Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom: A Geologist's Review

To be sure, I enjoyed myself.

It was about 5:45 in the afternoon and we were out and about doing errands. I had been called into an emergency meeting about the soon to be constructed outdoor education lab at my campus. It turns out that bids came in way too high so we had to start making a list of things that we were going to have to give up in order to get the project built. It was a series of difficult choices. To blow off steam, we decided to see what was being shown at the local cinema. The next movie, at 6:35, was Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. We got our popcorn and soda and headed in. After 30 minutes of trailers, the lights dimmed and the movie began. As scenes unfolded, I imagined the meeting that went on before this movie was greenlighted: "we have millions and millions of dollars, how many things can we throw up on the screen?" In other words, the direct opposite of my meeting.

It's almost as if we've lost our fascination with dinosaurs, so we needed our film to be spiced up with all kinds of movie tropes: volcanoes, lava flows, pyroclastic surges, gothic mansions, secret underground laboratories, not one, but three or four dastardly villains, and deeply hidden family secrets. There was the obligatory child in distress. And (spoilers ahead!) some people get eaten, others almost get eaten, lava almost eats somebody, and there was an unusually moral component in the character of those who ended up as part of the dinosaur buffet. And the poor Brachiosaurus brought a tear to my eye.

But I am a geologist, so let's get to the important part of the review: did they get the geology right?

No, of course not.

But taken as individual scenes, some of the geology was okay.

As in practically all Hollywood movies, the director mixes up his volcano genres. Isla Sorna, 120 miles off the coast of Costa Rica, is a volcano without an origin (the island doesn't exist of course, but the location doesn't make much geologic sense unless it resulted from a hot spot).

When deciding the mayhem to be produced by a volcano, one must choose: is it an oceanic hot spot that produces shield volcanoes and basaltic lava flows and, as Kilauea has shown us these last few months, the occasional phreatic (groundwater) explosion? Or is it an island arc stratovolcano, whose andesitic or rhyolitic magmas produce violent caldera eruptions?  The movie cannot make up its mind: there are scenes of basalt flows and Hawaii-like scenery, but on the other hand, the climactic eruption is composed of explosive ash columns and pyroclastic surges.

The climactic volcano scenes have the heroes outrunning (or out-rolling) the pyroclastic surge which would seem highly unlikely in real life. The Chris Pratt character looks to have inhaled some of the ash which should have caused him some severe respiratory problems later on in the movie. He also should have experienced some severe burns from his close encounter with flowing radiant lava.

I was actually bothered a bit about how the ferry was able to get underway without damage from the incandescent pyroclastic flow on the dock. It was necessary I guess to get the emotional impact over the demise of the aforementioned Brachiosaurus.

But my biggest beef is the failure in imagination concerning the "extinction-level" volcanic event. The eruption that is supposed to have destroyed all living things on the island was kind of underwhelming.  A ferry boat was able to outrun it. There was (to my memory anyway) the barest of an eruption column. If this was really the kind of volcanic event that would erase all life from the island, there should have been a caldera-forming eruption like that of Krakatoa (1883) or Tambora (1815). The sky should have been blotted out and the ship should have been enveloped in darkness.

Maybe next time they should consult with me, because I have a great idea about how the island could have been destroyed, and it would have had some great visuals. Some irresponsible websites have been criticized for suggesting that the Big Island of Hawaii could suffer unprecedented catastrophic damage caused by the collapse of a flank of the island into the ocean. Such an event is simply not in the cards for Hawaii right now, but some memorable slides have happened in prehistoric times. The long runout debris avalanches caused thousand foot high tsunamis that would have ravaged many coastlines around the Pacific Ocean rim (not to mention in the Hawaiian islands themselves). Imagine a gigantic eruption column with ash flows spreading over the entire island and then an entire flank sinking into the ocean producing a gigantic tsunami that nearly destroys the escaping ship.

But almost no one ever thinks to ask me (believe it or not I did scout out shooting localities for a proposed Hollywood movie once).

The dinosaurs in the movie are fine, although there were exaggerations of scale, especially with the Mosasaur (oh, and the Mosasaurs and Pteranodons in the movie aren't dinosaurs; they occupy separate lineages within the reptile clan). The one in the movie was WAY too big. Mosasaurs have been found as fossils in our region and many others, and they're no larger than 35 feet or so. Terrifying, yes, but not the behemoth that existed in the movie's universe. And where did they get Mosasaur DNA? I don't think mosquitos had much of the chance to bite these deep-diving marine creatures.

