Jurassic Park Series

Started by War Wager, Mar 25, 2007, 10:10:16 PM

Author
Jurassic Park Series (Read 1,366,862 times)

DoomRulz

DoomRulz

#12405
Ha! Yeah, I kind of figured that line was a nod to us collectors. We're a rabid bunch.

Gilfryd

Gilfryd

#12406
Quote from: Vertigo on Jul 04, 2015, 07:42:22 AM
Well... yeah... why would you want a cloned miniature lion? The whole point of wanting a big cat is to want a cat that is big. Otherwise you might as well just have a cat.

Something tells me they would be popular in like Japan. They love cute tiny versions of things.

xeno-kaname

xeno-kaname

#12407
Quote from: Tangakkai on Jul 03, 2015, 07:36:44 PM
Quote from: xeno-kaname on Jul 03, 2015, 08:33:23 AM
Quote from: Gate on Jul 03, 2015, 08:09:23 AM
Quote from: xeno-kaname on Jul 03, 2015, 07:46:38 AM
Quote from: Alien³ on Jul 02, 2015, 05:09:07 PM
Quote from: DoomRulz on Jul 02, 2015, 05:00:59 PM
The first scene didn't make much sense to me. Only seconds earlier, they were ready to rip Owen apart and suddenly Charlie is having a change of heart? How?

Conflicted loyalty man. ;)

That's how I feel too. I think in containment Blue had a sense of wanting to become the Alpha and take down Pratt. But after being free for a bit and seeing how much of assholes other huans are, it kinda looks at him in a different way. At least enough to doubt about killing the human they imprinted on. And then he gives them the proof he doesn't mean them harm.
You're giving the animal too much humanity.

No the movie did. They are super intelligent anyways.

They are intelligent... but not super intellilgent at all. Dolphin's behave far more social and clever compared to these fake raptors and not even Dolphins are considered super intelligent. Hell, the raptors could even be manipulated so easily by the indominus rex.

These raptors have basic intelligence that is markably higher than other dinosaurs/reptiles and mammals... but by no means were they super intelligent.

They were still primitive beasts by the very definition.
Quote from: DoomRulz on Jul 03, 2015, 11:29:10 AM
It's still just an animal. Also if that's the case, why did she try to kill Barry?

They're more intelligent than elephants, most likely. And these animals show wide ranges of emotion that are hard to believe "just an animal" can feel. They mourn and cry and consciously kill their own newborns just for the fact that they don't want to be parents. Infants even cry and get depressed when this happens and it happens in reverse when mother and son are separated and reunited again.

I know these animals are not even close to being similar, but if this can happen in real life I can imagine raptors can have conflicted emotions about their Alpha human who imprinted on them at birth. And maybe when Owen ran their instinct took over and won.

Vertigo

Vertigo

#12408
JP's raptors have been portrayed as being among the world's smartest non-human animals since JP3. You can pretty much ascribe the full human emotional/rational gamut to them if you'd like, short of creating fire or building the Dino Pyramids. Just about everything that motivates us at a non-superficial level has been observed to some degree or another in fellow animals (including totally unrelated groups like dolphins and elephants, as mentioned).


Just to clarify though, we're only talking about the JP raptors. Intelligence estimates are currently one of the fuzziest areas of palaeontology - particularly when it comes to dinosaurs, because their physiology and brain structure changed so much down the various lineages, and there aren't really any good living analogues. Even Archaeopteryx was only around 80% of the way to an avian brain structure, and dromaeosaurs like Velociraptor were more like 30%.
The short answer to the question of "how smart were dinosaurs" is - we don't know.

DoomRulz

DoomRulz

#12409
Well considering brain case scans of larger theropods don't outsize the largest birds, none of which have ever been witnessed opening a kitchen door, it's safe to say they weren't brainy. That doesn't mean they were stupid, but just smart for what they needed to do: catch and eat their prey.

Vertigo, you'll like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo0CVHwmhqo

Vertigo

Vertigo

#12410
Well, birds generally aren't bad in terms of intelligence, and some of them are very smart - corvids (ravens, magpies etc) have incredibly advanced logical reasoning and use self-modified tools, Harris' hawks have sophisticated pack hunting and social behaviour, parrots have emotional development on par with a young human. Corvids in particular are often placed alongside great apes and cetaceans, they only seem to be lacking on the emotional side - give them a door they'd be physically capable of opening and they'd figure it out pretty quickly.

But no, you can't really assume much about dinosaurs. If you plot the encephalisation quotient (the best means of estimating intelligence based purely on physical remains) of a great white shark on the mammalian scale, it's below pretty much everything, a fraction of even a rabbit. Yet it's proven in the real world to have complex social interactions, advanced navigational ability, flexible hunting strategies for a variety of prey types, variable personality types, and most tellingly, they're very curious.

