'Jurassic Park' made Dilophosaurus famous before scientists had a thorough understanding of it. The most comprehensive study of the iconic dinosaur reveals a very different animal from the one portrayed on film.
The fading sun beat down on our backs after an already long day in the field. Exhausted, we toiled over shovels and dug with our bare hands to clear away the sand. We were in the heart of dinosaur country on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, working in the middle of the Navajo Nation to determine the ages of two skeletons of Dilophosaurus wetherilli that had been unearthed there previously.
A Star is Born Today we know Dilophosaurus as a bipedal, meat-eating dinosaur more than 20 feet long with two distinctive parallel crests of very thin bone along the top of its head . But in 1954, when the animal first appeared in the scientific literature, it had a different name: in a series of papers, Samuel Welles, a University of California, Berkeley, paleontologist, presented his research on two skeletons found by Jesse Williams, a Navajo man who lived near Tuba City, Ariz.
New and Improved Artistic choices aside, scientific understanding of Dilophosaurus was bound to change in the years after Jurassic Park's release. In the lead-up to the book and film, the field of paleontology was undergoing tremendous change. Advances in computing were revolutionizing the study of fossils, enabling researchers to process enormous data sets in ways unimaginable when Dilophosaurus was first discovered.
The Dilophosaurus material discovered since Welles's initial description and Langston's reconstruction shows that the animal's snout and jaw were much more substantial than originally recognized. The upper jaw bones do not have the weak interface that the fragmentary first finds suggested. Instead these bones indicate a strong skull capable of biting into prey. Likewise, newly identified features of bones from the animal's lower jaw show stout ridges for muscle attachments.
One of the challenges of studying the evolutionary history of any species is understanding physical variation within and among taxonomic groups. Welles thought the various skeletons we now categorize as Dilophosaurus actually represented multiple genera. Taking advantage of the latest cladistics tools, one of us tested that hypothesis by identifying hundreds of anatomical features present on each individual skeleton and comparing them with one another.
One of our objectives was to more precisely determine the age of the rock in which Dilophosaurus is found, known as the Kayenta Formation. This rock was laid down by rivers, lakes and streams east of a volcanic arc that was depositing ash and fine-grained particles into the area. The ash helped to both preserve the bones of Dilophosaurus and aid early efforts to date the Kayenta Formation. We collected new rock samples to date using radiometric methods.
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