Feathered Dinosaurs Are Scary as Hell
There’s a bunch of squawk on the web coming from people who think that feathered dinosaurs aren’t scary. On behalf of anyone who’s had hands-on experience with or even basic working knowledge of bird biology, please, shut the fuck up. Birds are fucking creepy murderous motherfuckers. Don’t believe me? Watch this documentary in which it takes several big beefy australian rugby player type dudes to tackle down a partially sedated Cassowary which, despite being half their size, could kick their guts out.
(disclaimer: this is an hour long documentary – but if you jump to 22:25 you can see dudes tackling a drugged up dinosaur)
And that’s a fruit eating dinosaur! That’s sorta like your run of the mill Oviraptorid, except that it’s never had to run from a Dromeosaur. That’s the “Six foot turkey” the ugly fat kid in the beginning of Jurassic Park thinks ain’t shit. And it’s been roofied multiple times. And to anyone who can look at a cassowary and say “it would be scarier if it were brown and scaly like the raptors in Jurassic Park” I say that you are wrong. Not only do all those black shaggy feathers make it look like a nightmarish abomination emerging from the shadowy forest of a Jim Henson fever dream, but they also make it way harder to see which of its legs is going to kick you right in your twat. It’s like the red feathers that traditionally decorate the end of a kung fu spear to distract the opponent, except the whole animal is both feathers and kung fu and both its feet are spears.
I mean, HOLY SHIT. Indoors-only city folk who think that feathered animals aren’t/can’t be scary have clearly never spotted a barn owl with their flashlight while hiking alone at night. Let me explain: a barn owl in that context basically looks like the ghost of a dead Korean child sitting in a tree, that can turn its head completely around, fly in total silence, locate a rat by sound alone, and then snatch it with its ratchet-tendon talons from its hiding place in long grass.
Or better yet, check out a baby barn owl regurgitating the compressed bones and fur of the mammals its mother stuffed in its hook-billed squawking mouth.
Now imagine a big shaggy weirdo like that cassowary, but with the talons of an owl and it’s 20 feet long. Oh, also it has jaws with the crush force of a crocodile and the serrated teeth and septic bite of a komodo dragon. That’s what the little baby bitch cousin of T-Rex was. A murder-saur called Yutyrannus huali (which I choose to believe was named after some ancient kung fu master who could kick you hard enough to crumple your ribcage). Oh, but unlike t-rex it had relatively longer, frighteningly strong, creepy taloned hands emerging from its blood and shit flecked plumage to grip you to its fuzzy, death-smelling breast with. Don’t think that would make a horrifying mind-fuck of a movie monster?? REALLY!??!?
I disagree.
I just watched Jurassic Park in the theater for the first time in 20 years and it’s such a goddamn solid movie that it actually managed to make me mad about the recent announcement that the upcoming Jurassic Park 4 won’t feature any feathered dinosaurs. While I’m sure the new movie will have a line or two about how the JP dinos are genetic amalgams to explain away the lack of paleo plumage, what bothers me is that without a doubt the real reason for doing this is to maintain the “look of the brand”… which is exactly what the first Jurassic Park worked so hard to get away from – depicting dinosaurs according to their traditional reptilian image. The credibility and believability of the entire film is predicated on the idea that dinosaurs were more like birds than modern reptiles – from Dr. Grant’s first memorable child-traumatizing monologue to the final shots of the film which show a flock of pelicans flying along side Hammond’s helicopter as Dr. Grant smugly looks out at them like “god damn son, i really know my shit.” And twenty years later, what really holds up about the film’s dinosaurs is their distinctively bird like behavior. The tyrannosaur assaults the Ford explorer like an eagle pinning and picking apart a carcass, the raptors stalk about like huge murderous roosters, the dilophosaur has the spookily inquisitive yet suddenly aggressive temper of a cassowary, even the Brachiosaurs move and honk gracefully like a flock of giant swans. It was all thrillingly unlike anything we’d ever seen before, but despite all that, the new movie promises more of the same. That’s particularly sad when you consider that by todays scientific standards the design of the original JP dinosaurs is downright bland. Without a doubt the artistry and animation of the dinosaurs is gorgeous (especially for the time), but imagine if that level of special effects wizardry were applied to brilliantly colored and plumed creatures, reflecting our modern understanding of dinosaur soft tissues and their propensity for outlandish display structures… I submit to you, that would be visually stunning, and at times, downright frightening
…aaand here is the original frame from Jurassic park that I painted over:
Babbletrish on 01 May 2013 at 3:30 pm #
“On behalf of anyone who’s had hands-on experience with or even basic working knowledge of bird biology, please, shut the fuck up.”
