The JP Dio Vs Dinosauria Dio Poll

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Which is the Better Dio?

  • The JP Dio

    Votes: 41 51.3%
  • The Dinosauria Dio

    Votes: 39 48.8%

  • Total voters
    80
I didn't know what one of those looked like, so I looked it up. That would be a neat dio. On Wikipedia they have a picture of that matchup in skeleton form at the Denver Museum of Science and History (or something can't remember the exact name). Although the elementary kid in me hopes the Steg isn't about to become dinner. :lol

A maquette of a steg would be cool too.
 
i'm a big dino nerd, so Dinosauria wins for at least making an attempt at accuracy.
Jurassic Park dinos were about as accurate as the sharks in the Jaws movies.
 
The Dinosaria dio is a great looking set. I love Jurassic Park, but I also feel that Sideshow has a lot more leeway with just making their own dios rather than being stuck to a movie. I'd rather have a ton of awesome looking dino dios rather than a few scenes from the movie made 3D. There's definitely a lot more potential when you're not limited to what was on celluloid :D
 
Given a choice, I'd prefer my Dinosaurs to be more historically accurate rather than movie accurate. On this point, I think SS will have more room to ensure historical accuracy by producing their Dinosaur products under an in-house license.
 
I really like the JP dio and I'll probably try to pick up the non-exclu after it ships (the banner has got to be one of the worst ex ever IMO) :/

the dinosauria is cool and I look forward to more in this line but I'm just not diggin' this one.

~LoA
 
i'm a big dino nerd, so Dinosauria wins for at least making an attempt at accuracy.
Jurassic Park dinos were about as accurate as the sharks in the Jaws movies.

Not at all. The T.rex and Parasaurolophus in particular have been widely lauded, and with damn good reason, for being so accurate in terms of appearance. The parasaur frequently escapes the acclaim, being a simple hadrosaur, but when it appeared in TLW, it impressed most paleocritics for being spot-on. When SWS created the T.rex, they began with the skull of a Tyrannosaurus and worked their way outward from there. The design of the T.rex was actually vastly ahead of its time in terms of dermal ornamentation on the skull of the Tyrannosaur, which we have found increasing evidence to support.

In terms of pure "Velociraptor", then yes, the film raptors are greatly exaggerated. If, however, you realize that they bred the animal, raised it, and matched it against existing paleo records to try to deduce what the animal could be... it's not outlandish; particularly if the raptor exhibited the intelligence of a Velociraptor, was labeled as such, but matured to a much larger size than expected. One could see how JP scientists could easily have placed a hasty label upon the creature. There was a great deal of guesswork involved when labeling the dinos after hatching, so it makes sense to see some end results that don't quite correspond. This is why we see animals called "Velociraptor" that are the size of Utahraptors - which had not yet been discovered at the time, so even if they had bred Utahraptors they would not have known that species to acccurately deem it such.

Dilophosaurus... well, we've all conceded that the frill and venom are embellishments, but again, there are plenty of species that have yet to be discovered. This is what gave Crichton, Koepp, and SWS carte blanche in terms of creativity.

Personally, I can't wait for my JP dio to arrive this week, and am elated with this first Dionsauria dio! Hopefully we can expect to see dino products released now with a greater regularity!
 
