It seems that another Jurassic Park film is upon us. As I’ve written about before, the phenomenon that is Jurassic Park and it’s various sequels and spin-offs has played a central role in the public’s general awareness of dinosaurs for 30 years and counting. Whether we like it or not, every bit of public-facing media concerning dinosaurs (exhibits, books, documentaries, and more) must contend with Jurassic Park‘s long shadow. The latest film—Jurassic World: Rebirth—is just alright, but in a series first, it includes a scene in a natural history museum.
The Jurassic Park films have referenced the century-old association between museums and dinosaurs before. The first Jurassic Park played with this iconography in its classic finale, when the flesh-and-blood Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor tear down pair of skeletal mounts in the titular park’s visitor center. Those cast skeletons were supplied by Research Casting International: the T. rex was a combination of LACM 23844 and the Royal Terrell Museum’s Black Beauty specimen, while the sauropod was a Camarasaurus with an alternate head. The implication of the scene is clear: the living, cloned dinosaurs represent new technology and scientific progress smashing the old and obsolete incarnations of paleontology to bits. A museum-like setting also features in several scenes in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. In that film, the skeletal mounts—nearly all of which came straight from the Gaston Design catalog—are set up in the home of a wealthy dinosaur enthusiast.
In Jurassic World: Rebirth, the characters don’t just encounter museum-like displays, they visit an actual museum in New York City. The museum isn’t named in the film, but photos of props reveal that it’s the Natural History Museum of North America, an obvious stand-in for the American Museum of Natural History. As the exposition-heavy scene plays out, we see the dinosaur hall is being dismantled. Pieces of skeletons and other exhibits are carted up and loaded away by a crew of hard-hatted workers.
“It’s a hell of a day here. They’re closing us down,” says paleontologist Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey. It’s not clear who “they” or “us” is in this scenario. Is the entire museum being shut down? The paleontology department? Or just this dinosaur exhibit? The film doesn’t have an answer to any of these questions, and the scene’s setting seems to be mostly symbolic: the public has grown weary of the feral dinosaur populations that have spread around the world at this point in the Jurassic Park universe. A catastrophic decline in museum attendance is apparently a side effect of that disinterest.
Despite the hazy rationale for its deinstallation, we can still infer a fair amount about this fictional exhibition during the five minutes the characters linger within its walls. There are at least two galleries: an outer gallery flanked by large windows and dominated by a sauropod skeleton that straddles two pedestals, and up a set of stairs, an inner gallery that houses the T. rex skeleton.
The halls are decked in extravagant Baroque trim. This lavish architectural style was popular in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, but is somewhat out of place in New York City, where Beaux-Arts was the norm for large public buildings (like museums) built around the turn of the 20th century (like AMNH). A few Baroque revival buildings—mostly churches from the late 19th century—do exist in New York, however. Notably, the Baroque influence extends beyond the walls and ceilings and into the exhibit elements: gilded sauropods adorn a set of columns in the outer hall, and a high-contrast mural depicting what might be Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus is visible in the background of a couple shots.
The museum scene was actually shot in the UK, at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. The dinosaur galleries are in fact the famous Painted Hall. Designed by James Thornhill and constructed between 1707 and 1726, this space was originally a dining hall but is now a popular tourist attraction. The immense murals depict an assortment of mythological and historical figures: King William III is at the center of mural on the ceiling, while George I holds court in the mural on the rear wall (this virtual tour explores the murals’ subjects in detail). Both murals are visible in Jurassic World: Rebirth (it’s best not to wonder why a New York museum is decorated with images of British monarchs).
The British sensibilities extend to the exhibit elements. In the filmmakers’ commentary, director Gareth Edwards notes that he was inspired by the dinosaur hall at the London Museum of Natural History, which was considered as a shooting location. Much like that real-word exhibit, some of the displays at the North American Museum of Natural History are suspended above visitors’ heads and are partially hidden in shadow. The font and other design elements of the exhibit signage are also similar to the London museum.
