this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
2 points (66.7% liked)

Movies

13574 readers
31 users here now

Lemmy

Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!


Related Communities:

!books@lemmy.world - Discussing books and book-related things.

!comicbooks@lemmy.world - A place to discuss comic books of all types.

!marvelstudios@lemmy.world - LW's home for all things MCU.


While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

  1. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.

  2. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.

  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed

  4. Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.

    Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.

    Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.

Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] redhorsejacket@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure believability had much to do with it, as opposed to the flair for the dramatic. At the end of the day, Dr. John Ostrum, the paleontologist that both Crichton and Spielberg consulted for their projects had this to say:

Q: Is Steven Spielberg's version of dinosaur's accurate? A: I think he's a really talented man who can put these creatures on the screen so they look real. Steven Spielberg created this image based on a story written by another extremely clever person, Michael Crichton.

[...]

The name I gave it was Deinonychus, which comes from the Greek and means 'terrible claw'. And Michael Crichton, in an apologetic way, explained that in the novel he decided to use the name Velociraptors, that I had said was the closest relative to the animal I had found. He said, 'It's more dramatic.' And I said I recognize that most people are not familiar with Greek. Velociraptor everyone recognizes.

Then again, if you mean "believable" in the sense that Spielberg didn't believe accurately sized velociraptors would be scary (as opposed to 'i literally don't believe these creatures existed'), then I'm just making your point again, but worse.

archive link to the rest of Dr. Ostrum's interview, if anyone is curious.

[–] TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I think the reasoning at the time was lizards with feathers would not sell and thus were not « believable » but your explanation is better