he’s now ready to have kids of his own, but because they’re not a very convincing couple to start with it doesn’t quite ring true.  Besides, it’s like she’s saying “because you got these kids back safely, when we get back to Montana we’re going to pork like crazy”, which is creepy.

01:59:33               Not sure what the pelicans flying alongside the helicopter signify.  Is it representing the return to the modern world or is it affirming the bird-like characteristics of the dinosaurs?  Or maybe it’s just a nice peaceful image to end on - who knows?

02:00:08               End credits roll.  There you have it.  So the movie is a much stripped down version of the novel.  The plot is light; look past the scenes explaining the cloning, the amusement park and the disgruntled employee who causes the shut down and you have the plot of nearly every dinosaur flick since The Lost World (1925), i.e. People get trapped in a place where there are dinosaurs and have to escape.  There are some ‘orphaned’ subplot elements that don’t go anywhere and there’s some clunky characterisation too.  These issues could have been ironed out with a bit more script work.  If Jurassic Park was being made now the script might have had that extra polish.  But ultimately none of that matters.  Few people did or ever will come to this movie for real-life human characters or complex plotting.  The aim of this film was to make the most convincing dinosaur film ever.  It did exactly that.  Read any number of recent reference books and you find writers are still correcting preconceptions from this movie.  That’s a powerful endorsement of its success.  For further proof, note that Jurassic Park did not spawn a wave of other dinosaur movies.  Even its sequels (thus far at least) essentially rework the same plot to diminishing returns.  All of which proves it is quintessential and frankly unbeatable.

Megalosaurus – the rise and fall of the first dinosaur super star

Megalosaurus is one of those classic dinosaur names that encompass the schoolboy ideal of how dinosaurs have long been regarded by the public; -‘saurus’ suggests reptilian and ‘mega’ pertains to both great size and awe.  The name literally means great lizard.  What is less widely known is that this was the first dinosaur to be described – nearly 200 years before Richard Owen thought up the term.  In 1676, Robert Plot, first curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum described a fragment of leg bone (femur) too large to have come from any living British species, concluding rather that it had belonged to a giant.  This fragment was next described in 1763 by physician and author Richard Brookes, who named it “Scrotum humanum” due to its resemblance to a petrified pair of testicles. The fossil itself has been lost but the drawing of it is sufficiently detailed that it has been identified as coming from a Megalosaurus.

More fragments were discovered in Oxfordshire during the early 19^th century and were acquired by William Buckland, professor of geology and Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford.  Buckland was an eccentric character who, when he wasn’t naming new species spent much of his time eating known ones.  He was fond of mice on toast and kept live badgers in his college rooms.  After the French comparative anatomist Georges Curvier examined the remains and concluded they were from a reptile, Buckland described them in 1924, giving them the name Megalosaurus.  Two years later, geologist Gideon Mantell, who first discovered Iguanodon, gave it the two-part scientific name Megalosaurus Bucklandii in honour of its discoverer.

 

 

With the naming of Iguanodon in 1825 and the discovery of large marine creatures in locations such as Lime Regis, the notion of an age of reptiles before mammals quickly gained scientific credence.  Yet it would several more decades until it caught the popular imagination.  The next major step occurred when Richard Owen collected the giant terrestrial reptiles under the term Dinosauria; terrible lizards.  This was followed by engravings of ferocious Megalosaurus snacking on rhinoceros-like Iguanodon, regardless of the fact that the two species were separated by some 40 million years.  Megalosaurus had arrived!

The first dino-mania hit Britain in 1853, whilst the Crystal Palace was being prepared for its opening in Sydenham.  In the months preceding the opening, great interest grew around the life-sized models of extinct animals, which were the first of their kind.  Inspired by Richard Owen’s monographs and constructed by Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins, the stars of Crystal Palace are the three species of dinosaur; Iguanodon, the spiny Hylaeosaurus and Megalosaurus.  Although unfinished when the Sydenham Crystal Palace opened June 1854, the models were a sensation. They were accompanied by an array of merchandise, including guidebooks written by Owen, small-scale models and engraved prints and posters. They also featured in satirical cartoons, many suggesting that these ‘monsters’ were more terrifying than educational.  Those involved in making them believed the models would be an aid to geology and palaeontology. Others agreed, with The Crystal Palace Herald reporting that the models were: ‘A great visual idea, of much importance to scientific instruction, this portion of the Great Exhibition will be second to none’.

