It’s been years since I read the book, but it’s my memory that the geneticists used DNA from a variety of different animals, including birds and reptiles, to fill in the gaps in the dinosaur DNA samples. So it wasn’t that they thought frog DNA would be the best, it was just one of several different things they included in the mix.
I don’t remember if there was any reason given for why they decided to use DNA from different kinds of animals, though.
Exactly.
Not challenged.
Jurassic Park is one of those books and movies where you can really enjoy it, as long as you don’t think about it. Like The Three Stooges.
Maybe they meant a STEGOCERAS, but didn’t spell it right:
But you forget another classic Spielberg visual moment: the living T-Rex smashing the skeleton of the fossil T-Rex and bellowing in triumph as a tattered banner flutters in front of him, reading WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.
I always thought the whole egg thing was kind of lame in the book. The raptors don’t notice Alan hiding and injecting eggs and then as soon as an egg pops up they just eat it instead of wondering where the hell it came from? It felt straight out of a video game. And the raptors just didn’t seem that scary.
Were they meant to be smaller, more realistic raptors in the book, like the way velociraptors really were?
thread hijacking
Why did that guy in Jurassic Park III die, the other guy who was parasailing? He was talking in the video they found on the camera, so he survived the crash. Did he just sit up in that tree until he died?
Probably eaten by the tricycloplots.
But they find his skeleton still in the parachute, still all together
I think that was a joke.
In any event, maybe an animal attacked him up there but didn’t tear him apart or only killed him.
Acid.
I doubt many animals would waste time wondering where a tasty treat came from. Even young human children aren’t very careful when it comes to eating whatever they find that looks good. The raptors were said to be fairly intelligent, about as smart as parrots, but while that’s smart enough to be surprised I don’t think it’s smart enough to be cynical.
*IIRC in the book they were significantly smaller than humans.
But they were supposed to be super smart and have a great sense of smell–that’s what Grant was relying on, right? That they’d smell the eggs. It just seemed bizarre that they’d see/smell the eggs but completely miss the adult human tossing eggs at them just because he was behind a table or something.
Wouldn’t the raptor have been able to smell him from behind the table?
And were the turkey raptors really that frightening in the book?
Yeah, they make a HUGE deal out of the raptor’s scent of smell in the movies. Especially the second one.
I don’t think they were as scary in the book. I think they were meant to be smaller. Also there’s a scene where they go into the raptor den in the first JP book because they need to count the raptors. And the raptors sort of notice them but don’t do anything because they’re relaxed or something. I have no idea why they would be more relaxed if humans are near their babies, but there’s a lot about Michael Crichton I don’t quite get…
They were supposed to be super smart compared to other animals, not super smart by human standards. I don’t believe there was anything to suggest they’d be capable of suspecting that the eggs had been tampered with. That would not only require a pretty advanced theory of mind, but knowledge that it was possible for food to be poisoned. The raptors wouldn’t have had any experience to let them know that food that seemed fine could be dangerous.
I don’t remember about their sense of smell in the book, but Grant didn’t need them to smell the eggs since they could easily see them.
But they didn’t have to be super smart to be smarter than actors.
Or people nit-picking a classic movie, instead of doing what a raptor would be doing: getting out and enjoying what’s left of the day. (Thanks, Veelo! I’m on my way! “Clevah girl…” indeed.)
OK, I’m back! What’d I mi… Oh, I guess nothing. Umm, why aren’t there more people discussing *Jurassic Park? *It’s THE movie that made Science look like Fun to my very-young-at-the-time kids. And now one of them’s going into medicine. I just asked, and she said that “the only real JP movie” made dinosaurs (and, by extension, Zoology) real to her.
So maybe I should have more of that “Gee, whiz” attitude, and less cynicism with regards to sci-fi movies. Y’know, those dinosaur effects do hold up. That first shot of Dr. Grant seeing the… apatosaurus? and other dinos is still great.
No, I didn’t mean they would be smart enough to realize that the eggs were tampered with, or that they’d need to smell the eggs. Wouldn’t they smell the person who was throwing eggs and them and then just go for him directly?
I don’t remember how good their sense of smell was supposed to be, but the raptors liked to eat eggs and they weren’t on a deliberate mission to kill all humans. I don’t find it difficult to believe that a raptor or any other kind of animal would be more interested in the tasty treat that had just appeared than they would be in immediately identifying where that “human smell” was coming from.