Jurassic Park adviser unimpressed with Steven Spielberg's dinosaurs: ‘What didn't he get wrong?'

Irish Times

21 hours ago

The latest Jurassic Park film comes out next week – but the man who served as a consultant on the original film decades ago is not impressed by it.
'Dino' Don Lessem was employed by director
Steven Spielberg
on the title, Jurassic Park, which came out in 1993 and was responsible for a surge in interest in dinosaurs that never really dissipated.
Lessem is in
Dublin
this weekend to take in his
Zoorassic Park life-size dinosaur exhibition
, which runs at
Dublin Zoo
until September, and to give a series of sold-out talks to children on the subject.
Lessem credits the original Jurassic Park outing with reviving interest in the extinct creatures, but that is about all. As a consultant, he felt his advice was ignored.
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'I know all the wrong ways to present dinosaurs. If you told the real story of dinosaurs, it would be a very boring movie. They mostly ate, went to the bathroom and then slept,' he says.
'Dino' Don Lessem behind a brontosaurus which he designed as part of the Zoorassic Trail in Dublin Zoo.
'In Jurassic Park, I would tell them all the time that this is not what they look like, and they told me, 'enjoy the shrimp and try and be quiet'.'
What does he think Spielberg got wrong?
'What didn't he get wrong?,' quips Lessem.
However, the dinosaur expert got on very well with the film director, which he attributes to his being the 'only one on set who didn't want something from [Spielberg]'.
'Everyone on a movie set is angling for the next job.'
Lessem says he does not think much of Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the franchise. He objects to the depiction of dinosaurs as man-eating monsters as, in reality, a human could have outrun and easily outsmarted a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
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Still, he's not po-faced about the matter, because dinosaurs are a gateway to science for young children, and he regularly meets scientists whose childhood interest in the natural world started with the mostly outsize, long-extinct beasts.
Lessem had studied to be a gorilla scientist, but he found it too hard to make a living. He got a job at the Boston Globe as a journalist, and after being sent on assignment to report on dinosaur hunters, he was hooked.
Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern and Sam Neill star in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, watching dinosaur eggs hatch. Photograph: Universal
This is a golden age for dinosaur discovery, he says, with new species being discovered every couple of weeks or so.
The latest is called Enigmacursor Mollyborthwickae
and was recently discovered in the US and is about the size of a large dog.
In 1999, a dinosaur found in Argentina was named after him – the Lessemsaurus. This beast was nine metres long and weighed an average of seven tonnes.
It was a tiddler, however, compared to the Argentinosaurus, the largest-ever living creature, which weighed between 65 and 80 tonnes, roughly the weight of 50 elephants.
Most dinosaurs are only identified by a single tooth or bone.
'There's a lot of big mistakes made. Half of the dinosaurs that are named turn out to be wrong,' Lessem says.
How these land animals got to be so large is one of the questions that paleontologists are still trying to answer.
Lessem believes there are not enough paleontologists at work, and that there is little funding for research despite the enduring fascination with dinosaurs.
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Universities, he says, see no way of monetising dinosaur research, so they leave it to the amateurs.
'You could make a case that dinosaurs inspire children, but there is no practical benefit from it,' he adds with a hint of resignation.
There are no dinosaur fossils in Ireland because there was no such place during the time they were on Earth, between 245 million and 66 million years ago. What is now Ireland was then under water.
Nevertheless, a man from Co Cork called Lessem to tell him he had discovered a dinosaur footprint. Lessem says he is sceptical, but intends to check it out during his tour around the country.