A-freakin’-men!
Lillihandra on 02 May 2013 at 6:39 am #
Considering nature’s propensity for using bright colors in mating plumage and/or as a warning to others, I find it hard to believe that people ever believed that dinosaurs would be boring shades of green and brown without variation on this theme *somewhere*. Hell, even if we still believed them to be more like lizards, there are some fricking gorgeous lizards out there.
I think part of the problem with people’s perception of our plumed friends is that they’re used to watching bluebirds and robins from their windows or ducks/geese eating bread. Most of the time they see a predatory bird in action, it’s a smaller one going after a worm. Typically people don’t see hawks, eagles, owls, or their cousins grabbing or eating prey, and if they do they don’t translate it to what would happen if there was a bird big enough to treat them like that mouse they just watched being decimated and devoured.
Historian on 02 May 2013 at 11:04 pm #
Agreed. Drab animals seem to be the exception, not the norm. Even among the largest living species of reptiles there is an array of color, from yellow spotted anacondas, to brilliant iguanas, reticulate-patterned water monitors, radiated tortoises, beautiful sea turtles, even large crocodiles and caimans (when not caked in mud) display a variety of hue and patterning that at times is quite striking.
Jake on 03 May 2013 at 7:46 pm #
I would also argue that no one ever truly found the dinosaur designs of Jurassic Park scary. Awesome, fantastical, but not scary. The only time these animals became frightening was in behavior, raptors were truly a menace, the dilophosaurus was shocking in how it turned from a seemingly docile little dinosaur to a venom spitting killer. And none of these moments would have gone away whether the dinosaurs were feathered or not.
But then again are we really so surprised about this? It is Hollywood. And they will continue to shovel out the same shit that has made them money in the past.
Historian on 04 May 2013 at 2:55 am #
true. i definitely wasn’t surprised to hear that the new JP4 wasn’t going to be based in science, and i was pretty determined not to give a shit… until i saw the first JP movie in the theater again and got reminded of how well made a sci-fi adventure movie can be. Every character moment, human and dinosaur, is both entertaining and carefully conceived. Even when the science in the first movie isn’t accurate the behavior of the animals is based on the way living animals behave and founded on a set of character traits which are consistent throughout the movie… which can’t be said for the following JP movies.
RaptorX on 17 Jul 2013 at 10:19 pm #
They just should not forget the money mainly came from not doing mainstream stuff. JP got so popular and made money by being ahead of time, by doing something new. So sticking to a concept from 20 years ago by NOT changing anything will more likely kill than save the franchise if the story isn’t solid enough.