Off the back of this success, Megalosaurus gained the accolade of being the first dinosaur mentioned in a work of fiction.  In the beginning of Bleak House, Charles Dickens, describing the muddy London streets, writes "Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."  The dinosaur has unfortunately never made it into any film or TV adaptations of the book.

In a way, the Crystal Palace Park opened at just the wrong time for Megalosaurus and its other dinosaur stars.  Up until then, dinosaur discoveries were almost entirely confined to Britain and the reconstructions were based on the highly fragmentary known remains.  During the remainder of the 19th century, new finds, many from the western United States, overturned scientific understanding of these animals.  The discovery of Hadrosaurus foulkii (one of the ‘duck-billed’ dinosaurs) in 1858 and the Bernisart Iguanodons in 1882 suggested many dinosaurs were actually bipedal, rather the four-legged behemoths Hawkins depicted.

In 1912, Megalosaurus featured in the original dinosaur adventure story, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.  It is first glimpsed by the explorers in light of a flaming torch in the depth of night.  Conan Doyles describes the sight of “a horrible mask, like a giant toad’s, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood.”

The Megalosaurus of The Lost World is as truly terrifying as it is implausible.  Despite numerous finds of the related Allosaurus showing these animals were bipedal, it walks on either two or four legs and resembles a monster toad, even bounding across the plateau in pursuit of its prey.  Most disturbing of all, when one is killed toward the end of the book, its heart continues to beat for days after the flesh has been carved up!

The Lost World in many respects marks the highpoint of Megalosaurus’ career in popular entertainment.  When the book was adapted for the silver screen in 1925 by Willis O’Brian, the predators were changed to Allosaurus for the benefit of American audiences.  The greatest blow to Megalosaurus’ popularity, (as well as that of most other dinosaur species) came in 1905 when Henry Fairfield Osborn published his description of a new species.  It was a huge carnivore, measuring 12 metres in length and he named it Tyrannosaurus rex.

 

In the unlikely event that you require convincing of the popularity of T. rex, consider this; it is the only organism in all of earth’s history to be widely recognised by its full scientific name.  For much of the hundred and eight years since it was discovered, it has been considered the largest terrestrial predator to have ever lived.  With this kind of prestige, its popularity was guaranteed.  IMDb lists 93 titles featuring T.rex.  Whenever dinosaurs appear on screen, you can bet there’ll be a tyrannosaur amongst them.  In comparison other individual dinosaur species have failed to capture the popular imagination in quite the in the same way.

Meanwhile the poor Megalosaurus fell into cultural and to some extent, scientific obscurity.  No other fossils of it have been accurately identified.  During the 20th century remains of carnivorous dinosaurs found in a variety of places and geological times were attributed to Megalosaurus, so the species became what is known as a taxonomic waste bin; somewhere to shove stuff you’re not sure what to do with.  Research during the late 20^th century and over the last 10 years has corrected this.  The species Megalosaurus bucklandii now only refers to the fossils first described by William Buckland.  These pieces are on permanent display in Oxford’s Natural History Museum.  A fragment of skull, a section of jaw bone, some vertebra, a hip and part of a hind leg, are all we have of the first dinosaur that anyone knew about.

The Beasts of Sydenham

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a phenomenal success.  In the five and a half months that it was open to the public, an estimated six million visitors passed through the doors of the Crystal Palace as the exhibition building became known – and at a time when the population of England and Wales was not quite 18 million.  But what to do with the building once the doors had closed? Suggestions ranged from simply leaving it in situ to the more outlandish scheme of rebuilding it as a tower.

Sir Joseph Paxton, the building’s architect, set up the Crystal Palace Company with the aim of moving the building from Hyde Park in central London to Penge Hill in Sydenham. The newly constructed Crystal Palace boasted 50 per cent more floor space than its predecessor and it was filled with courts representing different cultures and time periods. It was conceived as an ’illustrated encyclopaedia’ through which visitors could progress from one subject to the next. This notion of physical space as a means of presenting information was also applied to the large shield-shaped park laid out below the palace. It was here that the artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins decided to attempt something new. Inspired by Richard Owen’s monographs on the extinct giant reptiles of the Mesozoic era, he felt compelled to create a series of large sculptures of extinct creatures for public display.

