JP dinosaur behavior analysis with a healthy dose of headcanon included from someone who doesnt know much about behavioral science. for funsies
ok so first of all lets start with the t rex. her very first moment is the goat leg ending up on the car, but we can see in the next shot that she is very capable of swallowing the goat whole. so how did that leg get there? given evidence that t. rexes were likely social creatures, i like to imagine that the leg on the car was more āhere you go have part of my meal because youāre smallā for the humans
next is her communication. i want to look at one specific thing, which was actually the thing that prompted the post
to me, that certainly looks like eye pinning. eye pinning is a behavior in birds that signals high stimulation. hereās what it looks like in a bird
it can be positive or negative, but in this case itās probably not negative, because thereās nothing forcing the rex to stay there. if she wanted to leave the situation she could hit the bricks
the continual roaring also sort of suggests play behavior to me. thereās not really any sense in making a shitload of noise at your prey (unless youāre trying to scare them out of cover, but we know she doesnāt need to do that because we see sheās strong enough to just break into the car) so, especially because they keep screaming, that reads way more like āim making noises and theyāre making noises back ^w^ā then it does as trying to intimidate prey for some reason
play behavior also makes sense because we know, canonically, sheās crazy understimulated. alan grant says as much when he mentions that they arenāt feeding her in a way that promotes hunting behavior. the way she noses at the jeep and spins it really just looks more like curious interaction than anything, as well as all the chasing people she does
next, the raptors. their really famous scene is the kitchen, but first letās establish some facts about them. we know from muldoon and what weāre shown that:
- theyāre smart enough to use one of their own as a distraction for flanking maneuvers
- theyāre good at problem solving enough to wait until the electric fences are turned off to systematically test them for vulnerabilities
- theyāre absurdly fast. ā60 mph on open groundā fast
- they are absolutely not in a big enough enclosure
- theyāre not fed in a way that promotes hunting behavior either
so when you put all this information together and then look at the kitchen scene, i donāt believe for even one second that the āhide behind the counterā routine is fooling those two raptors for any time at all. that entire sequence of loudly scrambling around the kitchen while something that can keep pace with a cheetah pretends it canāt catch you? yeah that makes WAY more sense as play behavior than it does hunting, especially since we see numerous times that there are many things on the island easier to catch and eat than a bunch of skinny humans (this goes for the rex, too!)
the bit with the noises is also true here. more true, if anything. muldoon tells us the raptors are ambush predators, so why on earth would they get into a hunting ground and then risk scaring their prey off with the loud barking calls? āhi weāre here come out and playā is a much more sensible use of a call loud enough to hurt a humanās ears from across a room in that situation
in conclusion: damnit john your girls are bored as fuck. give them a horse ball or a frozen pumpkin stuffed with meat or something
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