Carrie P. on 18 Jul 2013 at 1:21 pm #
Birds are a parade of horror, and when the plumage is strikingly beautiful or downright silly, that contrast and incongruity only serves to make them MORE horrifying. The harpy eagle of the Philippines has goofy-looking head plumes, and the crushing grip of its fist-sized talons makes your fist look like a baby’s. The secretary bird has goofy-looking head plumes and freaking bicycle shorts, and it kicks snakes to death for lunch every goddamn day. The cute-looking shrike could be any adorable little garden bird, until you catch it impaling living mice and lizards on a thorn to eat later. Hell, people think chickens are silly, but there’s a reason cockfighting is widely banned – two ordinary roosters will kick each other to death with their fucking leg-daggers. Birds are insane. Anyone who’s ever climbed to a robin’s nest only to find themselves staring at half-naked, sinewy-necked, bulgy-eyed, gaping-mawed living stomachs that do nothing while awake except scream tirelessly for meals larger than their heads should have more perspective than to think otherwise. I thoroughly agree with the OP and maintain that a beautifully feathered large theropod with the mad eyes of an eagle would be one of the most terrifying sights ever depicted on the silver screen. It’d blow Asian ghost stories clear out of the water.
Historian on 25 Jul 2013 at 5:55 am #
Just to clear up a little confusion: Harpy Eagles (Harpia harpyja) are South American, but easily confused with the Philippine Eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi), both of which have convergently evolved into similar looking birds that both prey on monkeys.
Rock Art on 24 Aug 2013 at 10:30 am #
Very true, and you don’t need to be an expert to work this out.
I keep chickens. If you get on the wrong side of a cockeral you will soon know about it!
OK not as scary as a t-rex, but they are persistent, if they want to kick, scratch and peck they will until you are safely away :-)
animal on 21 Nov 2013 at 4:39 pm #
golden eagles that kill wolves and deer. How is that not scary?
animal on 21 Nov 2013 at 4:41 pm #
On thing that bugs me about jurassic park is the t rex and raptors are the same color, so in the end fight they blend into eachother almost
reptyler1993 on 29 Mar 2014 at 6:55 am #
I can’t believe I’m that I’m going to say this but I think that that painting of the feathered t-rex is really really awesome. It just looks so cool and colorful and still very badass. But that’s just my opinion.
pokeymcgee on 14 Apr 2014 at 5:39 am #
The people who talk about dinosaurs, as in the real animals, as if they were movie monsters who have an “image” that needs to be “maintained” do so because they… well, they ARE talking about movie monsters. People who reject “feathered dinosaurs” (AS OPPOSED TO WHAT? Hairy dinosaurs?!) because it’s “not scary” do so because they can’t conceptualize the fact that all the extinct, mesozoic dinosaur lineages were REAL animals that REALLY existed and obey all the same rules of logic and animal behavior as living dinosaurs. Because they don’t ever see tyrannosaurs, just eagles and passers and the rest, they’ve developed a dichotomy in their heads that can’t rationalize the relationship between the two. This “living vs. extinct” problem has been mutated by the use of mesozoic dinosaurs in popular culture (that of antagonists in action movies or outright monsters that don’t even attempt to care about accuracy) based on the fact that we humans, for some reason, seem to be obsessed with dinosaurs in the first place, and produced an emotional connection to the outdated reconstructions of real animals they see on tv.
In short, it’s not that they can’t tell real from make-believe, it’s that they simply don’t understand that there is a difference between the two. The “dinosaurs don’t have feathers” people literally believe that Jurassic Park is a documentary. Because of this, like creationists or BANDits, logic simply doesn’t work on these people.
Here’s an analogy that might better help explain why “birds aren’t scary” isn’t even close to the actual core of their views: Godzilla and Brontosaurus are movie monsters, we all know this. Godzilla will always drag his tail and Brontosaurus is a swamp creature with an ambiguous diet. We don’t care about whether or not they’re accurate because they aren’t SUPPOSED to be real animals, they’re DESIGNED to be movie monsters. So if we saw Godzilla with primaries or a colorful crest or Brontosaurus with a marconarian-style nose completely ignoring humans we take offense to it because those monsters are purely make-believe and they SHOULDN’T be changed. To the people this article addresses, that’s what it’s like. While they may be dimly aware that Tyrannosaurs was at one point a living animal just like a Turkey they’re more concerned with the movies, tv shows, and toys than accuracy. It’s not about knowledge, it’s just entertainment. Trying to “talk some sense into them” will never work because they don’t want to know what’s right, even if they put up a facade of caring about paleontology, you have to understand that what they’re really saying is Godzilla shouldn’t have feathers, not that real dinosaurs shouldn’t.
p.s. Cassowaries are one of my favroite dinosaurs too~<3
Anonymous on 21 May 2014 at 2:52 pm #
WOW
Dino on 21 May 2014 at 2:53 pm #
Dino is me.
