Someone who really knows their way around the 3D rendering software Blender has produced a scientifically accurate version of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park. The footage is both incredibly impressive and a little grotesque—but in a good way.
Our knowledge of dinosaurs has expanded quite a bit since Jurassic Park was released in the summer of 1993. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we found fossil evidence that some dinosaurs had feathers, even though researchers had been theorizing about the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and modern birds since the late 1800s.
All of which is to say that when Steven Spielberg and his production team were designing the velociraptors for Jurassic Park, the commonly accepted wisdom at the time was that raptors were like every other dinosaur: big scary reptiles. We’ve since learned that this wasn’t the case, and that the species of velociraptor depicted in Jurassic Park would have had feathers.
YouTuber CoolioArt used their special effects expertise to set the record straight. By tweaking a few key scenes from Jurassic Park with their special effects skills, they transformed the velociraptors into what they might have actually looked like based on the current scientific evidence, i.e. giant terrifying crows.
The descriptions on CoolioArt’s videos make it clear that the velociraptors that feature prominently in the film and Michael Creighton’s original novel are actually the Deinonychus Antirrhopus, a species discovered in 1964 by famed paleontologist John Ostrom, whose work revolutionized our understanding of dinosaurs.
Feathers aside, the actual Deinonychus Antirrhopus was about half as small as the one depicted in the movie. Think of it more like a Great Dane than a horse.
CoolioArt has said they’d love to do a full scientifically accurate VFX remaster of Jurassic Park. However, as they’re currently a college student relying on freelance jobs, they’ve said they’re considering starting a Kickstarter or GoFundMe to finance the work.
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