Uncovering the Mysteries of Deinonychus and Velociraptor
In the summer of 1998, I sat down in my parents’ living room, opened the first page of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and did not stand up again until I had read the book in its entirety. This was not my first experience with the book – I had read through half of it seven years prior and then the whole thing before the movie adaptation was released in 1993 – but it was the beginning of what has since become an annual tradition.
The exact reading date and location may change from year to year, but every summer I’ll make time to go through Crichton’s modern classic. My ongoing annotations of the text, now numbering in the triple digits, record eighteen years of intellectual growth across three copies of the book. I cycle through these copies annually with the goal of returning to earlier notes and highlights with a fresh pair of eyes.
Approaching the text this way also reveals discrepancies between different editions. One such discrepancy might explain one of Crichton’s more controversial choices: his conflation of Deinonychus with Velociraptor. I think the discrepancy also shows how the philosophical foundations of paleontology have changed since the 1980s. Jurassic Park was in this sense very much a work of its time – Crichton wouldn’t be able to justify his taxonomic choices today.
What caught my attention this year was a curious omission I recalled from last year’s read-through: that Grant had made a point about lumping Deinonychus with Velociraptor, but that point was missing here. Sure enough, when I checked the same passage in the paperback and e-book editions, I found the following highlighted text:
Crichton’s addition to the text in the paperback release cuts to one question often asked about the book and movie alike: why did Crichton conflate Deinonychus, the North American dromaeosaurid described in Jurassic Park, with its much smaller Asian relative Velociraptor? This was taxonomically speaking a relatively big mistake.
Species classified within the same genus bear a relatively high degree of similarity, sometimes even non-experts might not recognize differences between them. Species classified in different genera, however, are less similar and often clearly different to the untrained eye. Why, then, would Crichton – known for his meticulous research – confuse different dinosaur genera?
Different sources offer different explanations. John Ostrom, the influential dinosaur paleontologist who first described Deinonychus and advised Crichton, claimed that the author did so for purely aesthetic reasons – the author thought that Velociraptor was the better-sounding name. By contrast, Brian Switek asserts that Crichton made the choice to conflate the two due to the influence of paleoartist Gregory S. Paul.
The change between hardcover and softcover editions of the text lends credence to Switek’s argument. Paul, well known among paleontologists for his controversial views on dinosaur taxonomy, receives credit in Crichton’s acknowledgments. In his 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, Paul wrote that later fossil evidence proved him incorrect regarding the morphology and function of Velociraptor and Deinonychus skulls. However, in his more recent Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, he was content to split one genus from the other, even while pursuing a broader agenda of taxonomic lumping.
At the time that Crichton was writing, however, Paul’s argument was at least reasonable, if not widely accepted. One could charitably read Crichton’s addition to later versions of the text as an explicit nod towards Paul’s dinosaur taxonomy. This is not to say that Ostrom was mistaken in believing Crichton’s choice was a matter of taste. The discrepancy between editions of Jurassic Park hints that Crichton’s lumping of Deinonychus with Velociraptor was guided by both data and taste.
Such an explanation would be consistent with Crichton’s philosophy of science. It would also reveal some progress in the philosophy of paleontology in the time since Jurassic Park’s publication. Many dinophiles have complained that the Deinonychus in Jurassic Park aren’t feathered – the author wishes they would stop “body shaming”.
Crichton’s Anti-Realism and the Changing Philosophical Foundations of Paleontology
Michael Crichton was likely a scientific anti-realist – his mouthpiece characters at least tended to assert that scientific theories are either necessarily false or not grounded in reality. That view became more explicit in Crichton’s later works, but its seeds were clearly sown by the character of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. Throughout the novel’s latter half, Malcolm offers postmodern critiques of Western science.
