Recreating dinosaurs

The motor behind the extreme popularity of the movie Jurassic Park was beyond doubt how real the dinosaurs looked. Created to look flawless on 32mm (a medium with higher quality than any digital camera to date) the dinosaurs retain their splendor and reality even on todays HD viewing systems and digital screens. But what really triggered a real scientific debate about Jurassic Park was the explanation why in the movie humans and dinosaurs coexist.

Uniqueness
Books and films that only give a documentation of dinosaurs seldom become as popular as books and films in which humans and dinosaurs meet each other and the carnivorous dinosaurs hunt and kill some humans. As a result, authors that make stories in which dinosaurs and humans coexist have to give an explanation how such a thing is possible.

Lost worlds
The first story in which humans stumble upon a prehistoric reptile was Jules Verne's 1864 novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Deep under the survice of the earth the explorers see a giant Ichthyosaurus, which fights with a Plesiosaurus and wins. Later, in 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel The Lost World. In this story a group of explorers travels to a plateau in South America where (due to isolation from the rest of the earth) time and evolution have stand still for millions of years. Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals still live on that plateau.

Both these stories became very popular and film adaptations of these stories have been made many times. But in both stories the explanation why humans and dinosaurs coexist is that, although dinosaurs disappeared everywhere on the planet, somewhere on or under the earth are small "lost worlds" where they still exist. In Conan Doyle's day, you could think of South America as a mysterious, unknown place, where ancient beasts and wonders might well await the determined explorers. But in modern times the entire globe (including ocean floors) has been mapped, and if dinosaurs would still live somewhere they would have been discovered. Furthermore, all hollow earth hypothesis have been rejected by the scientific community. Therefore, all stories that use a lost world explanation for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs are truly fiction, nothing more and nothing less.

Time traveling
A very straightforward solution for the coexistent problem would be time traveling. Humans could travel 65 million years in time and walk between dinosaurs. This solution is used in Walking with dinosaurs (particularly in Prehistoric Park) and will be used in Steven Spielberg's film film) Terra Nova.

Time travel is a good solution, but it's unlikely that in the near or far future it will be possible for humans. Therefore a story with a time travel explanation isn't very convincing for the general public or scientists.

Ancient humans
coming soon

Recreating dinosaurs
coming soon

How to build a Dinosaur
coming soon

Non-Jurassic Park appearances
coming soon