Some Groundbreaking Dinosaur Facts

TelltaleGames

Since starting at Telltale a little over a month ago, I've gotten a glimpse at some of the prehistoric creatures that will be making an appearance in our upcoming Jurassic Park game; some of them totally surprising me. While I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any particular dinosaur, I’m sure you can venture a guess or two on some of the creatures that will be in the game.

Now that I’m on the subject of dinosaurs (one of my favorite subjects as I am eternally a four to eight year old boy), I’ve gotten to thinking about how little the scientific world really knows about the fascinating primordial beasts. Just a month or so ago an entire species of dinosaur was pretty much wiped from existence due to the new theory of them actually being the juvenile form of an entirely different species. Of course I’m referring to the theory that the Triceratops is actually a Torosaurus, but there have been others. Here are just a couple of the misconceptions about dinosaurs that science has rebuked in more recent years, both of which have even been depicted in the existing Jurassic Park film trilogy.

[readmore]One of the biggies is that dinosaurs, namely the sauropods such as Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, lived in swamps and spent most of their time in water to support their immense size. Modern research has proven that to be untrue, both due to the design of their feet not being suitable for aquatic living and due to the fact that these creatures were not the lumbering behemoths they were once thought to be. Remember how blown away Dr. Grant was at the beginning of the first Jurassic Park film when he saw the Brachiosaurs? That’s how I felt when I learned this fact, as all the books I had read when I was little depicted these animals neck deep in water, usually with a weird vine hanging from their mouth.

Another shocker is the revelation that many dinosaurs may have actually been covered in feathers. That is totally crazy, given the fact that for so long, dinosaurs were known solely as giant lizards. While they were reptilian, dinosaurs shared many traits with birds and likely had more in common with that pigeon that left a present on your car than the iguana at the zoo. The first two JP films were a little off on that, with the Velociraptors being depicted as totally scaly, but the third film fixed that by adding the feathers. That doesn’t really explain why a Velociraptor portrayed as taller than a human in the films (they were actually about two feet tall - the film Velociraptors had more in common with the Utahraptor) or why they even sprouted feathers in the first place after being shown sans feathers in the first two films, but I digress. Anyway, there were dinosaurs with feathers and they weren’t all called Archaeopteryx.

Now that I've summarily blown your mind with these groundbreaking facts about dinosaurs, let me ask you something sort of unrelated. What are your favorite fictional dinosaurs, realistic or otherwise (that means the Jurassic Park dinos are fair game), and why? Let me know in the comments.

Oh you want to know my favorite fictional dinosaur? I’m going to have to go with the Dino-Riders Tyrannosaurus Rex. Sure, he was controlled by the evil Krulos and his brain box, but he had lasers and armor and the toy was pretty rad! An honorable mention in the fictional dinosaur pantheon is the Dinosaucers. Remember that show?