Jurassically Inaccurate

The time is finally here. After fourteen years, Spielberg has opened up the Jurassic World for us again, and everybody’s talking about it. In the twenty years since the release of Jurassic Park, we’ve learned a huge amount about how dinosaurs looked, moved, behaved and reproduced. We’ve learned about how their appearance changes through development, about their social behaviour and how they held themselves, and we’ve learned more from their genetics than we ever thought imaginable when Michael Crichton was writing his Jurassic novels.

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Mega Penguin

Penguins are certainly one of the more cute and charismatic of the Antarctic fauna, but would people be so fond of penguins if they were over 2 metres tall? Fossils recently unearthed in Antarctica have revealed that giant penguins used to roam this icy continent.

Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, discovered on Seymour island off the Antarctic peninsula, was a penguin weighing 115 kilograms and towering above most people at 2m (6ft7). That’s two and a half times heavier, and nearly twice the height of an Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)!

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