Not at all. The T.rex and Parasaurolophus in particular have been widely lauded, and with damn good reason, for being so accurate in terms of appearance. The parasaur frequently escapes the acclaim, being a simple hadrosaur, but when it appeared in TLW, it impressed most paleocritics for being spot-on. When SWS created the T.rex, they began with the skull of a Tyrannosaurus and worked their way outward from there. The design of the T.rex was actually vastly ahead of its time in terms of dermal ornamentation on the skull of the Tyrannosaur, which we have found increasing evidence to support.
i wasn't just talking about inaccurate appearance, i mean inaccurate basic biology and behavior, too.
for one, t. rex can definitely see someone if they stand still. in fact, they had binocular vision... with even better eyesight than modern hawks.
also, they were diurnal and wouldn't have gone chasing after cars at night, and would probably ignore a human entirely unless it was starving. mammals were not part of their natural diet.
Spielberg's big problem with using accurate dinosaurs is the real ones wouldn't make entertaining movie monsters.
as for appearance, it looked too lizard-like for a member of the coelurosaur classification in general and tyrannosaurinae in particular.
its earliest relatives in Asia were covered in feathers. and although it is believed adult tyrannosaurs lost most of their plumage, their young would most certainly have been covered in downy feathers.
but, to be fair, at the time JP was filmed t rex was still mistakenly classified in the carnosaur family.
In terms of pure "Velociraptor", then yes, the film raptors are greatly exaggerated. If, however, you realize that they bred the animal, raised it, and matched it against existing paleo records to try to deduce what the animal could be... it's not outlandish; particularly if the raptor exhibited the intelligence of a Velociraptor, was labeled as such, but matured to a much larger size than expected. One could see how JP scientists could easily have placed a hasty label upon the creature. There was a great deal of guesswork involved when labeling the dinos after hatching, so it makes sense to see some end results that don't quite correspond. This is why we see animals called "Velociraptor" that are the size of Utahraptors - which had not yet been discovered at the time, so even if they had bred Utahraptors they would not have known that species to acccurately deem it such.

Dilophosaurus... well, we've all conceded that the frill and venom are embellishments, but again, there are plenty of species that have yet to be discovered. This is what gave Crichton, Koepp, and SWS carte blanche in terms of creativity.

Personally, I can't wait for my JP dio to arrive this week, and am elated with this first Dionsauria dio! Hopefully we can expect to see dino products released now with a greater regularity!
all dromaeosauridae, including velociraptors, deinonychus (which JP raptors were based on, but Spielberg thought the audience was too dumb to pronounce/remember), oviraptor, etc were biologically indistinguishable from modern birds.
JP raptors were covered in scales and had snake-like eyes.
and none of them were smart enough to open doors. the smartest dinosaurs known (troodon) were about as smart as a turkey. and deinonychus/velociraptors weren't even that smart.
 
i wasn't just talking about inaccurate appearance, i mean inaccurate basic biology and behavior, too.
for one, t. rex can definitely see someone if they stand still. in fact, they had binocular vision... with even better eyesight than modern hawks.
also, they were diurnal and wouldn't have gone chasing after cars at night, and would probably ignore a human entirely unless it was starving. mammals were not part of their natural diet.
Spielberg's big problem with using accurate dinosaurs is the real ones wouldn't make entertaining movie monsters.
as for appearance, it looked too lizard-like for a member of the coelurosaur classification in general and tyrannosaurinae in particular.
its earliest relatives in Asia were covered in feathers. and although it is believed adult tyrannosaurs lost most of their plumage, their young would most certainly have been covered in downy feathers.
but, to be fair, at the time JP was filmed t rex was still mistakenly classified in the carnosaur family.

all dromaeosauridae, including velociraptors, deinonychus (which JP raptors were based on, but Spielberg thought the audience was too dumb to pronounce/remember), oviraptor, etc were biologically indistinguishable from modern birds.
JP raptors were covered in scales and had snake-like eyes.
and none of them were smart enough to open doors. the smartest dinosaurs known (troodon) were about as smart as a turkey. and deinonychus/velociraptors weren't even that smart.

To make concrete behavioral deductions without concrete evidence is not something I would be willing to jump the proverbial gun on. Ethologists and paleontologists alike will counsel that it would be unwise to say of an extinct organism we have never seen that it "definitely exhibited X behavioral trait." You can't make a definitive inference with the fossil record. Speculation is key, as is reliance upon extant organisms. If you're familiar with the novels, you'll know that the whole "they can't see you if you don't move" business is bunk, and was misconstrued when Grant encountered the T.rex... hence Howard King's death in the books, as well as the rexes searching the vehicle for Eddie in TLW; if one made the case that they attacked the vehicle when it was moving, that's understandable, but it doesn't attest to their clear familiarity with vehicles, glaring in through the open window to spot their prey, and then abandoning the car after devouring Eddie.