Taking a closer look at the dinosaurs themselves, the T. rex appears to be in an old-fashioned tail-dragging pose, or perhaps it’s mirroring the classic roaring stance from the end of the first film. The “When dinosaurs roamed the Earth” banner that matches the Jurassic Park visitor center is presumably an in-universe coincidence. A Quetzalcoatlus skeleton is suspended in front of the doorway, and a very large Mosasaurus skull hangs to its left. We also see a Triceratops skull and Deinonychus skeleton already crated for removal, along with some unidentified vertebrae and ribs on tables.
The fossils are realized on film with a combination of physical reproductions and CGI. The Triceratops skull is (rather crudely) sculpted, while the T. rex skull and Deinonychus skeleton appear to be casts of actual fossils. The Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurus, and T. rex body are CGI. The sauropod legs were likely present on set, but the rest of its body was filled in digitally when it appears in frame. None of the mounts have the supporting armatures needed for real fossils, so we can conclude that within the film universe, this exhibit only featured casts and reproductions.
Taken together, the evidence on screen suggests that the Natural History Museum of North America is of similar age to AMNH, and the space occupied by the dinosaur exhibit was built as a Baroque revival in the late 1800s. Dinosaur-themed trim like gilded sauropods indicates that this has been a paleontology exhibit for all or most of that time. There have been recent updates, however. Some exhibit text is displayed on animated LED screens (this is most visible below the Mosasaurus skull) and other graphics are backlit. Text beneath the header “Incubation and Development” discusses the process of cloning dinosaurs—in the Jurassic Park universe, the existence of cloned dinosaurs became public knowledge when a T. rex briefly rampaged through San Diego in 1997, so this text must have been added sometime after that. An animated video summarizes how the feral dinosaur populations that began to spread in 2018 ultimately did not survive in the temperate latitudes, and most living dinosaurs now only thrive at the equator. This display could not be more than a couple years old at the time of Jurassic World: Rebirth.
The age of the Mesozoic reptiles on display is harder to pinpoint. Let’s ignore for the moment the many differences between these skeletons and their real-life counterparts (yes, there are no real mosasaurs that big, nobody would reconstruct a Quetzalcoatlus skeleton with that crest, and the Triceratops‘s eyes are weirdly placed). Few of these animals were known at the turn of the century, so most would have to be relatively recent additions. Quetzalcoatlus, for instance, was named in 1975, and sauropods the size of the “Titanosaurus” on display weren’t discovered until the late 80s (amusingly, the sauropod skeleton has a Camarasaurus skull, a fate that is apparently not just reserved for apatosaurines).
As discussed, the skulls and skeletons are all clearly plastic casts and models, which would date them to the 1970s at the earliest. The dynamic poses of the sauropod and Quetzalcoatlus also suggest a mid-Dinosaur Renaissance timeframe. What’s really interesting, though, is that all these skeletons are the chocolate brown color of fossilized bone. In a world where living dinosaurs exist, I would imagine that newer displays—whether real or replica—would be made to look like recent animals. Replica skeletons would be ivory-colored, and perhaps accompanied by taxidermy mounts or preserved samples of feathers, skin, and other soft structures. With that in mind, I’d say these skeletal displays were overhauled in the 80s or 90s, before there was widespread access to cloned dinosaurs. Overlays of new text and media were added in subsequent decades in an effort to keep the exhibit relevant in the “neo-Jurassic age.”
Loomis’s comment that “five years ago, you’d have to wait for hours” to get into the exhibit doesn’t make much sense with this timeline—if the public was going to lose interest in prehistoric dinosaurs, surely it would have happened before 2015, when the Jurassic World theme park was going strong. Perhaps the museum saw a brief spike in attendance around the time living dinosaurs started showing up in people’s backyards?
To be honest, much of the timeline of Jurassic World: Rebirth is illogical, and it probably has something to do with the film being hastily written and rushed into production. But I hope you’ll agree that even the worst fiction can be fun playground for thought experiments like this one. Did you catch any details in the Natural History Museum of North America Scene that I missed?
EXTINCT MONSTERS 