Hawkins drew concepts for each of the animals, based on the published work of Owen and others. Satisfied with the designs, he created scaled-down clay models, which were refined to meet Owen’s standards, based on the available scientific knowledge of the time. Hawkins then made life-size clay models, from which metal casts were produced. The larger models, such as the Iguanodon, were built in situ (near the lowest lake in the park),,by pouring concrete into moulds surrounding foundations of steel and brick. Even before they were unveiled, the reconstructions were being discussed and speculated over. The Illustrated Crystal Palace Gazette reported ‘The grounds adjoining to the new road from the Rock Hills Sydenham to Penge… is the site being prepared, in hollow basin, mounds, and upheaved tumulae, for the representatives of the antediluvian world.’

This term ‘antediluvian’ refers to the biblical Great flood. One popular belief was that the extinct animals had been killed in the flood and it was even suggested that the dinosaurs’ demise was due to their being too large to fit in Noah’s ark. This, of course, wasn’t the accepted scientific theory, but it was the one presented in newspapers at the time. Another view was that these creatures were ‘the inhabitants of this earth before the abode of our first parent Adam’.

Speculation about the models came to a head on New Year’s Eve 1853, when Hawkins held a banquet at Crystal Palace Park. The table and chairs were set inside the mould used to make the standing Iguanodon, (and not inside the model itself as the famous Punch cartoon suggests). The guests included the leading scientists of the day, with Richard Owen, in his only recorded visit to the park, seated at the head of the table.

Although unfinished when the Sydenham Crystal Palace was opened by Queen Victoria in June 1854, the Geological Illustrations, to give them their official name, were a sensation and a major part of the unique experience of the park. The models were accompanied by an array of merchandise, including guidebooks written by Owen, small-scale models and engraved prints and posters. They also featured in satirical cartoons, many suggesting that the ‘antediluvian monsters’ were more terrifying than illuminating.  Those involved with the project believed that the experiment in visualising extinct animals would significantly further the causes of geology and palaeontology, among the other natural sciences. Others agreed, with The Crystal Palace Herald reporting that the models were: ‘A great visual idea, of much importance to scientific instruction, this portion of the Great Exhibition will be second to none’. Hawkins thought that children in particular responded to tangible things rather than to abstract words. He summed up the driving idea behind the Crystal Palace as being ‘one vast and combined experiment of visual education’.

On opening, the set of completed models on display comprised of Anoplotherium, Dicynodon, Hylaeosaurus, several species of Ichthyosaurus, Iguanodon, Labyrinthodon, Megaloceros, Megalosaurus, Megatherium, Mosasaurus, Palaeotherium, Plesiosaurus, Pterodactyl and Teleosaurus. These models are the most famous result of Hawkin’s labours but the park also featured three islands, each representing a different geological formation and era of time andan ‘exposed cliff face’ showing the litho-stratigraphic order of the rock formations in which the fossilised remains were found.Both Hawkins and Owen planned to introduce more extinct animals at Sydenham: there were plans for a mastodon, mammoths and a moa. Owen even suggested including a dodo.

The relocation of the Crystal Palace failed to live up to expectations.  After the great success of the Great Exhibition, it was thought that any amount of money involved would be recouped, but Joseph Paxton wished to push the grandeur of the Sydenham palace to the extreme, seemingly regardless of the cost. From the start, the Crystal Palace Company was operating beyond its means. Relocating to Sydenham left them with a debt of £1,300,000 (equivalent to £96.5 million today) that was never recovered. The building itself was not adequately insured and when the north transept burnt down in 1866, it was never rebuilt. The Geological Illustrations consumed time and raw materials and having cost £13,729 by the middle of 1855, the company decided that the range of animals already on display was sufficient.  Despite protests and their evident popularity, the project came to a stop.  Contemporary maps of the park show the site of a mastodon that never materialised. The steel frame for a mammoth was 18 foot high when work stopped. The model would have required 50 tonnes of clay.

The financial woes of the Crystal Palace Company also explain why the models were not protected from the rigors of time, either from physical damage or the more telling advances in scientific knowledge. The discovery of Hadrosaurus in 1858 showed that this dinosaur walked upright on its hind legs. A similar conclusion was drawn for Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, confirmed in 1878 by the  discovery of near-complete Iguanodon skeletons in Bernissart, Belgium. This discovery also revealed that the dinosaur’s’ ‘horn’ was actually a thumb claw, betraying the most famous ‘mistake’ in Hawkins’s reconstructions. Subsequent discoveries would further erode the reputation of the models. When American geologist Othniel Marsh visited in 1895, he said ‘There is nothing like unto them in the heavens, or on earth, or in the waters under the earth.’ They were further discredited by Henry Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Museum in the book Extinct Monsters, when he stated that Hawkins was ‘occupied for years in unauthorised restorations’. Woodward noted that the toad-like Labyrinthodon and Dicynodon should have been more akin to salamanders, while ’Iguanodon did not usually stand on all-fours but more frequently sat up like some huge kangaroo…’ This particular notion has since been superseded.