Gweg on 01 May 2015 at 10:52 pm #
Well….
I think the problem is that a lot of modern artistic representation of scary dinos (let’s say : T-Rex…) make them looks like hen/chicken which are the most ridiculous birds in the world. Or at least are the image of the ridicule and stupid.
Sparrows and other birds are one thing, but hens… you know… and imagining T-Rex like a gigantic hen… plugging it’s nose in the dirt to pick up worms… panicking at any noise with their little wings….
It makes them priceless.
Historian on 03 May 2015 at 7:03 pm #
watch a cockfight.
Smaugfiredeath on 29 May 2015 at 4:11 pm #
Well, the Godzilla analogy has some issues, considering that he’s a trademarked character. Making him more like a real dinosaur is like making Superman wear a green cape. And besides, he’s 300 feet tall and breathes blue fire – I’m guessing any sane person doesn’t expect that to be realistic…
Anyway, I’m sure Jurassic World is a new low for the franchise – not a backwards step into science but also a blow to the fandom. Once we have things like gyrospheres and 1000-foot mosasaurs and mutant dinosaurs of human intelligence and opposable thumbs, you know that things have gotten TOO weird for the franchise. Making raptors tamable ‘dogs’ commanded by Chris Pratt is a worse blow to the fans than the T. Rex being defeated by the Spinosaurus. It ruins the characters far more than feathers ever could.
David Hicks on 09 Jul 2015 at 1:20 am #
Bravo for you! I agree wholeheartedly with the premise of your article. Cool looking rendition of a feathered rex from JP1, though I would do it a little differently.
I too was deeply disappointed by the ho-hum looks of the JP4 dinos, especially the Indominus rex. Though it was a stupid movie I was entertained by it anyway. But part of my enjoyment was due to the ridiculous plot holes. And I sure wish those velociraptors had been feathered.
One criticism about your grammar; now don’t get upset please. The possessive form of “it” is not “it’s.” It is “its.” The word “it’s” is the contraction for “it is.” I see this mistake over and over again on the web and I don’t understand why people have trouble with this basic form of grammar.
I had a coworker at the zoo who was trampled by 3 ostriches; fortunately he survived. And I had to throw a clueless idiot out of the park when he got out of his RV in front of a male ostrich in rut and began mocking the bird’s courtship dance not 20 ft from it.
I had to save my mom from an attack by a pissed off rooster. And I’ve handled birds of prey, including the golden eagle that used to star in the Pan American Airlines commercials and the red-shouldered hawk that starred in the Buick Skyhawk commercials. You had to respect and handle those birds VERY carefully! I remember a trio of baby long-horned owls doing their defense threat dance in their box in the rehabilitation clinic, scarily snapping their beaks and dancing side to side with their wings spread. And I’ve seen cute little sparrows and finches tussling in the dirt ripping each other’s feathers out. So yes, the idea of theropods as giant flightless “birds” doesn’t annoy me at all. In fact I heartily endorse it.
Yes, concept wise, JP4 was disappointing in being no longer at the crest of new science like JP1 was and someone should make another dino movie that builds on the new paradigm of birdlike dinos. So I doubt I would be eager to see JP5. Regrettably, the movie is making tons of money so I expect more of what is now merely humdrum.
Historian on 10 Jul 2015 at 2:32 am #
soryr i dum.
