Back in the flesh: ‘Jurassic Park' and the Dinosaur Renaissance

The Hindu

17 hours ago

In the summer of 1993, the world watched spellbound as a towering Brachiosaurus gracefully reared up to nibble treetops, while John Williams' score swelled like God breathing. Steven Spielberg's genre-defining blockbuster rewrote the cultural DNA of dinosaurs forever, transforming them from textbook curiosities into Hollywood royalty. An entire generation developed an unshakable obsession with creatures that had been extinct for 65 million years. All because of a movie.
For a film that opens with a mosquito trapped in amber, Jurassic Park has aged with surprising elasticity. It had the makings of a pulpy B-movie, but the magician in Spielberg spun it into something timeless. Ever since, it's been re-spun, rebooted, and rebranded across three decades.
The science, even then, was flimsy. Toxorhynchites rutilus, the species of mosquito shown, doesn't even suck blood. And DNA degrades far too quickly to survive millions of years. But that shaky premise has since evolved from science fiction, to 'science eventuality,' to literal modern-day science. While extracting dinosaur DNA from fossilised insects remains a fantasy, the real world has been inching closer to that cinematic magic.
Iconic special effects
Of course, the magic wasn't all Spielberg. Stan Winston built animatronics with blinking eyes, breathing chests, and skin stretched over robotic bones. Industrial Light and Magic's (ILM) groundbreaking CGI handled the weight and gait of creatures that had never been seen before, using a special 'Dinosaur Input Device' to puppeteer their movements digitally. Just 15 minutes of dinosaur screen time was enough to reshape how a generation imagined prehistoric life.
The irony is that while Jurassic Park was hailed for its scientific fidelity, it also got a fair amount of things wrong. The Velociraptors were scaled up to nearly double their actual size. The T. Rex's vision, contrary to Dr. Grant's famous whisper, was not based on movement; it likely had binocular depth perception and could smell you coming a mile away. Most egregiously for modern palaeontologists, the dinosaurs were featherless, greyish reptiles, missing the colourful, bird-like traits we now know many had.
But Jack Horner, the real-life palaeontologist who inspired Alan Grant, saw the bigger picture. In his words, the movie wasn't a documentary, but a doorway to suspend all disbelief. Yet, over time, the franchise leaned deeper into American military-industrial fantasies. The recent entries have given us weaponised Velociraptors, genetically-engineered hybrid killing machines, and a Mosasaur the size of a battleship. Behind the scenes, consultants still fought to keep the science honest. Some succeeded (the Pyroraptor from Jurassic World Dominion finally had feathers) but the overarching 'scary sells' mandate remained. Pink-plumed, birdlike dinosaurs, no matter how accurate, just didn't test well.
The palaeontological re-awakening
In the years following the film's release, palaeontology experienced a renaissance. The so-called 'Jurassic Park Effect' turned casual curiosity into career paths. Children who once saw dinosaurs as static images began imagining them as dynamic, intelligent, and even graceful creatures. Universities saw a spike in students declaring interest in prehistoric life. Museums were packed again. Dinosaurs were, suddenly, the coolest things ever.
The once unassuming field relegated to academia now had a face, a soundtrack, and perhaps most importantly, funding. Governments and institutions began investing more seriously in palaeontological research, emboldened by a public that was suddenly into dinosaurs. Before Jurassic Park, new dinosaur species were discovered at a rate of maybe three or four per year. Today, that number hovers around 50. Whether digging in the deserts of Mongolia or scanning fossils with particle accelerators, researchers rode the wave of public fascination the film helped ignite.
Which is exactly why the Jurassic World sequels sting a little. They're fine as popcorn films, but they could've done more. The original reimagined how the world saw dinosaurs. The new films played it safe, recycling familiar nostalgic images rather than reflecting what science had since uncovered. Sure, they'll still get some kid to Google 'Indominus Rex vs Spinosaurus', but it's hard not to feel a little let down by what could've been.
On the ethics of de-extinction
Jurassic Park did something more speculative and slippery by introducing the world to the concept of 'de-extinction.' Today, we live in a time where resurrecting lost species no longer sounds entirely impossible. Ben Lamm, founder of Colossal Biosciences, believes the woolly mammoth will walk again by 2028. His labs are working with ancient DNA, comparative genomics, and somatic cell nuclear transfer — the same science that cloned Dolly the sheep, now turbocharged with robotics and AI. The ostensible goal has been to resurrect extinct species to seed ecosystems with keystone animals. His team is also simultaneously attempting to revive the dodo, the thylacine (the Tasmanian Devil, or Taz from Looney Tunes), and potentially use artificial wombs for reproduction. It's the closest thing we have to a real-life InGen, though unsurprisingly, not everyone is optimistic. Some question the ethics of creating a single living animal just to prove it can be done. Others worry about the unintended consequences of gene editing, including evolutionary whiplash, cellular chaos, and the specter of designer organisms being commodified.
There's a certain poetry in how Jurassic Park warned us about the dangers of turning nature into a spectacle while itself becoming the most breathtaking spectacle ever made. A movie that staged a cautionary tale about playing God with prehistoric DNA ended up inspiring decades of scientific fascination, funding, and, ironically, real-world attempts. The franchise that once asked whether we should resurrect extinct animals is now part of a cultural machine that increasingly seems to whisper, 'Why not?' It captured, maybe accidentally, the exact shape of our cultural neurosis: the maniacal desire to control nature, a belief in technological omnipotence, and a tendency to moralise after the fact.
Perhaps the cruelest cosmic twist is that the plastic toy dinosaurs clutched by children today — those mass-produced echoes of Spielberg's creations — are, in a very real sense, made of dinosaurs. Fossil fuels, derived from ancient organic matter liquefied over millennia, have been moulded into choking hazards and Happy Meal replicas of the creatures. These great beasts who once walked the Earth now circle in a perfect closed loop of commercial mythmaking. Capitalism, like life, finds a way.