Brusatte is a professor of paleontology and evolutionary biology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. During production, anyone working on the movie could ask him questions. “It’s my job to tell them what we do know, what we don’t know, and what’s reasonable speculation,” Brusatte says.
As a paleontologist, Brusatte finds and studies fossils, the preserved remains of ancient life. By examining fossils of bones, he can get a better idea of what different dinosaurs looked like and how they would have behaved. For example, the shape of a claw fossil can tell him if a dinosaur was a predator or a planteater.
Before working on Jurassic World Dominion, Brusatte was often asked about how accurate the film franchise’s dinosaurs were. The one thing he would bring up was feathers.
“These dinosaurs would not have looked like lizards or crocodiles,” he says. “They would have feathers.” Steven Spielberg, who directed the first Jurassic Park film, couldn’t have known to put feathers on dinosaurs back in 1993—it’s a more recent discovery.
That’s why Jurassic World Dominion is an opportunity to show even more realistic dinosaurs in action. “When the film comes out, so many people are going to see an image of dinosaurs they haven’t seen before, and it will be the real image of dinosaurs,” Brusatte says.