On the night of 30 November 1936, a fire tore through the palace, burning so brightly it was seen in eight counties. 100,000 people watched the Crystal Palace’s destruction in 1936.  Amongst them was Winston Churchill, who called it ‘the end of an era’.  By morning all that remained of Joseph Paxton’s masterpiece was red hot steel and pools of molten glass. Although the Crystal Palace Company attempted to maintain the park as a going-concern, the Trustees of the company were disbanded in 1951 and the park was given to London County Council.  With the building lost and the park very much altered, the models are the most visible evidence of the ‘experiment in visual education’ that lay at the heart of the Crystal Palace scheme. 

Today, the models are largely known for their inaccuracy. It is undeniable that they quickly became outmoded, but it is their outmodedness that now makes them so valuable.  By studying past attempts to communicate science we get our best record of contemporary understanding, and in setting their ideas about these animals literally in stone, Hawkins and Owen created a unique record of the state of scientific understanding at the time. Though our understanding has since advanced it does not make their attempt less valid. Rather, it shows that our understanding of the natural world is never definitive, but subject to change.  But equally any restoration or interpretation can be superseded.  A gallery or model can be outmoded after a few years or even sooner. There will always a requirement to review, more to discover and more to communicate to others.

Exploring The Lost World

First published in 1912, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle is generally considered to be the first dinosaur story. The thrilling adventure yarn – familiar to millions – is a true landmark of popular culture. 

Initially serialised in the Strand Magazine, the story is told to us by journalist Edward Malone. In order to win the love of his fiancé, Gladys Hungerford, Malone has agreed to accompany Professor Challenger on an expedition to South America to investigate tales of a plateau where dinosaurs still exist. Together with the sceptical Professor Summerlee and big game hunter Lord John Roxton, they start to find evidence to support Challenger’s theory. Accessing the isolated plateau by climbing a rock pinnacle and felling a tree to form a bridge, they become trapped when the bridge is destroyed by treacherous aids.

As Conan Doyle’s characters explore, they discover numerous prehistoric species that have survived in this isolated corner of the world. The plateau is wondrous but dangerous, roamed by vicious pterodactyls and carnivorous Megalosaurus. The explorers also discover that it is home to a tribe of natives who are at war with a species of primitive humanoid – a form of ‘missing link’ between Homo sapiens and the great apes. The explorers help the natives defeat the ape-men and in doing so win their friendship. Eventually, the chief’s son shows the explorers a way down from the plateau.

When the characters return to London to share their discovery with the scientific community, no-one believes them until they produce a young pterodactyl they have brought back. The creature quickly escapes, causing alarm, but undeniably proving their case. Hailed as heroes, they retire to Lord Roxton’s rooms where he reveals another export from the plateau: diamonds valued at £200,000. With the proceeds from these precious stones, Challenger plans to open his own museum and Summerlee retires to catalogue his fossils. Malone (rejected by Gladys, who has married a solicitor in his absence) and Roxton plan a return expedition to the lost world.

Arthur Conan Doyle had broad-ranging interests: alongside his keen advocacy of spiritualism, he was interested in judicial reform, criminology and palaeontology. His home, Windlesham in Crowborough, East Sussex, was on the Weald – an area of rock formations that date back to the Upper Jurassic (145.5–150.8 million years ago). This contributed to the author’s fascination with prehistoric life and, in the spring of 1909, he wrote to the Natural History Museum requesting an expert come and view what appeared to be Iguanodon tracks found at a nearby quarry. Conan Doyle hand-drew the tracks in his letter and the discovery directly inspired a passage in The Lost World, where the first evidence of Iguanodon on the plateau also takes the form of footprints.

In November 1911, Conan Doyle wrote again to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum’s keeper of Geology reporting that ‘we have something in the old quarry that is beyond me’. He claimed that this mysterious object was ‘not an impression but a body’. However, when geologist Charles Dawson was dispatched to examine it, the body proved to be a ‘mere concretion of oxide of iron and sand’. The experts perhaps viewed him as a happy amateur, but Conan Doyle persisted in his hope of finding extinct reptiles in some state other than fossilised. In September 1922, he wrote to Smith Woodward stating he had seen an ichthyosaurus in the Aegean Sea.