So, using brain comparisons to estimate intelligence becomes increasingly fuzzy, and eventually wholly erroneous, the further apart the animals are in relationship. This is because brain structure changes enormously through lineages, to cope with the demands of different physiology, different senses, or different lifestyle demands. Bird brains, for example, changed to cope with the demands of flight - the masses of sensory and locomotory data synchronisation they have to throughput to automate that process. Every living bird evolved from a flying ancestor, and they all had the same brain structure - but a structure that non-avian dinosaurs (even those closest to pygostylian birds) are proven to lack. That in itself doesn't necessarily make them any more or less smart, it just means they aren't directly comparable.

And they probably aren't directly comparable to reptiles either, because even the most basal dinosaurs had a greatly higher metabolism than any living reptile, which imposes more regulatory demands on the brain.
It's worth pointing out that Hobson's 1980s study, which assumed dinosaur brains were comparable to reptiles (and it's worth pointing out that most of them do seem similar to reptile brains), found that ceratopsians ranged from slightly below to equal with crocodiles, ornithopods equal or a bit higher, most theropods equal to double. Sauropods and thyreophorans were much lower, as you'd expect from famously "brain the size of a walnut" Stegosaurus.
Deinonychosaurs scored many times higher than crocs, which was the inspiration for Crichton's brainy Velociraptor. But we now know that their brain structure is 30% avian, which puts them in an awkward position of not being directly comparable either to birds, reptiles or other dinosaurs.

Also worth pointing out that the whole validity of EQs and brain-to-body-weight calculations are debated, as intelligence doesn't necessarily scale in direct accordance to cerebrum size, nor *precisely* to body weight (overall cerebral size is sometimes suggested to be a better indicator among primates).

But anyway. If we're talking overall brain size, some dino brains did outsize any bird's. Tyrannosaurus' brain was around a kilogram, larger than a gorilla's.

Le Celticant

Le Celticant

#12411
It's impossible to estimates species' intelligence as it can greatly vary between individuals.
I have two cats, one can open the door (both pull and push) the other can't.
My grand parents had a cat who could only pull door.

You could say cats are intelligence because they can open door, but it's not true for all of them.
On the other side, my cats who can't open door has a social skill to call the other one to open the door for her.
But that doesn't mean all cats have this abilities, it just mean this one does.

I'm personally unable to tell you instantly the square root of all numbers from one to one thousand.
Some people can.
Some human have very strong social skill and some don't.

Then we are all subject to empirical thoughts but if I hadn't seen anyone open a door before, I'm not sure it wouldn't have take me a lot of time to figured it out. Maybe I would have got bored and would have never open it.
Same goes for language, the fact we can speak doesn't mean every human does if we aren't taught first.

SiL

SiL

#12412
Quote from: Alien³ on Jul 02, 2015, 12:06:45 PM
I guess that boils down to how invested you are in the storytelling.

I personally was convinced by them as living, breathing characters in the new movie.
I really struggle to see how. That's not a slight on anyone: it's just me. The story never sells it to me.

Spoiler
They don't act like animals, they act like movie monsters. The movie makes a point that the iRex is a "monster" and the others are animals, but then they have the pterosaurs immediately attack people the second they're free (Were they starved in the aviary? Do they normally eat humans?), the velociraptors have switching "loyalties" (If a wolf walked up to a dog pack and tried to assert its dominance, the dog pack would at best force it into submission, worst kill it, not suddenly switch sides), and all we get out of the TRex is a boss fight which ends with her and the velociraptor having some bullshit moment of respect pass between them before walking off.

That's what the friggin' Predator does, not an animal.
[close]

They don't even seem to move right any more. The TRex and iRex really, really do not feel like they should be moving that way. It looks much too fast for something of that size and mass. All of the dinosaurs have this problem. They're too fluid.

I said it when the trailer came out and it was no better in the movie -- the hatching iRex may as well have been a 2D animation for all the realism it had to it. Tiny, newborn tendons don't move like that. Ever. They're twitchy. They're imprecise. Even animals that can walk moments after being born struggle in the first few moments. A tiny wire-controlled puppet 22 years ago was infinitely more convincing because it had the twitchy motions of an actual newborn.

The overall effect just wasn't convincing. There was nothing that let me ignore the fact I was looking at CGI.

HuDaFuK

HuDaFuK

#12413
Quote from: SiL on Jul 06, 2015, 11:28:10 AM
Spoiler
They don't act like animals, they act like movie monsters. The movie makes a point that the iRex is a "monster" and the others are animals, but then they have the pterosaurs immediately attack people the second they're free (Were they starved in the aviary? Do they normally eat humans?), the velociraptors have switching "loyalties" (If a wolf walked up to a dog pack and tried to assert its dominance, the dog pack would at best force it into submission, worst kill it, not suddenly switch sides), and all we get out of the TRex is a boss fight which ends with her and the velociraptor having some bullshit moment of respect pass between them before walking off.

