Our unfeathered friends (Image: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features)

“No feathers. #JP4” This enigmatic recent tweet by Colin Trevorrow, the director of Jurassic Park 4, has riled dino buffs. It suggests his CGI giants will be bald, flying in the face of science.

Since the early 1990s, when the first Jurassic Park came out, evidence has mounted that many of its lizard-skinned stars in fact wore feathery bling. The turkey-sized Velociraptor and at least some of the gigantic tyrannosaurs had feathers. A few dinosaurs even had iridescent ones, perhaps for display.

Palaeontologist Darren Naish, of the University of Southampton, UK, isn’t impressed with Trevorrow’s choice. “I’m pissed off by a disregard for knowledge,” he says. “It helps perpetuate the notion that dinosaurs were all scaly dragons, alien and unlike modern animals.”


“[The decision] jars with overwhelming evidence that some JP dinosaur stars were feathered, and misses an terrific chance to affirm modern concepts of dinosaur palaeobiology with a wide audience,” blogs palaeontologist and movie consultant Mark Witton.

Trevorrow has remained tight-lipped, so we can only speculate as to why he is sticking with bald beasts. Feathers are tricky to render in CGI, but the last few years have seen rapid progress. Pixar’s Up featured a bird with iridescent feathers, while armies of CGI owls starred in the 2010 film Legend of the Guardians. Even a recent Doctor Who episode, made on a television budget, managed to put some feathers on its dinosaurs.