The reality is far more confusing
Fur, feathers and more are featured in latest dinosaur movie.
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Fur → feature → movie
Experts explain the science behind it all
A giant snake-like creature crawls from a neighbour's pool.
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creature → explain → pool
Feathered lizards chase a family down their driveway.
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lizards → chase → driveway
Two furry, building-sized animals lean against a house and … get it on?
This is The End of Oak Street, the latest movie to barrel into theatres on the backs of dinosaurs and a nostalgic love for Jurassic Park.
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This → lean → Park
But despite a long entrenched Hollywood history, these prehistoric creatures look noticeably different from their Hollywood predecessors — representing a long-awaited update from the perspective of paleontologists.
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creatures → look → paleontologists
Here, CBC News asked experts about the feathers and fauna the movie gets right, and where filmmakers have filled gaps in a fossil record that still leaves some surprisingly basic questions unanswered.
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that → ask → questions
And most importantly, is that really how dinosaurs had sex?
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dinosaurs → have → sex
"It was actually pretty refreshing to see a lot of feathers and fluff on a lot of the dinosaurs in the movie, because that's really different from what we tended to see, even in the more recent Jurassic World movies," said Victoria Arbour, a paleontologist at the Royal B.C. Museum.
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Arbour → see → Museum
Hollywood's depiction of dinosaurs has long lagged behind the science.
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depiction → lag → science
Researchers have suspected a close relationship between dinosaurs and birds since soon after the theory of evolution was established.
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theory → suspect → evolution
If you've ever seen the logo for the Canadian brand Arc'teryx, you've seen the fossil of the world's first bird that suggested the link.
uncertain
that → see → link
But fossil discoveries beginning in the 1990s dramatically expanded the evidence that many non-avian dinosaurs had feathers.
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dinosaurs → begin → feathers
The 'Jurassic Park effect': How a generation fell in love with dinosaurs
Young tyrannosaur found with baby dinosaurs in its stomach
One important discovery was Sinosauropteryx prima in China, the first non-avian dinosaur with clear evidence of feathers. That and subsequent discoveries helped transform how scientists pictured dinosaurs, a revelation largely impeded in pop-culture due to movies imitating the scaly creatures made famous by Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
"
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scientists → fall → Park
That's really in the past 20 years that we've started to realize, 'Oh, these are feathered animals,'" said Caelan Libke, a PhD student at Carleton University researching dinosaurs.
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Libke → start → dinosaurs
"And so I think Jurassic Park was on the cusp, right when we were starting to figure out that they may have been feathered — and so that's why they're still scaly."
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they → think → cusp
From plausible to pure invention
The End of Oak Street goes all-in on feathers in a way few dinosaur movies ever have.
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movies → go → way
Its Allosaurus — which some movie-goers may mistake for a T. rex — is feathered, a choice Libke called plausible because the species is "closer to the base of the group that eventually evolved into birds."
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that → mistake → birds
A smaller feathered creature fills the stereotypical "velociraptor role" familiar from other dinosaur movies.
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creature → fill → movies
Arbour said it appears largely invented for the film, but resembles an Elaphrosaurus, a lightweight, three-toed, meat-eating dinosaur.
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it → say → Elaphrosaurus
Libke suggested Coelophysis, a smaller dinosaur from the late Triassic, as another possible inspiration.
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Libke → suggest → inspiration
Neither has direct fossil evidence proving feathers, but their position within the theropod group makes Oak Street's depiction plausible.
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depiction → have → group
Other animals seem to have been constructed with more creative liberties.
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animals → seem → liberties
The enormous legless, aquatic animal could have been inspired by the giant prehistoric snake Titanoboa, Libke said.
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Libke → inspire → snake
Arbour pointed to the still-living worm-shaped amphibians caecilians as another possible jumping-off point.
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Arbour → point → point
But in either case, the animal shown onscreen is not one scientists know to have existed.
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scientists → show → case
"We have literally nothing in the fossil record that matches that.
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that → have → that
It does not exist," Arbour said.
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Arbour → exist → ?
"There are some genuinely large snakes in the fossil record; they are not that big.
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they → be → record
Flights of fancy
Other artistic inventions are the fluffy, furry sauropods — a group of dinosaurs familiar to those who grew up with The Land Before Time and that includes the scientifically controversial Brontosaurus.
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that → grow → Brontosaurus
"The main reason being that they're just so big, they wouldn't need a lot of fur like that because they already have trouble getting rid of heat," Libke said.
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Libke → need → heat
"So they would just bake in their own fur, just because of their size."
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they → bake → size
What the sauropods do next is much harder to judge.
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do → judge → What
One scene depicts the enormous animals mating, positioned not unlike dogs — a somewhat bizarre scenario for creatures that would have weighed tens of thousands of kilograms.
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that → depict → kilograms
Director David Robert Mitchell has said he wrote the scene quickly and without much scientific consideration, but as a way of showing that dinosaurs had full lives and did more than hunt.
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dinosaurs → say → more
Yet simply modelling their behaviour after living animals may not be as scientifically far-fetched as it appears.
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it → model → animals
"Dinosaur mating has been a mystery, and it's still most likely going to be a mystery because behaviours don't really fossilize very well," Libke said.
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Libke → go → ?
Beyond knowing that dinosaurs must have done it, scientists have struggled to determine exactly how they did.
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they → know → it
Skeletons fossilize much more readily than soft tissue, meaning skin, feathers and reproductive anatomy are rarely preserved.
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skin → fossilize → tissue
Experts still struggle to determine whether individual dinosaur specimens were male or female.
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specimens → struggle → ?
Only about half a decade ago, scientists reconstructed the first preserved genital opening for a non-avian dinosaur — evidence so rare it only recently lent serious credence to the still-unproven hypothesis that some dinosaurs had penises.
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dinosaurs → reconstruct → penises
…and 8 more, not listed.
