Teaser image for Jurassic Park 5, via Colin Trevorrow/Universal.
Well, this is a doozy. Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow tweeted the above image this afternoon, which is a teaser for the upcoming “Jurassic World 2” (Jurassic Park 5?). The film doesn’t have an official title yet, but apparently they started shooting on February 23rd and are aiming for a June 2018 release.
The Victorian-style museum gallery piqued my interest immediately. Since this is the first promotional image they put out, it stands to reason that natural history exhibits might play a significant role in the film. Is this a flashback to a formative experience for a main character? Or is it a brief moment of quiet before Chris Pratt smashes through the wall riding a mutant cyborg T. rex? Both are probably equally likely at this point, but there are still a few things worth noting.
First, this scene is plainly referencing the century-old association in the public consciousness between museums and dinosaurs. When we think of museums, we think of dinosaurs, and vice versa. This is no accident – as I’ve discussed here on many occasions, dinosaurs (and their mounted skeletons in particular) played a central role in defining the modern museum at the start of the 20th century. The first Jurassic Park film played with this iconography in its classic finale, when the flesh-and-blood Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor literally obliterate a pair of skeletal mounts. In that case, the implication was clear: the living, cloned dinosaurs represent new technology and scientific progress smashing the old and obsolete incarnations of paleontology to bits.
Y’know, this scene. (Universal).
Is “Jurassic World 2” pushing a similar message, casting the iconography of a museum hall as a past doomed to extinction? Maybe. The Victorian design elements – wood paneled walls, skeletons on open pedestals in orderly rows – distinctly evoke museums of the past. You’d be hard pressed to find an exhibit that looks like that today. Perhaps the filmmakers are using the Victorian iconography to enhance the impression of dusty obsolescence. Or maybe the baby boomer producers are recreating the sort of museum they remember from their childhood. The primary counterpoint is that the mise en scène on display here is stately and impressive. That dramatically-lit ceratopsian skull looks formidable, not at all like something shrinking back into history.
Let’s talk about that ceratopsian skull for a hot sec. The other skeletons are (perhaps incredibly) reasonably accurate representations of identifiable dinosaurs. We’ve got a tyrannosaur, a hadrosaur, and a dromaeosaur on the left, and what looks like Euoplocephalus, Kosmoceratops, and Protoceratops on the right. The skull in the center stands out as the sole fanciful element in the scene. It looks like an oversized, exaggerated Triceratops, with extra-long, tapering brow horns and a frill studded with spikes. Jurassic World established fantasy dinosaurs as being part of the Jurassic Park universe, so it’s possible this represents some kind of new, fictitious hybrid.
Charles Knight’s 1897 Agathaumas painting. Source
However, I was immediately reminded of Charles Knight’s classic take on Agathaumas. E.D. Cope named Agathaumas sylvestris in 1872, based on a pelvis and a number of vertebrae discovered in southwest Wyoming. It was technically the first ceratopsian dinosaur to be named and described, but without a skull, Cope had little idea of what the animal looked like (today, it’s considered a synonym of Triceratops). Charles Knight depicted imagined the animal as a sort of spiny uber-Triceratops. His striking reconstruction was copied almost exactly for the Agathaumas that appeared in 1925’s The Lost World.
Triceratops and Agathaumas models, sculpted by Marcel Delgado and animated by Willis O’Brien. Source
It would be beyond awesome if the dramatic ceratopsian skull was meant to be a throwback or nod to the mythic Agathaumas. Or perhaps I’m reading too much in to it.
EXTINCT MONSTERS 
