11 Movie Mistakes Only Smug Nerds Would Ever Notice

9. Jurassic Park: That's No Raptor

It's hard to tell what so-called dinosaur experts have actually got correct over the years: every year there seems to be a new story emerging that suggests that formerly long-held facts about certain creatures were in fact total hocum, and that some dinosaurs never actually existed as we had become accustomed to them at all. So, it's no real surprise that the "science team" behind Jurassic Park made a lot of mistakes. Not only were the DNA experts attempting to extract DNA (which had probably long-since expired) out of the male (and thus not biting sex) type of a species of mosquito that didn't even drink blood, they also believed some long-running untruths about raptors.

Not only did raptors not eviscerate their prey (their claws weren't capable of it, and one found fossil had one raptor stabbing its prey in the neck) they were also nowhere near as big as the scaly tormentors on screen (which should accurately have had feathers apparently.) Dino nerds around the globe will happily point out that the creatures that can somehow open doors, and seem utterly convinced that Dr Grant is speaking their language fluently in the third movie, are in fact Deinonychus.

To really understand this one, you have to have spent some time reading about the false classification that happened after a presumptuous classification change by by paleo-artist Gregory S. Paul who decided that raptors and Deinonychus were so similar, they should, despite the assertions of actual paleantologists, be counted as the same thing. Michael Crichton read his book, then Spielberg adapted that book, and the lie turned into a pretty big movie. And it's not just taxonomy problems that plague the dinos in Jurassic Park, as there are not one, but two spelling mistakes of famous dino names - in the embryo freezing chamber, Tyrannosaurus Rex is spelled with only one "n" and Stegosaurus reads "Stegasaurus".

But then, that's all fine, because according to the magical timeline invented by Prometheus, Bible-bashers were sort of right in that dinosaurs were just a great big hoax sent to confuse and infuriate us all, so it doesn't really matter what you call them.