That's what the friggin' Predator does, not an animal.
[close]

This is a big part of the reason why I didn't go mad for the movie.

DoomRulz

DoomRulz

#12414
Quote from: SiL on Jul 06, 2015, 11:28:10 AM
Quote from: Alien³ on Jul 02, 2015, 12:06:45 PM
I guess that boils down to how invested you are in the storytelling.

I personally was convinced by them as living, breathing characters in the new movie.
I really struggle to see how. That's not a slight on anyone: it's just me. The story never sells it to me.

Spoiler
They don't act like animals, they act like movie monsters. The movie makes a point that the iRex is a "monster" and the others are animals, but then they have the pterosaurs immediately attack people the second they're free (Were they starved in the aviary? Do they normally eat humans?), the velociraptors have switching "loyalties" (If a wolf walked up to a dog pack and tried to assert its dominance, the dog pack would at best force it into submission, worst kill it, not suddenly switch sides), and all we get out of the TRex is a boss fight which ends with her and the velociraptor having some bullshit moment of respect pass between them before walking off.

That's what the friggin' Predator does, not an animal.
[close]

I attribute that to the film's complete lack of concern for the scientific aspect of it. Everyone's happy to see dinosaurs on screen but we still don't respect them enough to portray them properly.

Alien³

Alien³

#12415
Quote from: SiL on Jul 06, 2015, 11:28:10 AM
Spoiler
They don't act like animals, they act like movie monsters. The movie makes a point that the iRex is a "monster" and the others are animals, but then they have the pterosaurs immediately attack people the second they're free (Were they starved in the aviary? Do they normally eat humans?), the velociraptors have switching "loyalties" (If a wolf walked up to a dog pack and tried to assert its dominance, the dog pack would at best force it into submission, worst kill it, not suddenly switch sides), and all we get out of the TRex is a boss fight which ends with her and the velociraptor having some bullshit moment of respect pass between them before walking off.

That's what the friggin' Predator does, not an animal.
[close]

Spoiler
The pterosaurs attacking people was like watching a bunch of seagulls at the seaside picking up breadcrumbs. It was a monster movie moment for sure and a damn good one. Reminded me personally of this...



Maybe the fact these flying animals were not meant to be caged up is why they cease their chance to feast upon freedom.

I can't argue that the Raptors switching loyalty is realistic because it isn't. But for me it works in the world building of the Jurassic series.

And its seems you're projecting a human emotion onto the T-rex and Raptor having a moment of respect when really the Raptor looks at the Rex and takes a step back, making an unaggressive growl, and the T-rex just looks at it and walks off. Nothing un-animalisitc about it in my eyes.
[close]

SiL

SiL

#12416
Quote from: DoomRulz on Jul 06, 2015, 12:03:35 PM
Everyone's happy to see dinosaurs on screen but we still don't respect them enough to portray them properly.
We did 22 years ago.

Quote from: Alien³ on Jul 06, 2015, 12:33:16 PM
Spoiler
The pterosaurs attacking people was like watching a bunch of seagulls at the seaside picking up breadcrumbs.
[close]
Spoiler
Seagulls are fed breadcrumbs by people. They consider it part of their diet.
[close]

Quote
Spoiler
It was a monster movie moment for sure and a damn good one.
[close]
Spoiler
In a series -- and a movie -- that tried to depict them -- or at least wanted to establish them -- as animals, not monsters.
[close]

Quote
Spoiler
Maybe the fact these flying animals were not meant to be caged up is why they cease their chance to feast upon freedom.
[close]
Spoiler
That's really, really silly. Birds don't start eating everything in their path the second they're let out of a cage unless they've been starved.
[close]

Quote
Spoiler
But for me it works in the world building of the Jurassic series.
[close]
Spoiler
Pratt training them, absolutely. Them having switching loyalties -- not to mention "speaking" to an animal that would be about as related to them as a pig is to a human, which the movie made such a huge point about having been entirely isolated its whole life and never learning how to socialise -- however, completely flies in the face of trying to portray dinosaurs as actual animals rather than cool movie monsters.
[close]

DoomRulz

DoomRulz

#12417
Quote from: SiL on Jul 08, 2015, 06:14:01 AM
Quote from: DoomRulz on Jul 06, 2015, 12:03:35 PM
Everyone's happy to see dinosaurs on screen but we still don't respect them enough to portray them properly.
We did 22 years ago.

-ish. I've heard of accounts of Stan Winston making the dinosaur creation process an absolute nightmare because he wanted monsters rather than animals.

OmegaZilla

OmegaZilla

#12418
...Source? Winston never pushed for monsterish things and certainly did not make it "a nightmare" to design the dinosaurs. Everything was according to what Spielberg wanted and sometimes Horner would smack 'em in the head too. Hell, Winston Studio was hired because the concepts they presented first were based on the latest scientific theories (for the time).

HuDaFuK

HuDaFuK

#12419
Yeah, that doesn't sound like something Winston would do.

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