SICK JP DINOSAURS

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

Minor note on things of a JP nature.. the sick _Triceratops_ 
in the first film owes its existence to a confused cross-over 
between what's in Crichton (1991) and the film. 

1) In the book, the stegosaurs are ill. This is because they 
are swallowing poisonous berries which they mistake for 
stones, and they are swallowing stones because they employ 
gastroliths. I suppose the implication - it ties in with stuff 
Sattler says about long-dead animals finding survival 
difficult in the modern world - is that the stegosaurs are 
ethologically naïve when confronted with extant flora. 
Which is reasonable if you've been extinct for 150 million 
years.

2) For assorted reasons, stegosaurs didn't make it into the 
first film, but they did decide to use _Triceratops_. They 
now decided that, instead of a sick _Stegosaurus_, they 
were going to have a sick _Triceratops_.

3) Problem is - the ostensible reason for the ceratopid's 
sickness in the film is the same as that for the stegosaurs in 
the book: viz, the animals have mistakently swallowed 
poisonous berries while selecting gastroliths. So far as we 
know, ceratopids did not employ gastroliths, so the cross-
over is flawed.

I think this has been pointed out on the list before. My 
sources for the above are assorted published and TV 
interviews and Shay and Duncan's (1993) book _The 
Making of Jurassic Park_.

-- 
Darren Naish
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences
University of Portsmouth UK, PO1 3QL

email: darren.naish@port.ac.uk
tel: 023 92846045