Rick on 19 Jan 2016 at 3:44 pm #
Old thread, I know, but it’s interesting to see that the idea of feathered dinosaurs is steadily working its way into general culture. Check out what the dinosaurs look like in the Jurassic World game, for example: Google “fully leveled utahraptor” for a great example.
Historian on 25 Jan 2016 at 6:40 am #
Cool thanks for the heads up. That thing looks completely ridiculous! And the skull morphology and hand posture are still completely wrong… Perhaps the issue is that modern media and education train people to think in sound-bites and lists of facts, despite the reality that science has revealed that nature functions in logical systems. It’s not just that “dinosaurs had feathers, bro” it’s that feathers serve a variety of important evolutionary purposes, and thus it’s not just whether or not we show an animal with one integument or another, it’s HOW we show it with that integument. One of the great things about Emily Willoughby’s paleoart is that she depicts feathered dinosaurs using their feathers as modern feathered animals do, and in many cases the behaviors she depicts are backed up directly by the fossil record. As a result, the illustration functions not as a sound bite, or a simple fact, but as an exploration of logical ideas…
Rick on 27 Jan 2016 at 3:29 pm #
Agreed … I wish very much that it looked like this:
http://emilywilloughby.com/gallery/paleoart/utahraptor
rather than this:
http://pm1.narvii.com/5806/a3a0beac4bd4727cd609ecad75f4d5d79bb033f0_hq.jpg
But at least one can’t complain that it lacks colorful feathers!
dontmesswithdinosaurs.com » A Terror Ruled The Menefee on 09 Oct 2018 at 3:26 pm #
[…] a long time much more diminutive. For most of their history Tyrannosaurs were small to medium sized dinofuzz-covered beasts living in the shadows of a diversity of huge terrifying flesh eaters descended from the Allosauroid […]
Just another WordPress site on 31 Dec 2018 at 6:20 pm #
[…] “There’s a bunch of squawk on the web coming from people who think that feathered dinosaurs aren’t scary. On behalf of anyone who’s had hands-on experience with or even basic working knowledge of bird biology, please, shut the fuck up. Birds are fucking creepy murderous motherfuckers. Don’t believe me?” Keep reading: Feathered Dinosaurs Are Scary as Hell […]
dontmesswithdinosaurs.com » T. rex’s skull shattering bite on 25 Sep 2019 at 3:25 pm #
[…] extensive body covering is a 20 foot Yutyrannus and it’s completely floofy with feathers(and, imo still terrifying af). Now please imagine how long it would take to bury a 7 ton tyrannosaur… Which begs the […]
Francois on 15 Sep 2020 at 10:00 am #
It’s sad that film makers like Steven Spielberg and Colin Trevorrow, who directed the Jurassic Park/World movies, aren’t interested in changing their dinosaurs with modern dinosaur knowledge. I don’t blame the first Jurassic Park (1993) film for it’s inaccurate (scaly, shrink wrapping and whatever) depiction of the animals, because back then that’s how worked out and guessed what dinosaurs looked like. But as paleontology along with paleobiology and paleoart advanced and updated through the years, Jurassic Park decided to stick with the past. In he first JP movies the dinosaurs were shown a lot with bird-like behavior like you stated in your blog, but Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World removed most of the bird features and added more sci-fi elements including the raptors having more mammalian-based sounds than bird sounds. I could go on, because I too care about the reality and truth about feathered dinosaurs, but yeah. I think it might be because of the fact that most people live in cities and huge towns where there’s big cinemas or theatres far away from nature and where people don’t understand how scary and creepy birds can be. I hope one day a good film maker will look up and read blogs like this one and do what Jurassic park never tried to do, because I love movies and I dream of seeing realistic science accurate dinosaurs in a movie like Jurassic Park or in a TV series like the British sci-fi Primeval. And I hope they hire you sir Brian Engh for creating the design for the dinosaurs, because you make the these prehistoric beasts come alive and make them look real and monstrous. Definitely don’t mess with dinosaurs!