Of all the unexpected sights in Jurassic World Dominion—dinosaurs frolicking in the snow, a pterosaur riding the air currents over New York City—there’s one creature that stands out. The pyroraptor has a mouthful of serrated teeth, sickle-shaped claws that curve to a wicked point, and a shock of fire red feathers. That’s right—feathers.
Ever since the first Jurassic Park movie hit screens in 1993, paleontologists have been clamoring for the franchise to have more scientific accuracy. The scaly, reptilian creatures that ran amok on Isla Nublar may have flocked like birds, but they didn’t look like them, which meant that the movies soon diverged from the scientific consensus. “That’s something we're all waiting for—a Jurassic Park where there’s no more naked dinosaurs,” Robert Bakker, a paleontologist who consulted on the first movie (and inspired a character in the second), told National Geographic in 2016.
In fairness to Steven Spielberg, the notion that dinosaurs might have had feathers wasn’t common knowledge when the original movie came out. The link with birds had been widely discussed from about the 1960s, and there had been fossils of the winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx kicking around since the 1860s, but no one had unearthed the crucial evidence.
That started to change in the late 1990s, says David Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London, and cohost of the podcast Terrible Lizards. In April 2001—a couple of months before the release of Jurassic Park III—a paper in the journal Nature laid out the first hard proof that even flightless dinosaurs were probably feathered, courtesy of a fossil discovered by a farmer in northeastern China’s specimen-rich Liangdong province.
By then, though, the look and feel of the Jurassic series had come to dominate the public perception of dinosaurs. “You couldn’t really just change the design of the creatures midway through the franchise,” argues David Vickery, visual effects supervisor on Dominion. “It would be a bit like replacing an actor with a completely different actor. Those designs are established.”
There’s also a handy in-universe explanation—frog DNA and all that—for why InGen’s lab-hatched creations might not look exactly like their ancient relatives, and for why that might have suddenly changed with Dominion, which sees InGen’s rival BioSyn finally bringing its own more genetically pure creatures to life. (They’re the ones who tried to steal embryos using a decoy shaving can in the first Jurassic Park.) “These aren’t 65 million years old,” says production designer Kevin Jenkins. “They’ve been remade by a company for their own purposes. They’re not like a true dinosaur in that sense.”
The makers of the original Jurassic Park movies couldn’t have added feathers to their dinosaurs even if they wanted to, argues Vickery. “You could barely do the dinosaurs,” he says. “They achieved a fantastic thing in 1993 to create animated dinosaurs but feathers might have been a no-go.”
Doing it for Dominion required a blend of practical effects and digital trickery that’s become the hallmark of the Jurassic movies. Like Spielberg before him, Dominion director Colin Trevorrow was determined to shoot as many dinosaurs as possible “in-camera” using animatronics, rather than resorting to CGI, and spared no expense.
John Nolan—who previously worked on the Harry Potter films and the Netflix prequel of The Dark Crystal—was given the job of creating 38 animatronic dinosaurs from 14 different species. These ranged from the ink-spitting, Nedry-eating fan favorite dilophosaurus (which took 12 puppeteers to operate) to the giganotosaurus, which comprised a 25-ton, 15-meter long rig with a head the size of a car, controlled by someone wearing what Nolan describes as a “mechanical sock puppet” and opening and closing their hand to make the creature’s jaws open and shut (surely the greatest job in the world).
Each dinosaur started life as a miniature clay maquette. For Dominion, Trevorrow brought University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte in as a consultant, promising the scientist in their first meeting that he planned to bring feathered dinosaurs into the franchise. (Hone, who says he has a “love-hate relationship” with the series, points out two flirtations with feathers in previous movies: quills on the heads of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park III, and a brief glimpse of a feathered lizard in Henry Wu’s lab in Jurassic World.)
Brusatte checked over the design of each dinosaur to make sure it was accurate, and some tweaks were made based on the latest scientific findings: tails are stiffer, because it’s thought that vertebrae were fused together; the velociraptors’ wrists no longer sit flat like they’re playing the piano, but are turned inwards—bent to look like the precursors to wings. “There’s a lot of people who shout at us for not doing it properly, but we did it very properly,” says Jenkins.
The small-scale clay maquette of each dinosaur was then scanned by the team at Industrial Light and Magic to inform the digital version. That digital scan was then passed to Nolan’s team to use as the blueprint for their physical animatronic dinosaur. At least one dino, the feathered pyroraptor, ended up being built like some mythical beast—CGI in the back half, with an animatronic head and neck. “Each individual feather was dyed and painted and cut and snipped and then hand woven into this stretch net material,” Nolan explains. “That net was then applied to the top of the animatronic dinosaur so that when the head moved around the feathers would naturally move with it.”
The digital side proved a bigger technological challenge. “There’s this terrifying line in the script that says, ‘The pyroraptor leaps out of the water covered in snow and ice,’” says Vickery. “Feathers are a very difficult thing to do digitally, water is a very difficult thing to do digitally. So if you put the two together you’re in a perfect storm of technological complexity.”
Vickery’s team built a brand-new system for rendering feathers in the animation software Houdini, with each feather defined by thousands of curves—one for the central quill (called the rachis), and one for each of the individual barbs coming off the side. “Each feather could have up to a thousand curves to define it,” Vickery says. “There are thousands of feathers on that dinosaur, so you end up with a creature that’s defined by millions upon millions of curves.”
ILM’s visual effects artists and Nolan’s animatronics work complemented each other. For the dilophosaurus, for instance, ILM provided a computer-generated animation of how the creature walked so that the 12 puppeteers controlling it had a reference to work from. But they also recorded the movements of the puppeteers and fed those back into the digital animation for a more natural effect. “When you’re coordinating 12 puppeteers you get happy mistakes and it looks real,” Nolan explains.
It was the same for the feathers. “That’s where our two disciplines really come together and complement each other,” Nolan says. They gave the VFX artists samples of the feathered net they’d made. “They could get a hairdryer on it and see what the feathers do when you blow wind on them, and then they would put that into their animation.”
Dominion picks up a few years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and puts dinosaurs fully out in the world for the first time—stalking through northern forests, terrorizing drive-in cinema-goers, treating Mediterranean plazas like tapas platters. It might seem absurd to strive for scientific accuracy when putting prehistoric creatures into modern-day Malta, but it's a task Dominion's VFX team took very seriously, even though, as Jenkins notes, “there also comes a point where we are telling a story.”
But perhaps that swing for realism is part of what gives these movies their lasting power, three decades after that herd of smooth-skinned sauropods first lumbered onto our screens in Jurassic Park. “Dinosaurs are so intriguing because they were real,” says Vickery. “They’re not myth. They’re not legend. They did exist.”