Crichton literally gave anti-realism the last word in his sequel to Jurassic Park, wherein an ally of Malcolm’s and an obvious Crichton mouthpiece advocates a pessimistic meta-induction. Nevertheless, Crichton was a careful researcher – it’s not for nothing that Jurassic Park is often held up as an exemplary work of true science fiction. He used actual scientific data as a point of departure for his stories.
This simultaneous commitment to the reality of data and the unreality of theoretical entities implied by the data marks Crichton as a constructive empiricist. It also explains why Crichton would feel the need to justify his choice of the name Velociraptor as something more than personal preference. The Deinonychus-Velociraptor hullabaloo makes a bit more sense in this context.
V. mongoliensis and D. antirrhopus are clearly different fossil taxa distinguished by features of the frontal and nares bones among others. Reality shows that specimens of the two species form distinct phylogenetic clusters, and so Crichton acknowledges that species-level distinction. At the time that he wrote, however, phylogenetic analysis in dinosaur paleontology allowed ambiguity between genus- and species-level differences.
Reality showed that V. mongoliensis and D. antirrhopus are different taxa, but it didn’t demand that the difference was enough to warrant genus splitting. Some authorities, such as Ostrom, maintained that it was; others, such as Paul, disagreed. Both taxonomies were empirically adequate, i.e., accounted for the given empirical data. A constructive empiricist would hold that theory choice would then have to be made on non-scientific grounds, such as taste. Crichton could therefore justify his lumping through a combination of aesthetic and empirical considerations.
What occurred to me during this year’s read-through, and the reason Crichton’s choice reveals the shifting philosophical foundations of paleontology, is that when Jurassic Park was published, a paleontologist could have been an anti-realist about fossil species. At the time, it was easier to believe that reality couldn’t show us the different degrees of similarity between fossil genera and fossil species.
As Turner et al. point out, in the 1980s, debates about genus-level lumping and splitting couldn’t be settled by data alone. Disputants would have to rely on philosophical arguments about the sufficiency of difference to justify their taxonomies. Paleontologists have since developed analyses capable of species-level resolution, making realism about fossil species more reasonable than the alternative.
The Self Under Siege: Navigating the Complexity of Meaning in the 20th Century
In the grand scheme of things, the Deinonychus-Velociraptor debate may seem like a relatively minor issue. However, it reveals a broader shift in the philosophical foundations of paleontology – a shift that mirrors the broader challenges facing the human self in the 20th century.
As the philosopher Rick Roderick observed, the late 20th century presented us with one great and overriding problem: the “self under siege.” The traditional reservoirs of meaning, such as religion and cultural worldviews, have come under the scrutiny of the “masters of suspicion” – thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who exposed the ways in which these systems can serve vested interests and mask underlying realities.
Just as the Deinonychus-Velociraptor debate revealed the shifting philosophical foundations of paleontology, the critiques of the masters of suspicion have undermined the stability of the self’s traditional anchors. Roderick argues that this has left us in a state of “complexity, insecurity, and confusion” about the nature of our own identity and place in the world.
The self, once grounded in the certainties of religion or cultural tradition, now finds itself adrift in a sea of information and competing narratives. The simplicity of the Tonkawa Indian’s “reservoirs of meaning” has given way to the bewildering array of choices and influences that characterize modern life. As Roderick laments, “Nobody and this is not Cartesian doubt you know this isn’t doubt brought on by an evil genie who makes me wrong to my clear mind No we doubt in a different way now we doubt that we could know enough about the big picture to even make sense.”
This crisis of meaning is not just an intellectual exercise; it has profound practical implications for how we construct and understand our own identities. The self, once a stable and coherent narrative, has become “fractal” – a self that “reproduces itself” in different contexts, leaving us to grapple with the question of who we truly are.
The Lost Kingdoms blog aims to explore these profound questions of identity, meaning, and the human experience, using the lens of ancient history and archaeology. By delving into the lost worlds of the past, we may find clues and insights that can help us navigate the complexities of the present and reclaim a sense of purpose and belonging in an increasingly fragmented world.
