You’ve unleashed the kraken, my friend.

I am excited for JP4, as I am excited for any movie that has dinosaurs in it, and that theme music gets me every time because I remember how beautiful it was to see that first film. The first film showed us dinosaurs as they’d never been seen, dinosaurs based on thorough research (though not without their faults— those raptors and dilophosaurus for instance) and it changed the way dinos were portrayed in media forever.

And this is why I am so, so upset with JP4. It’s showing us the same old green-skinned scaly monsters and totally ignoring DECADES of new developments. It’s ignoring the reason why the first film worked so well— it was something new, based on actual scientific research. People love innovation, and many love learning really neat science facts, and JP4 is in no way going to do either of those.

Now I have heard the arguments FOR the scaly green-skinned boring designs:

1. “But Abby, there’s an in-universe explanation, they have frog DNA! They’re just trying to stay consistent.” Never, never never say “but there’s a canonical reason” for something that’s problematic. . Someone at some point made a conscious decision to make it so, it’s not some unchangeable law that must be adhered to. It’s been at least 20 years in-universe since the first movie, are we really supposed to believe they didn’t keep making developments in their cloning process? Remember how frog DNA fricked everything up by making the dinos able to reproduce? What if they changed it to bird DNA once it became apparent that birds and dinos were so closely related, and to stop them from changing sex? And beyond all that the important thing to remember here is that it doesn’t MATTER if they aren’t exactly supposed to be dinosaurs in-universe, people who watch this movie are going to see them as dinosaurs. They are going to come away from this film thinking the “feathers theory” is still some weird fringe science and REAL dinosaurs are still green and scaly and naked. Also calling “consistency” when the dinosaurs’ appearances were changed between films is hardly a steady argument.

2. “There’s no way we could know what they look like so why even bother, we can make them look however we want!!1!” This is you choosing to ignore the vast wealth of knowledge we DO have. Paleontologists aren’t just making wild guesses, sitting around thinking “whooa duuude what if they had feathers, wouldn’t that just be wild” we KNOW. We have FOSSIL EVIDENCE. Technology has progressed to a point that we can look at the same fossil we had 30 years ago and find countless more details we didn’t know were there, didn’t think to look for. We even know what COLOR some feathers were, we know there were feather mites that preyed on those feathers. Trackways tell us how they walked, how many walked, where they walked. Fossilized nesting sites give us clues on how they cared for their young. We know so much, there is no reason to ignore the incredible amount of research people have done just because we haven’t seen living, breathing non-avian dinosaurs with our own eyes, especially considering the fact that so many people don’t know about all the stuff we know, because public outreach movies like JP4 keep blatantly ignoring it.

3. “But feathered dinosaurs look stupid, like big chickens. They could never sell that to an audience!” Okay look. People are going to see JP4. If you make it look good, and you have Chris Pratt, and you have Chris Pratt on a motorcycle riding with some velociraptors, people will see this movie. And is a chicken the only bird anyone knows? Have you never heard of the bearded vulture? Or eagles, and the fact that they attack BEARS? Even small birds are a formidable opponent to a person. And their feathers make them look magnificent, not stupid. In order to design crowd-pleasing dinosaurs, we don’t need to strip them of their feathers, we need designers who know what they’re doing. The blog paleoillustration reblogs excellent paleo art from capable artists, a game called Saurian is being developed that is using incredible artists such as grimchild to create the most accurate and beautiful dinosaurs possible, Emily Willoughby is excellent at using bird influences to make realistic feathered dinosaurs (including one of my favorite depictions of Microraptor!)— feathered dinosaurs do not look stupid. Even if they look stupid to you, that doesn’t stop them from existing, and perhaps you should immerse yourself in the world of feathered dinosaurs some more and get used to it, because they are here to stay. You aren’t getting Pluto back, and you aren’t getting your naked monsters back, either. When good scientists are presented with theories that disprove old theories, they don’t wallow in nostalgia, they accept it and move forward.

4. “Why do you even care so much, geez, it’s just a movie” Nothing is ever “just a movie”. Even if you think you aren’t, you are affected by what you see in movies. We tend to believe what we see in movies, even some of the ridiculous stuff. Movies can be an excellent way to present science to people in an easy to digest format, as we saw with JP1. Sure, the science was ridiculous, but it got people interested in actual dinosaurs. JP4 will be the only exposure most people have to dinosaurs— and it is decades behind. People will keep chuckling to themselves when I draw them a dinosaur with feathers, asking “haha so you buy into the feather theory?” as if it’s something a scientist posited in a fit of insanity, totally unsupported by evidence. When people keep seeing naked dinosaurs in pop culture, they assume that must be the accepted idea of what they looked like, or else it would be changed. So I have to make a stink, so I can get the word out that Paleontologists and even Junior Paleontologists absolutely do not support the current portrayal of dinosaurs in the media. This way, we can get more movies such as Dinosaur Island which I very much look forward to seeing, and Saurian which I very much look forward to playing.

And why does learning about accurate dinosaurs matter? Why should we want to learn about these weird bird/reptiles that died millions of years ago? Because learning about the world we live in is important. Just as we want to figure out how we fit into the universe, we want to figure out how we fit on our own planet, where we came from, our life history. This isn’t just a bunch of sheltered nerds sitting around saying “Well actually…” in a nasally voice, it’s an entire branch of science whose accomplishments are being ignored because a bunch of nostalgic 20-somethings are afraid of change and think “feathers look stupid, like a chicken”

All this being said, I am still going to see it the day it comes out, in the best seats in the house.