Reading on mobile? Click here to view the trailer.

Twenty years after its original run, Jurassic Park is back on the big screens in a 3D format that bodes well for those who like their dinosaurs looming out of the screen or dining on stray lawyers. At the time of its initial release it was the highest grossing film ever, and the pioneering advances in computer-generated graphics gave a new realism to the special effects. Mixing in the digital work with life-sized models and puppets to take movie monsters to the next level at least partially explains the popularity of the film at the time and its enduring legacy.

The film spawned two sequels (with Jurassic Park 4 currently in preproduction), not to mention enough copycats and low-rent efforts (Attack of the Sabretooth is especially egregious) to keep the film industry creatives going for some time. Dinosaurs have always been popular with the public, but JP did help rejuvenate interest in them and the science of palaeontology. In particular, it brought to the public the idea that dinosaurs were fast and active animals and not simply giant tail-dragging lizards. They could be relatively intelligent, social animals and were in many ways rather like their modern descendants, the birds.

New finds suggest the famous forelimbs of tyrannosaurs were much closer together and almost under the head. Photograph: Rex

These ideas were common in palaeontology when the film appeared, and indeed had been growing strongly since the early 1980s, but it was the first time this had really spread and become fixed in the public consciousness. The PR surrounding the film made it quite clear they were consulting with prominent dinosaur researchers to create the most accurate animals possible and in many ways the creatures depicted on screen were good representatives of our understanding of dinosaurs at the time. While there was inevitably some dramatic licence and exaggeration (this was fiction, after all) they were convincing as both effects and realistic as animals.

However, if anything the PR was a little too good and people took a fictional film a bit too literally. A colleague in Canada confided that to this day visitors at the museum where she works ask to see the "real" dinosaurs and are frustrated at the presence of only skeletons and footprints. That's clearly rather extreme, but I regularly encounter people who treat pretty much every aspect of dinosaurs from Jurassic Park as being scientific fact and assume everything on the screen was approved by researchers and thus backed by the fossil record.

Even if that had been the case, two decades is a long time in any field of research and as a result, even some aspects of the film that were considered appropriate at the time are now out of date and don't represent current thinking. We have ever-improving understanding of dinosaur anatomy, physiology and behaviour, and most notably (given that we are looking at restored animals on screens, not bones) their external appearance.

Some assume that all the creatures depicted in the film and their behaviour were backed by evidence in the fossil record. Photograph: Rex

While I have talked before in these pages about the increasing number of dinosaurs that are known to have had feathers (and still more that may have had some kind of covering beyond scales) and the first tentative steps are being taken to uncover the colours of some of these animals, some more "mundane" research also impacts on their appearance.

For example, we now have a better idea of the arrangements of the muscles in the backs of the legs that connect to the base of the tail in carnivorous dinosaurs. Analyses of the arrangements of these, based on scars that appear on the bones of their legs and backbone, combined with studies of their nearest living relatives (birds and crocodilians), shows they would have had a rather crocodile-like bulge of muscle on their tails.

Similarly, new finds show that the forelimbs of tyrannosaurs were rather closer together than previously assumed – on screen those famous little arms are set far up the side of the animal, but in fact should be much closer together and almost underneath the head.

These are minor details in appearance compared to the probability that Tyrannosaurus had feathers, or the fact that there's no good evidence that Velociraptor was a pack hunter or especially smart (or as fast as a cheetah while we're on the subject), and the giant frill and venom-spitting in Dilophosaurus is basically fiction.

Even so, this illustrates just how research can progress in a whole variety of ways and that while dramatic finds like feathers are important, there is still much to be done with skeletal remains, and these have implications for the appearance and behaviour of these animals way beyond gross proportions like how tall they were.

For all the back-and-forth that has gone on over the possibilities of feathered dinosaurs in the next instalment of the franchise, I'm looking forward to it. It's fiction, and for all the often obvious cinematic problems with the films, it's good dinosaur-centric entertainment and I enjoy it for that. Still, it would be nice if more people were better at differentiating between what is real in the world of cinema and what is not.