Conan Doyle started The Lost World in October 1911 and, for details of the prehistoric life, he referred to Extinct Animals by E Ray Lankester, then Director of the Natural History Museum. This book, described by its author as ‘[nothing] more ambitious than attempt to excite in young people an interest in a most fascinating study’, contained illustrations and descriptions of many species Conan Doyle included in his adventure. However, he interpreted some of the science in peculiar ways. In Extinct Animals an image of an ichthyosaurus skull shows the parietal foramen, a hole which in modern reptiles contains a photoreceptive organ call the parietal eye. The Ichthyosaurus in The Lost World has a visible third eye on top of its head. Also, despite a clear description in Extinct Animals of Megalosaurus as bipedal, Conan Doyle’s animal walks on either two or four legs and resembles a horrible toad.

Conan Doyle may well have been inspired by the model dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park, opened in 1854. The reconstructions, including a quadruped Megolosaurus, were already deemed obsolete by the 1900s. Like the fictional plateau, the exhibition in Sydenham featured a mixture of species from different time periods, all apparently living together around a lake. From Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs to the much more recent Toxodon and Irish elk, almost all of the species at Crystal Palace appear in Conan Doyle’s book.

Conan Doyle also took an interest in exploration. In 1909 he spoke at a luncheon for Ernest Shackleton and later appeared with Robert Falcon Scott at a fundraiser for the British Antarctic Expedition. The following May he jovially admonishing American explorer Robert Peary for making the job of storytelling much harder. Previously it had been possible to write about remote parts of the world without fear of contradiction. Now that so much of the world had been explored, he asked where ‘the romance-writer is to turn when he wants to draw any vague and not too clearly-defined region’.

The answer apparently lay in the Amazon Basin. At a time when the border between Brazil and Bolivia was poorly defined, Conan Doyle’s close friend Percy Harrison Fawcett led the Bolivian Boundary Commission, tasked with preventing border disputes. When Fawcett returned to England, he brought with him tales of the Huanchaca Plateau and an impenetrable jungle where anything could be hiding.

Conan Doyle knew that exploration had led to the expansion of the British Empire, through the acquisition of new territories. He also recognised that the Empire required defence. Covering a quarter of the globe, and home to 285 million people, it was difficult and expensive to police. Britain’s small professional army was surrounded by the larger, conscripted, armies of her European neighbours: old enemies like France and Russia, and a more recent concern – Germany. The less than glorious victory of the Boer War led to genuine fears that a future conflict might lose Britain her colonies or even her independence. These worries were countered by a brash imperialism that permeated middle and upper classes British culture. In 1907, Robert Baden-Powell set up the Scout Movement to promote health, exercise and teamwork in boys. There wasn’t an implicit military connection, but he stated that they should ‘be a brick’ in the ‘wall of Empire’.

In the years preceding The Lost World, Conan Doyle wrote several Roman-era short stories, as allegories for contemporary British issues. The Last Galley was a fable about Britain’s naval superiority in the face of expanding German sea power. The Lost World’s brash imperialism is evident the admiration heaped on Roxton’s military skills and in the plot’s focus on British explorers aiding natives in defending their territory against an inhuman aggressor. Malone enthuses that, following his adventures on the plateau, he should receive a commission as correspondent in the next Great War.

The Lost World was adapted into a film in 1925 by American film-maker Willis O’Brian, using stop-motion effects to realise the dinosaurs. The movie reduces the book’s militaristic tone by adding a female character to the party and many subsequent adaptations have followed suit, overlooking Edwardian social conventions to add romance to the story. The 1925 movie also removes the conflict between the natives and ape-men, while the belligerent presence on the plateau is reduced to an actor in an ape costume and a chimpanzee. Even the treachery that traps the explorers is replaced by a brontosaurus feeding on the felled tree. Perhaps, after the First World War, the book’s soldierly fervour was considered inappropriate for cinema audiences.

By downplaying the battles between humans and ape-men, the story is refocused on exploration and scientific discovery. Although the original text is arguably diluted, the most exciting element is retained, and even magnified. The notion of an isolated place where prehistoric animals continue to thrive was first explored in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but Conan Doyle was the first novelist to make this a central premise of his work, thus creating the archetypal dinosaur narrative. The narrative has reoccurred frequently since 1912, with tales in which people discover some remote location inhabited by creatures long thought to be extinct, become trapped and must endeavour to escape.  Jurassic Park is essentially The Lost World combined with a fear of modern technology.  At its core is the thrill of the unknown and this tale is an adventure that audiences of all ages can enjoy. As its author stated:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.