Coelurosaurs, T.rexes in particular, are distinguished for their binocular vision among large theropods, with the prevailing theory being that with their overlapping fields of vision afforded them the ability to deliver fairly precise bites when ambushing or assailing large and dangerous prey. T.rex visual acuity was simply astounding, being 13 times that of humans... and I believe eagles only have a visual acuity of nearly 4 times our own. It had a binocular overlap of at least 55 degrees in documented specimens, a trait which sets it apart and indeed is more than that of any Buteo. Overall, does that make it "better"? In terms of optic precision at close range, yes, but the optic lobes of the brain are nowhere near as derived as they are in any members of Falciformes. In point of fact, we have yet to find a member of Saurischia to rival Falciformes in overall eyesight when distance-sighting other organisms. Holtz said this in a lecture in August.

On the same note, don't jump the gun on deeming T.rex purely diurnal. It was before these most recent visual estimations that we deemed T.rex to be such. However, with its newly-pronounced visual acuity in mind, one can no longer make the argument that T.rex was diurnal based solely on visual capabilities, considering that all members of Strigiformes, modern owls, have a binocular range exceeding 70 degrees and the best stereoscopic vision known. People have talked long on diminished capacity after twilight, but while that could be true, we don't have anything down yet that has been widely accepted, and considering the breadth of extant wildlife we have to draw upon in comparative behavior as well as brain case comparison, I'm certainly not ready to make definitive assertions. Now if we are contesting the behavioral inaccuracies of JP, one can't help but notice that they made the animal an obvious predator, which is indeed the sort of lifestyle in which one would adaptively evolve binocular vision... the way we understand the T.rex brain case in combination with the binocular vision, it doesn't make sense to infer sighting a carcass at long range. I think we can put little Jack Horner to bed on that matter. ;)

Also to note, we can reasonably infer that it's a great likelihood T.rex infants had some degree of down fluff which they likely shed soon after birth. In the TLW novel, the infants are covered with down, however, the T.rex infant we see in TLW the movie is deemed to be an estimated "couple of weeks old", whereas the infants in the novel were mere days. We can't perceive this as s discrepancy between text and film being that we don't know when the creators would have postulated the infants to have lost their down. It was a creative choice on the part of SWS, and while I would have liked to have seen down, it would have meant a younger and much smaller animal than the one seen in the movie, and the decision to use Tyrannosaur offspring of that size was again a creative call. That, I suppose, boils down to preference as to whether or not one agrees.

All members of Dromaeosauridae indistinguishable from modern birds? If you mean lightly built and possessed of feathers, then yes, it is extremely likely that all Dromaeosaurs had feathers at least to some degree. It wouldn't be difficult to notice the toothy maw in lieu of a beak, nor the fact that the creature was bipedal without the ability to attain flight. Don't be so quick to denigrate Spielberg, it was Crichton who used Deinonychus-sized raptors under the name Velociraptor. All Spielberg did was enhance the size a tad further (for JP at least, not TLW); Crichton likewise did not opt for feathery coverings on his raptors, and while I don't personally feel it would have detracted from the menace of the animals if executed properly, I'm sure the author and director were right to assess that the audience would be better intimidated by animals that looked large and reptilian with the grace and agility of a bird, rather than adding feathers into the mix. It had nothing to do with treating the audience as uneducated. Conversely, I would argue that it helps to be educated to fully appreciate Crichton's books, and to get all that you can out of the movies... with the exception of the third film. I can't justify JPIII... that movie is just paleontologically unredeemable.

In terms of the snake-like eyes of the Velociraptors, I'd say they had eyes more akin to cats with the irises shaped as they were, not snakes which are devoid of eyelids.

I will concede that Velociraptors are not intelligent enough to open doors, no doubt there. However, based on preliminary brain case scans, there is an increasing amount of evidence supporting advanced congnitive capabilities in Utahraptor ostrommaysi, which oddly enough are the raptors that the JP raptors appear to be most similar to in every regard.
 
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Since I have an interest in dinosaurs your conversation is very interesting and enlightening. Although I feel compelled to point out that if they put feathers on the dinosaurs it really would have confused people. And I think since its a movie they were going more for scary dinosaurs than accurate dinosaurs.
 
Since I have an interest in dinosaurs your conversation is very interesting and enlightening. Although I feel compelled to point out that if they put feathers on the dinosaurs it really would have confused people. And I think since its a movie they were going more for scary dinosaurs than accurate dinosaurs.

