Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment… focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Chances are that you have seen Jurassic Park or one of its sequels. Chances are that you found some part of it exciting. Perhaps you found other parts to strain credulity. That’s ok. The Jurassic Park franchise is not entirely accurate. At first, I thought it was too pandering, too dumbed-down to create realistic dinosaurs. But I was wrong. At least about the relative realism of the dinosaurs.
No, they weren’t exactly Jurassic. The dinosaurs named and depicted did not completely act like their namesakes should have acted. The velociraptor and the dilophosaurus in the first movie were particularly off. But Spielberg got a lot of other things right. And he made dinosaurs really popular, which probably led to more people studying dinosaurs and more funding for dinosaur studies. Well played, Mr. Spielberg, well played.
Not Especially Jurassic
So what exactly is Jurassic? It’s a geological time period. Geologic time is divided up into eras and periods, chiefly to provide names for future geologists and paleontologists to memorize. Also, it’s shorter to write Jurassic than it is to write 200 to 145 million years ago. The entire era of the dinosaurs is called the Mesozoic, which means the middle (meso) era that had animal fossils (zoic), as opposed to the Paleozoic, which means older time of fossils, and the Cenozoic, which is the recent era, i.e. now.
The Mesozoic also had three divisions: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Triassic was called that because the Germans wanted that time period to have another three categories that they called the Trias. Kind of like the basic rule of magic; if you say a thing three times, then it becomes real.
Continue reading “J is for Jurassic”
