Well, you'd get exactly the same answers from zoologists, botanists, and biologists.
In other words, you subscribe to Spielberg's populist notions of expert opinion and science. Zoologists, botanists, and biologists, in other words, are just a bunch of nerds who "know highly technical stuff", but are too stupid to be able to apply their knowledge to the "unknown" in such a way as to be accurate (or as reasonably accurate as possible).
This line of thinking is why I absolutely hate this movie, because if people familiarized themselves with how scientific knowledge works, they'd know how off-base this line of thinking is. Zoologists, botanists, and biologists of course would be initially thrown in their first encounters with dinosaurs, having never encountered them before. But dinosaurs, in the end of the day, are animals, and their biology and behavior would be similar enough to certain species living today that with enough observation, the zoologists, botanists, and biologists would be able to answer the questions of what they eat, how they behave during mating season, etc. The reason why is that they'd be able to apply what they know about, say, lizard and bird behavior, to species of dinosaurs that more or less are built and behave in the same way.
That's how scientific knowledge and expertise works. But of course with a anti-science, anti-expert populist like Spielberg, what the population learns is something different.
I ask this in all seriousness--not to be confrontational, but in the hopes of maybe opening your horizons a little--have you watched, say, science programs like Nova or Scientific American Frontiers? Or National Geographic, which shows how scientists draw conclusions about certain things?
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Otter (24464)
3 years ago
Actually, I've studied enough biological science and read enough about dinosaurs specifically to feel pretty certain I know more about the subject than you do. Because you say stuff like "But dinosaurs, in the end of the day, are animals, and their biology and behavior would be similar enough to certain species living today that with enough observation, the zoologists, botanists, and biologists would be able to answer the questions of what they eat, how they behave during mating season, etc."
FYI the current theory of dinosaur evolution is that they didn't die out, but only the smaller species survived the asteroid disorder, and they evolved into birds. So say Hammond wants to know what to feed a triceratops, so he asks a scientist to come up with a menu, by making assumptions based on the diet of the modern species most closely related to the triceratops... which would indeed be a plant-eating bird like a goose. Dude, that would be like an alien asking what to feed you for breakfast, based on what capybaras like, because you're both mammals! No, wait, it would be more like asking an alien what to feed you, based on the diet of whatever the descendants of capybara will evolve into in 70 million years. Mmmm, tasty!
The thing is, scientists do have ideas about unanswerable questions such as "What did this species of dinosaur eat", and will argue with each other about their theories, but the fossil record really tells us diddly-squat about such things and they know their theories are based on assumptions made from limited data and aren't actually fact. So to a non-scientist like Hammond, their standard answer would be "We just don't know", although of course they will discuss current theories with qualifications about limited data if someone is curious and persistent. But they still don't know.
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