Agreed. I think the goal with the raptors was to make them scary to people. The movie made Velociraptor a household name because people saw a dinosaur that was threatening in ways aside from sheer brawn.
 
Agreed. I think the goal with the raptors was to make them scary to people. The movie made Velociraptor a household name because people saw a dinosaur that was threatening in ways aside from sheer brawn.

Correct me if I'm wrong but arn't true life Raptors a fraction of the size that they were portrayed as in the JP movies? :confused:
 
To make concrete behavioral deductions without concrete evidence is not something I would be willing to jump the proverbial gun on. Ethologists and paleontologists alike will counsel that it would be unwise to say of an extinct organism we have never seen that it "definitely exhibited X behavioral trait." You can't make a definitive inference with the fossil record. Speculation is key, as is reliance upon extant organisms. If you're familiar with the novels, you'll know that the whole "they can't see you if you don't move" business is bunk, and was misconstrued when Grant encountered the T.rex... hence Howard King's death in the books, as well as the rexes searching the vehicle for Eddie in TLW; if one made the case that they attacked the vehicle when it was moving, that's understandable, but it doesn't attest to their clear familiarity with vehicles, glaring in through the open window to spot their prey, and then abandoning the car after devouring Eddie.

Coelurosaurs, T.rexes in particular, are distinguished for their binocular vision among large theropods, with the prevailing theory being that with their overlapping fields of vision afforded them the ability to deliver fairly precise bites when ambushing or assailing large and dangerous prey. T.rex visual acuity was simply astounding, being 13 times that of humans... and I believe eagles only have a visual acuity of nearly 4 times our own. It had a binocular overlap of at least 55 degrees in documented specimens, a trait which sets it apart and indeed is more than that of any Buteo. Overall, does that make it "better"? In terms of optic precision at close range, yes, but the optic lobes of the brain are nowhere near as derived as they are in any members of Falciformes. In point of fact, we have yet to find a member of Saurischia to rival Falciformes in overall eyesight when distance-sighting other organisms. Holtz said this in a lecture in August.

On the same note, don't jump the gun on deeming T.rex purely diurnal. It was before these most recent visual estimations that we deemed T.rex to be such. However, with its newly-pronounced visual acuity in mind, one can no longer make the argument that T.rex was diurnal based solely on visual capabilities, considering that all members of Strigiformes, modern owls, have a binocular range exceeding 70 degrees and the best stereoscopic vision known. People have talked long on diminished capacity after twilight, but while that could be true, we don't have anything down yet that has been widely accepted, and considering the breadth of extant wildlife we have to draw upon in comparative behavior as well as brain case comparison, I'm certainly not ready to make definitive assertions. Now if we are contesting the behavioral inaccuracies of JP, one can't help but notice that they made the animal an obvious predator, which is indeed the sort of lifestyle in which one would adaptively evolve binocular vision... the way we understand the T.rex brain case in combination with the binocular vision, it doesn't make sense to infer sighting a carcass at long range. I think we can put little Jack Horner to bed on that matter. ;)

Also to note, we can reasonably infer that it's a great likelihood T.rex infants had some degree of down fluff which they likely shed soon after birth. In the TLW novel, the infants are covered with down, however, the T.rex infant we see in TLW the movie is deemed to be an estimated "couple of weeks old", whereas the infants in the novel were mere days. We can't perceive this as s discrepancy between text and film being that we don't know when the creators would have postulated the infants to have lost their down. It was a creative choice on the part of SWS, and while I would have liked to have seen down, it would have meant a younger and much smaller animal than the one seen in the movie, and the decision to use Tyrannosaur offspring of that size was again a creative call. That, I suppose, boils down to preference as to whether or not one agrees.

All members of Dromaeosauridae indistinguishable from modern birds? If you mean lightly built and possessed of feathers, then yes, it is extremely likely that all Dromaeosaurs had feathers at least to some degree. It wouldn't be difficult to notice the toothy maw in lieu of a beak, nor the fact that the creature was bipedal without the ability to attain flight. Don't be so quick to denigrate Spielberg, it was Crichton who used Deinonychus-sized raptors under the name Velociraptor. All Spielberg did was enhance the size a tad further (for JP at least, not TLW); Crichton likewise did not opt for feathery coverings on his raptors, and while I don't personally feel it would have detracted from the menace of the animals if executed properly, I'm sure the author and director were right to assess that the audience would be better intimidated by animals that looked large and reptilian with the grace and agility of a bird, rather than adding feathers into the mix. It had nothing to do with treating the audience as uneducated. Conversely, I would argue that it helps to be educated to fully appreciate Crichton's books, and to get all that you can out of the movies... with the exception of the third film. I can't justify JPIII... that movie is just paleontologically unredeemable.

