Realistic dinosaurs and their poop

The pair used data from known fossil models to reconstruct the dinosaurs' locomotive anatomies and musculoskeletal features. These models were then pushed to their limits in the GaitSym program, which ran each dinosaur's model through different combinations of muscle activation patterns. Patterns that caused the models to falter were abandoned, while simulations where the dinosaur ran at least 15 meters were investigated more thoroughly.

Frankly, those were all the words Grantland required about a 20-year-old dinosaur movie. But on April 5, Jurassic Park is returning to theaters in 3-D. And that, Dr. Grant, is what we call a "peg." So here are three more nerdy footnotes that I've run across.

Where'd Michael Crichton get the idea to write Jurassic Park? The first place to look is Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World (1912), which is about scientists searching for dinosaurs in Latin America. Conan Doyle — who, like Crichton, had a background in medicine — was the author's hero. Crichton once said, "Sometimes I think I've devoted my life to rewriting Conan Doyle in different ways."

Finally, there's one scene that never made it into Steven Spielberg's movie. Early in the film, Lex, the young girl, was supposed to ride on the back of a baby triceratops. The scene was storyboarded, and effects man Stan Winston worked on a model.

It doesn't look like a model, or a beast manufactured in a computer, or one of those charming, stilted monsters that staggered across movie screens from the time of the original King Kong — who battled a stop-action dinosaur in the 1933 film — to the days when effects legend Ray Harryhausen created "Dynamation" monsters like Mighty Joe Young or the Cyclops that the hero battles in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

It looks like a brachiosaurus, just as the Tyrannosaurus Rex that destroys a Ford Explorer, and the velociraptors that chase children through an abandoned building are the most persuasively realistic dinosaurs ever seen. When Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park came out in 1993, it changed the way we saw the prehistoric world, and the way movies could be made.