There's a larger issue though. A central tenet of the movie was the desire of the movie's protagonists to let the dinosaurs live together in a big happy stable ecosystem. The problem is that the dinosaurs they resurrected never lived together in an ecosystem. They would have all technically have been invasive species. Many or most of the interactions between these species and their environment would have been problematic, including food sources for the herbivores (no grass or flowers during the Jurassic, for instance), and no evolved defenses against viruses and other disease-causing organisms. Our present-day efforts to bring back mammoths make a bit more sense since they've been extinct for only a few thousand years, and they lived in ecosystems much like those that exist today.

But still, all in all I enjoyed the movie. Geology criticisms aside, I'd give it a B+.

All pictures are courtesy of Universal Studios

California's First Dinosaur Discovery and Finding a Tiny Bit of Inspiration

I meet with 72 5th-graders on Friday. The occasion was our SEEK (Science Education Encounters for Kids) day, a program NOT sponsored by NSF, GSA, NAGT, or any other acronym. It is a volunteer affair that has been running at our college for the last year or so. We bring students from local elementary schools to the campus where they can see science in a college setting. We do a lecture presentation and a pair of laboratory experiences. It was, as always, a lot of fun doing science with the kids. Something happened this time that really set me to thinking, though.

I asked them what school they were from, and so many of them shouted their answer that I didn't really pick out a school name from the cacophony, but I moved on with my intro about the prehistoric animals found in our region. And I got to the dinosaurs.

It seems like dinosaurs always capture the imagination of kids. I can talk about ancient sharks, sabertooth cats and giant cave bears, even mosasaurs and plesiosaurs (we've had them all around here), but they really perked up when I mentioned that a dinosaur was discovered in California too. Then I mentioned where, and their eyes grew wide, and a bunch of them shouted "that's where we live!".

They were, as it turned out, from Patterson, a small town at the west end of Stanislaus County, where California's first dinosaur was discovered in 1937. A 17-year-old young man by the name of Al Bennison was exploring nearby Del Puerto Canyon, and he found bones near the ridge-top above the farm and landslide seen in the picture above. It proved to be a species of hadrosaur, a Saurolophus, a large plant-eater of the duck-billed dinosaur clan (according to story related by Richard Hilton in "Dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles of California", a femur from the creature was being used as a doorstop by a local rancher).

What struck me is that no one knew this. No one ever does. It seems that one of the most fundamental scientific facts about our county remains unknown by children, teachers, and just about everyone else. We teach our children their all-important math and English so they can pass their multiple-choice competency tests but this is an example of how we are falling short in the arts, the sciences and history. Math and English become more or less meaningless without the context of these other disciplines. But we are told that there just isn't room in the budget for these "frills" of education. It's more important to preserve our tax breaks than to take care of our vulnerable and young. According to recent news reports, American students have fallen to the bottom of the heap among leading economic powers in science and mathematics. And California spends less per student than just about any other state. And the cuts keep coming. Our summer session is about to be cut again this year. Sometimes I come close to despair.

I asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their answers included the usual policeman, firefighter and other normal kid answers. One indicated she was going to be on "Dancing With The Stars". But one of them said "scientist". Maybe it was because they were on a science field trip, but it gave me that little bit of hope for the future. I hope we can give them the opportunities they deserve and the inspiration they need.

Postscript: I found a report of a discovery of a Hadrosaur in Orange County in 1927, but it was not actually identified as a dinosaur until decades later.

Postscript #2: One of those moments of irony...after making a crack about students aspiring to be dancers on television, our local paper has a front page article on a student at a local school...dancing on television (MTV). To their credit though, there was a science story too, about how Saturn got her rings...way back on page B-5. I'm glad we have our priorities straight.

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the story of a Dino-Dig wraps up

Continuing the story of our 1994 dino-dig, in which we learned the truth of uncovering new scientific knowledge. We were re-opening the quarry where the raptor Deinonychus had first been discovered. After nearly a week of hard digging we were approaching the bone layer, but work was pre-empted by a heavy rain and hail-storm that drenched the area. We had found nothing to speak of, but in the days that followed the storm, bones began to appear.

