Nathan Myhrvold, a Seattle tech titan who also studies titanosaurs and other denizens of the dinosaur era, realizes that “Jurassic World: Rebirth” is science fiction, not a documentary — nevertheless, he has a few bones to pick with the filmmakers.
“There are some lines that it would be silly to cross, but they did anyway,” says Myhrvold, who was Microsoft’s first chief technology officer back in the 1990s and is currently the CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures.
Paleontology is one of Myhrvold’s many interests, and he’s a co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the subject. He was inspired to get into dinosaur research almost 30 years ago, when he visited a “Jurassic Park” movie set at the invitation of director Steven Spielberg. That visit led to connections with leading paleontologists.
“At that point in my life, I was interested in dinosaurs, but I’d never been professionally or seriously, in a scientific sense, into dinosaurs,” Myhrvold recalls. “So, the movie was a little bit instrumental in me, just as a way of meeting a bunch of those people.”
On the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Myhrvold and University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz discuss how much scientists — and filmmakers — have learned about dinosaurs over the past three decades. And they also critique “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the latest offering in a multibillion-dollar movie franchise that was born back in 1993.
