Hi, Mr. Nature here. I’ve just been watching that Mosasaurus scene from Jurassic World, and it has me in stitches.
Mosasaurs were lizards, related to monitor lizards, that lived in the sea long ago. There were many species of them, found here and there and everywhere. I once dug up a nice Mosasaur tooth right here in New Jersey.
The premise of this movie is that people even get bored with live dinosaurs, after a while, so Science has to somehow give them bigger and better dinosaurs. By “better” they mean scarier and more dangerous. So they use cloning and genetic engineering to create this terrible monster…
Well, fry my hide, they’ve already got this Mosasaurus! Here they are, feeding it a great white shark. Might as well give it something that’s not at all easy to come by. An adult great white shark is anywhere from 12 to 20 feet long, but it looks like a sardine compared to the Mosasaur. That would make the Mosasaur… oh, better than 100 feet long. Bigger than a blue whale. And they’ve got it in an aquarium.
I’m sorry, but that’s funny! I mean, it’s a fun movie, I enjoyed it no end–but reality it’s not.
Christians, never forget, never forget, that in our popular culture, that we live in, science and fantasy and pure humbug are tangled together worse than the hideous snarl of wires behind my computer. Feel free to enjoy the entertainment value–but make very sure you’re never taken in by it. If you want absolute truth, you have to go to God’s word for that.
Don’t let your fun be the enemy of your integrity.
I’ve never seen any but the original movie, Jurassic Park. I enjoyed it, but viewed it as a sophisticated reselling of Godzilla and nothing more. It was scary and hilarious, especially when one unsympathetic character was plucked from the outhouse by a T Rex, but it was not a source of any factual information.
I see it as a parable on the vanity of Science: the whole idea that we know what we’re doing and can control it.
Crichton was great at that sort of thing. He’s one of my favorites. “Airframe” was a book about the airline industry and, speaking as a person that was in the industry, he was the only author I ever read that got it right.