Little has changed since Conan Doyle hoodwinked Houdini and company. Today’s special effects are vastly more sophisticated, but they still have the same goal of fooling us into accepting what we are seeing is real. We think we know what dinosaurs looked and sounded and moved like simply because we’ve watched countless hours of them galumphing around in films and documentaries. But although animatronics and CGI advances have made them much more compelling and convincing, what we see on screen remains at least as much the product of fantasy as reality.

For all the huge strides made by palaeontology and the use of new imaging techniques to get pigment and tissue details from fossils, we still have only the haziest idea what colour most dinosaurs were. Maybe they had polka dots or were purple like Barney. Many more than we used to believe now appear to have been feathery not leathery, including Jurassic Park’s velociraptors (which were also much smaller than in the movies, about the size of a large chicken) and quite possibly T-rex itself. And bar a couple of exceptions, we are still largely clueless as to what noises they would have made. Work on a well-preserved Parasaurolophus skull indicated it may have made sounds akin to low notes from a trombone. As to how they moved, what and how they ate and many other key details, it’s fair to say our ideas are still in flux.

Documentary dilemmas



In the end, fiction is fiction, so it’s arguable that it doesn’t matter that much if Jurassic Park and its ilk stomp on a few facts in the cause of creating drama. All monster movies take liberties: the latest incarnation of Godzilla, for instance, is far too big to be plausibly supported by his own legs. Where this blurring of what-we-know and what-we-conjecture is more significant is in programmes that could be mistaken for reality