Our first effort to actually discover bone involved Karma Craig, whose previous efforts had netted us a near tornado, scorpions, rattlesnakes and deer-van collisions. Knowing of his power, we got him to say the words "I wonder what it would be like to find dinosaur bones?". His Karma was strong, and later that day he stumbled over some tail vertebrae (second picture) of a Tenontosaurus, the large iguanadon-like plant-eater that appears to have been the main prey of Deinonychus. Soon after, another member of the party found an odd boulder that turned out to be the carapace of a turtle (third picture; the matching half of the carapace was later found to be already ensconced in the Museum of the Rockies). I had walked past a pile of rocks for a week before it occurred to me that we were in mudstones, and that rock chunks shouldn't be there; they turned out to be the bones of an anklyosaurus relative. And several members of our party wandering on the other side of the gully found a partial Deinonychus claw and numerous other scattered bone fragments (fourth picture).

Meanwhile, the diggers had reached the bone-level of the main pit. Tensions were high as the professionals climbed in with their dental picks and brushes and went to work. What would come to light? Whole skeletons of Deinonychus locked in a death embrace with their victims? Well, no, we didn't find that; we found a single claw, which fell to pieces upon exposure, and was lost. But that's what happens, I guess. We were quite thrilled with our other discoveries.

Just the same, there was one more discovery to be made in our last days on the site. That story follows soon!

The Real Jurassic Parks: Where are the Dinosaurs?

A great many parks on the Colorado Plateau draw their scenery from Jurassic-aged sediments, and have been reviewed on a fair number of posts in the last month or two (see here for a listing). I haven't said much about the dinosaurs themselves because I was waiting to talk about the ultimate dinosaur park: Dinosaur National Monument (a most creative name, don't you think?)

The park draws its fame for an extraordinary bone bed that was discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass. Although thousands of bones were quarried and sent to distant museums, there was enough foresight among the powers-that-were to preserve hundreds of bones in place where they could be viewed in situ by the public. By 1915, 80 acres around the quarry were set aside as a monument by President Woodrow Wilson. The park was expanded in 1938 to include the spectacular gorges of the Yampa and Green Rivers, an area of some 200,000 acres. The park was the setting of one of the seminal battles in the nascent environmental movement in the 1950's when an effort to construct a huge reservoir in Echo Park in the heart of the monument was turned back (some details here).

The source of most of the dinosaur fossils in the monument is the Morrison Formation, one of the most widespread sedimentary units in the western United States. It is exposed over a region extending from Canada to New Mexico and from the Great Plains to Arizona and Utah, forming a unique badlands topography in shades of purple, red, green and yellow. The rocks reveal a vast river floodplain system that was occasionally mantled with volcanic ash from eruptions of stratovolcanoes to the south and west. A shallow sea existed to the north.

Rivers are wonderful settings for the preservation of fossils. Animals are drawn, of course, to river (fluvial) environments, and occasional floods will trap many of them. As rivers meander back and forth across the plains, point bars (inside loop of a meander) become collection points for animal carcasses. They can be quickly buried and preserved in such situations (the bone bed at Dinosaur NM is an example of this). The muds of the floodplains likewise can be a tomb for mired animals. In other situations, the muds served as nesting grounds for some species, and nests, egg shells and juvenile dinosaurs are counted among of the significant finds in the Morrison.

A phenomenal number of fossils have been found in the Morrison Formation, including dozens of species of dinosaurs, as well as smaller reptiles, pterosaurs, crocodiles, primitive mammals, fish, amphibians, and invertebrates. Many of the most best-known dinosaurs were discovered in the formation: stegosaurs, sauropods ("long-necks" to you parents out there), and allosaurs. Twelve species have been discovered in Dinosaur National Monument alone, including the Camarasaurus in the third photo above.

The clay-rich nature of the Morrison Formation has been the undoing of the most famous aspect of the park. The bone bed was exposed in a steep face that came to be protected under a three-story-high shelter. Over the years the soils have settled and the structure was seriously compromised, with cracks and fissures in the building that represented a danger to the staff and public. As a result, the building has been closed since 2006. Unfortunately, park visitation plummeted, and the budget situation at the park has deteriorated.

Because of the budget shortfalls, some political controversies have arisen in recent months over the management of Dinosaur National Monument and the role of paleontologists in the work force at the park. Rebecca at Dinochick Blogs has been on top of the issue, with the most recent flurry of letters here.

If you have the opportunity to visit the park, do not miss the 200,000 acres of the park that are not the fossil exposures! A vast plunging anticline dominates the park, and the two rivers that cross the anticline have carved deep gorges that are extremely popular with river rafters. A road climbs from the south boundary of the park to spectacular overlooks at Harpers Corner and above Echo Park.