Jurassic Park IV: Rebooted Dinosaurs Needed?

When I was young (we are talking "in the 1980s" here) I inherited the dinosaur books that my aunties and uncles had used in the 60s and 70s. Big, boldly coloured books full of beautiful pictures they began my love affair with dinosaurs (helped by frequent visits to Maidstone museum to buy the Invicta line of dinosaur models). However even as a child I could tell there was something a little wrong with those pictures. Snorkelling brachiosaurs seemed to conflict with the then current models of tall, strong brachiosaurs I was playing with.

Paleontology is still a young science, new discoveries that change the fundamental understanding of how dinosaurs and other related species looked and acted are made all the time. In writing Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton did his best to stay true to the late 80s understanding of dinosaurs, and the subsequent movie had several expert advisors (such as Jack Horner) to help guide it. Even so, 20 years later Jurassic Park's dinosaurs are starting to look very out of date.

For example, at the time of Crichton's research, Deinonychus was named by some as Velociraptor antirrhopus. Given the similarities in size, it is pretty clear that Deinonychus is the basis for the infamous Raptors seen in the movie. Now this has been revised and what is known as a Velociraptor today (an animal roughly around 0.5m tall with feathers) is totally unlike the Raptors of Jurassic Park.

The Original JP Version

          The JPIII Redesign 

Current Impression Of What Deinonychus Might Have Looked Like

Will Jurassic Park IV acknowledge the new discoveries? Will it keep to the, very well-recognised, designs from the earlier movies or be bold and completely reinvent them? Will we get properly feathered dinosaurs or even newly discovered ones?

I've seen some say that they could keep the original designs, perhaps slightly modified, but explain the differences due to the amphibian DNA used during the cloning process. This sounds decent, or they could take the explanation from the original book that Wu got his way and redesigned the dinosaurs to look more like people expected (in the book Wu and Hammond argue about this sort of genetic engineering). Not only is this fiction but it is fiction based on still up for debate science meaning they can take some liberties (as they did with both the dilophosaurs poison and "mane").

The dinosaur fanboy in me would love for them to be very bold indeed and make some of the newly discovered dinosaurs as infamous and terrifying as the original Jurassic Park made velociraptors. Or they could just do an "upgrade" to utahraptors who dwarfed deinonychus. 

Here's looking forward to whatever new designs and dinosaurs they come up with!