Jurassic World

Director: Colin Trevorrow. Universal: 2015.

The hybrid dinosaur Indominus rex runs rampant in Jurassic World. Credit: Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment

How did you get involved in the series?

In the early 1990s, a colleague called me and said, “You're in a book about cloning dinosaurs” — Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). I said, “I hope my character doesn't get eaten.” I never bothered to pick it up; I am dyslexic and have trouble enough keeping up with my own science. Then director Steven Spielberg called and asked whether I wanted to work on the film. I thought growing a dinosaur was an intriguing idea, and I still do. It is a little far-fetched now, but I think one day we will be able to do it, not using amber-trapped DNA, but through genetic modification of dinosaurs' closest living relatives, birds.

What did work on Jurassic Park (1993) entail?

Credit: Mus. of the Rockies

My job was to find things that were obviously wrong. In one scene, the puppeteers were having trouble getting an animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex leg to move properly. So I stepped in to control the joystick, making the foot land on its toes in a bird-like position, rather than heel-first like a mammal. In a kitchen scene, the puppeteers had velociraptors sticking out forked tongues, which dinosaurs did not have. Instead, we had the raptors snort to fog up the window, revealing that they had warm blood.

What are the innovations in Jurassic World?

The science has got ahead of the films, but we cannot really change the way the dinosaurs look. If suddenly the raptors had feathers, it would destroy consistency. But I did help to render new creatures. You can see a mosasaur, a giant swimming reptile, shoot up from a tank to eat a great white shark. From my research, I helped to ensure that the juvenile triceratops, with its backward-curving horns, looked distinct from the adult, whose horns curve forward. But my biggest job was helping to create the 'genetically modified' Indominus rex, a combination of several dinosaurs and other animals, which turns against its makers.

How plausible is such a dino-hybrid?

Jurassic World is set in the future. If you can clone a dinosaur, you can modify its DNA and combine it with that of other animals. We already have lots of tools for modifying an animal. We have been breeding them for centuries. Now we are getting to the point where we can take genes out of one organism and put them into another, for example taking fluorescent genes out of jellyfish and putting them into the embryos of other animals to make them glow in the dark. The challenge is finding ways of changing a creature without killing it. And I think we will.

Are you trying to breed birds back into dinosaurs?

In the Dino-Chicken Project at Montana State University in Bozeman, we are looking for the genetic pathways that provided the transformation from dinosaurs into birds, with the hope that some of those pathways can be reversed. Part of it is genetic engineering to see if we can get a long tail back on a chicken (D. J. Rashid et al. EvoDevo 5, 25; 2014). My postdoc Dana Rashid has screened mouse genes, looking for pathways that cause mice to lose their tails. If she can find one that causes a similar reaction in a reptile, it might be possible to reverse the process and grow a tail on a chicken.

Do the films do justice to the science?

Each film explains a bit of the science, for example through the dancing DNA cartoon in the first movie. If people are wondering about whether the science in Jurassic World is real, that is great for science. Jurassic Park brought out all sorts of students who wanted to switch careers into palaeontology. It channelled a flood of graduate students to my lab, including some of the best scientists I have trained.

How have digital effects changed your work?

For the first film, I would sit with Steven Spielberg and advise him on the motions of the dinosaur puppets. But Jurassic World had only one puppet on set — an injured sauropod. For the rest of the dinosaurs, most of my consulting was with the graphics people.

What do we know about how dinosaurs behaved?

They were more like robins than crocodiles. Their spikes and shields were too flimsy for fighting and were more likely to be for display, like the bony crests on some modern birds. Some dinosaurs had feathers and probably 'danced' like birds. If you built a Jurassic Park, it would be more like the Serengeti than Jaws. I wrote a script once for a film where scientists come out of their time machine to see triceratops dancing and showing off their coloured shields. Nobody would go to that movie.