Celebrating Dino Day with Our Favorite Dinosaurs from the Jurassic World Films
Dr. Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History takes us behind the scientific scenes of Jurassic Park.
The seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, hits theaters everywhere July 2, 2025. Over the last 30 years, the franchise has treated moviegoers to big screen visualizations of all their favorite dinosaurs, from the realistic to the fully fictional; from the tiny but still deadly Compsognathus (compies) to the gargantuan long-necked Dreadnoughtus.
In honor of the Jurassic franchise's imminent return, and as a nod to National Dinosaur Day on June 1, we spoke with Dr. Matt Lamanna, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and the senior dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History about seeing dinosaurs brought to life on the big screen.
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"I have wanted to be a paleontologist since I was 4 years old, I was already drinking the paleo Kool-Aid by the time Jurassic Park came out. But I will tell you it was foundational for me to see dinosaurs on the big screen in a realistic way. It felt like someone had put into a movie theater what I had imagined my whole life,” Lamanna told NBC Insider.
Some of the best dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park series (and one we’d like to see)
While Megaraptors have not yet appeared in the Jurassic Park film franchise, they are one of the most exciting groups of dinosaurs being studied right now. If Jurassic World were a real place, they’re at the top of the list of dinosaurs Dr. Lamanna would want to see.
“They’re the group that I’ve studied the most in the past five years or so. They’re super enigmatic, they’re super mysterious, I’d love to see what one would look like with its whole genome reconstructed. Currently, our fossils of this group are pretty beat up and fragmentary,” Lamanna said. “They would have been about two-thirds the length of T. rex and only about a quarter of the mass. They looked sort of like a T. rex but with a lower head, smaller teeth, and huge gangly arms.
Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus made its first appearance in The Lost World: Jurassic Park when Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) stops to snap their picture. Many viewers were overwhelmed by the staggering size of the Stegosaurus and that’s for good reason, they were massive creatures. Although maybe not as massive as they seem in the movies.
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“I would encourage everyone to see one in a museum. We have one of the biggest in the world in our museum,” Lamanna said. “My recollection is that the Stegosaurus in The Lost World are ginormous and were maybe a little bigger than they were in life. Our individuals are about 20 feet long. I think they were scaled up a little bit for dramatic purposes. They were more kind of rhino to small elephant size, that would be a more appropriate characterization.”
Dreadnoughtus
One of the largest sauropod dinosaurs to ever walk the Earth, Dreadnoughtus measured roughly 85 feet in length. The species made its first appearance on screen in Jurassic World Dominion (now streaming on Peacock!), illustrating the immense power of these prehistoric creatures now released into the wider world. Dr. Lamanna was part of the team which discovered Dreadnoughtus in Patagonia back in 2005.
"It was just an extraordinary full circle moment for me to see the thing on the big screen in Jurassic World Dominion. Because like a lot of people of my generation, I was in high school when the first Jurassic Park came out. That iconic scene when the Brachiosaurus walks onto the screen and the paleontologists are stunned to see it. I was just as stunned as they were in high school,” Lamana said. "So, to see one of our dinosaurs make the cut was a full circle moment thing and a really exciting thing."
Dilophosaurus
Perhaps the most memorable dinosaur from Jurassic Park, Dilophosaurus captured the imaginations of a generation with its neck frill and venomous spit. Fortunately for the Dennis Nedrys of the world, those features were Hollywood inventions. That said, the real Dilophosaurus had other things going for it.
“Ironically, we just talked about the Jurassic movie series often making dinosaurs too big, they actually made Dilophosaurus quite a bit smaller than it would have been in real life. The real Dilophosaurus was something like 15 - 20 feet long. In the movie, it's 6 or 7 feet long,” Lamanna said.
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“The most notable things though are that, famously and to terrifying effect, they give it this big neck frill. There's no evidence at all that Dilophosaurus had a neck frill along those lines. It's not impossible but there's no evidence. Then they show the animal as capable of spitting venom. Most modern venomous animals have grooves in their teeth for venom delivery. Even spitting cobras have holes in their teeth that the venom gets shot out of. Dilophosaurus teeth look basically the same as most other predatory dinosaur teeth. So, there's no evidence for Dilophosaurus or any dinosaur being venomous. It's a very cool piece of cinema that took a lot of licenses with the scientific information.”
Tyrannosaurs rex
The king of the dinosaurs, the terror the Cretaceous, there is no dinosaur more broadly beloved than the T. rex. For more than a hundred years, the T. rex has captured the imaginations of paleontologists and the wider public, alike.
“We at the Carnegie museum have the holotype, the name-bearing T. rex, the original one upon which the species name is based,” Lamanna said. You can see it yourself at the Carnegie museum during the upcoming DinoFest.
“I think it's famous because it was the first truly gigantic predatory dinosaur to become well known, both scientifically and to the public. Our specimen was found in 1902 and there was an even better specimen found in 1908, so we've had well over a century for this animal to filter into people's consciousness as this gigantic, iconic, multi-ton predatory animal. One of the largest meat-eating animals who've ever lived on land.”
Of course, just because we’ve been studying T. rex forever, doesn’t mean we’re done learning about her. It’s one of the most studied dinosaurs in existence and we’re still learning new things about it all the time.
"Any aspiring paleontologists, people like me back when the first Jurassic Park came out, there are so many extraordinary discoveries to be made long after I'm retired, including about relatively well-known dinosaurs like T. rex. I think you could argue that this is the golden age for dinosaur discovery,” Lamanna said.
Catch dinosaur fever for yourself when Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters everywhere July 2, 2025.
