Days after being tapped as the director of the next "Jurassic Park" film, Colin Trevorrow went online and tweeted something controversial and revealing about the upcoming film.
"No feathers. #JP4," the director wrote. In just sixteen characters Trevorrow managed to ruffle the feathers of science world.
Paleontologist and dinosaur fact checker Mark Witton wrote that the move clashes with "overwhelming evidence that some JP dinosaur stars were feathered" and misses an opportunity to set the record straight with a mass audience.
The New Scientist reported some sharper criticism about Trevorrow's choice to go featherless.
"I'm pissed off by a disregard for knowledge," said palaeontologist Darren Naish, of the University of Southampton, U.K. "It helps perpetuate the notion that dinosaurs were all scaly dragons, alien and unlike modern animals."
The birds that we see today are likely descendants of dinosaurs, and there is mounting evidence that stars of the Jurassic Park franchise like the velociraptor and the tyrannosaurus rex had feathers.
Trevorrow has not tweeted anything else about dino feathers in JP4, though Friday he mentioned his excitement 20 years ago when he snuck out to catch a midnight screening the first Jurassic Park film.
A 3D, 20th-anniversary reissue of the original "Jurassic Park" premiers Friday, April 5.
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