How Jurassic Park III Solved a Major Predator Problem From The Original Movie
Jurassic Park III 's Spinosaurus holds the world record for largest animatronic ever built for a film production. More importantly, it was also waterproof.
When you're pushing boundaries, it's sometimes hard to know where the limit lies.
Take, for instance, the groundbreaking effects on the original Jurassic Park, which blended practical animatronics with nascent CGI to bring create a new standard for the summer blockbuster.
The practical dinosaur effects—courtesy of the legendary Stan Winston—were just as ambitious as the unproven digital technology and arguably exceeded difficulty in terms of correcting unforeseen problems.
One of those roadblocks involved an excess of water during the iconic scene where the T. rex breaks out of her enclosure. While the build was designed to repel a certain amount of liquid, the creature's foam rubber hide ultimately became too porous when subjected to the monsoon-like conditions created on the Universal soundstage.
"Once the skin was soaking up water," puppeteer John Rosengrant recalled in James Mottram's Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History, "it started shuddering and doing everything that you wouldn't want it to do."
Added director Steven Spielberg, "Suddenly, all of Stan's kids would run in with big shammies, used at the carwash, and they're slapping the rain off the T. rex and trying to dry it off."
Several years later, Winston found himself tasked with building a formidable opponent for ol' Rexy, the sail-backed, long-snouted, mean-as-all-hell Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, during production on Joe Johnston's Jurassic Park III.
How Jurassic Park III solved major dinosaur problem from the original movie
The resultant animatronic was 45 feet long, weighed 25,000 pounds and ran on 1000 horsepower. It was the largest ever built for any film project in history and, more importantly, designed with water-resistance in mind from the jump. That's because the script called for a sequence where the animal attacks Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and his party as they sail down a river on Isla Serna.
"At least we knew that up front," Rosengrant said. "We built his head out of carbon fiber and a dense rubber, something that wouldn't absorb water ... They treated the Spino just like a submarine."
Even though the franchise is never 100 percent accurate with its paleontology, Jurassic Park III's depiction of Spinosaurus was quite truthful to reality, thanks to the discovery a new fossil nearly two decades after the film hit theaters. The bones unearthed in the North African desert by a team of international scientists essentially proved that the species spent most of its time in water.
“This discovery is the nail in the coffin for the idea that non-avian dinosaurs never invaded the aquatic realm," Dr. Nizar Ibrahim said at the time. "This dinosaur was actively pursuing prey in the water column, not just standing in shallow waters waiting for fish to swim by. It probably spent most of its life in the water."
