Admittedly I have been a lifelong dinosaur fan so here it goes.

Mainly the biggest thing was the gaps in Dinosaur science between the late 80s and early 90s. Crichton's book was great but it still felt like a good deal of it was 70s dinosaur science without much if any of the Dinosaur renaissance. The 7 year gap between the movie and the book were an eternity in dinosaur science. And having Horner on the movie helped a ton as he was a key figure in the new science.

Not only was having Grant seem a little bit hair brained for the Birds from Dinosaurs theory wrong it was out of place. By the early 90s there were no debates about dinosaur evolution in that basic sense nor were there serious doubts about endothermy (holding an ambient body temp). The people who should have seemed hair brained were the ones opposing Grant's views.

And certainly by the time the movie came out no one in a camp working would have laughed at him like that.

70's dinosaur science tended to under speciate which led to the Velociraptor confusion. 70's dinosaur science referred to Deinonychus antirrhopus as a subspecies of Velociraptor. That led to the Raptors of the novels and movies being forever called Velociraptor in the fact the in movie Genus/Species name was Velociraptor antirrhopus. By the time the movies had came out no one in the Dinosaur community considered the American Dromeosaurs like Deinonychus as close relatives to the Velociraptor. Real Velociraptor are dog sized from Asia. The raptors of the film are sized right just named wrong.

A good deal of the science in the novel was considered the logical next steps when it was released in 1986. By as early as 1993 and even today we realize all of the science used to bring the dinosaurs back to life is completely science fiction. But that isn't how Crichton wrote it. When he first approached Jurassic Park it was considered at least halfway probable if in the distant future. Jurassic Park was his first book that openly expressed it but Congo and Next would reveal more his views. Crichton was as weird as it sounds a "bio conservative" despite being a speculative science writer. He was wary of genetic engineering and tampering with nature as it appears as a regular theme in most if not all of his post Jurassic park work.

This post was edited on 10/30/13 at 9:58 pm