In terms of the snake-like eyes of the Velociraptors, I'd say they had eyes more akin to cats with the irises shaped as they were, not snakes which are devoid of eyelids.

I will concede that Velociraptors are not intelligent enough to open doors, no doubt there. However, based on preliminary brain case scans, there is an increasing amount of evidence supporting advanced congnitive capabilities in Utahraptor ostrommaysi, which oddly enough are the raptors that the JP raptors appear to be most similar to in every regard.
i'm not a Crichton fan, so i won't be bothered to read the books and the diorama is based on the movie anyway.

but, where would you draw the line between birds and dromaeosauridae?
all birds are born with teeth (or at least 1 tooth).
all birds and dromaeosauridae have/had hollow bones and feathers.
all birds and dromaeosauridae are/were warm blooded.
all birds have tails at early stages of development.
there are birds with claws/hands in South America.
many birds are flightless.
there is no significant biological difference.
 
Depends which raptors you mean. The three Dromaeosaurids usually in question with JP discussion are Velociraptor, Deinonychus, and Utahraptor. Velociraptors were about one and a half to two feet tall and six feet long. Deinonychus was around three feet tall and eleven feet long. Utahraptor was about six to seven feet tall and over 20 feet in length. The raptors in the JP novel were most similar in appearance to Deinonychus and the raptors in the JP movie were most similar to Utahraptors.
 
i'm not a Crichton fan, so i won't be bothered to read the books and the diorama is based on the movie anyway.

but, where would you draw the line between birds and dromaeosauridae?
all birds are born with teeth (or at least 1 tooth).
all birds and dromaeosauridae have/had hollow bones and feathers.
all birds and dromaeosauridae are/were warm blooded.
all birds have tails at early stages of development.
there are birds with claws/hands in South America.
many birds are flightless.
there is no significant biological difference.

A pity, you're missing out with Crichton's books, imo. You bring up a crucial point as to how one should adequately place the dividing line between modern birds and Dromaeosaurids. I'd probably expressly define the difference such that Dromaeosaurids likely carried out the majority of their life functions terrestrially while attaining prey/masticating via toothed mandibles for the duration of their lives. That'd be my preferred way to distinguish the two. That being said...
-The egg tooth as it is usually referred was indeed retained in modern birds as well as reptiles, and with the name explaining its purpose for forcing one's way outward from within the egg. Usually it's broken off during hatching, or it is shed shortly thereafter.
-Air sacs and hollows are a shared ancestral trait that can be traced back from modern raptors to non-avian theropods. The same can be said for the warm-bloodedness characterizing organisms with more active lives.
-Tails are a shared trait across most members of Vertebrata. Tails aren't nearly adequate to use as an assessment. The other characters are more appropriate.
-Anomalies like clawed forelimbs and flightlessness were of selective advantage to those organisms, and it wouldn't be prudent to make correlations.

It's best to look at phylogenetic bracketing to attain where to adequately draw the lines with ancestral and derived traits, but I would define Dromaeosaurids as I did above in order to avoid confusion. It gets messy when you add in things like warm-bloodedness, tails, and claws, because then we need to trace them back through the rest of Vertebrata to see other classes that share similar traits and then look for an ancestral organism. Simply put, it's much more difficult than most people realize to define one species from another, and often times it comes down to obscurities such as variation in remige length among Finches. However, while remige length seems trifling, it's much easier to draw a distinction between modern avian raptors and dromaeosaurids. I would recommend the way I defined them above.
 
Oh, and it might all just have been mind control on the part of Krulos. Forgot about Krulos. Tricky bastard. Thanks, Hicks!

no problem. You see that. I corrected you all without even typing. :rotfl:monkey1
Why did dino riders only get one season ? :monkey2:monkey2:monkey2
 
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