Shawnliu

After twenty years, the original Jurassic Park is back in theaters. The movie’s dinosaurs – once state of the art, now woefully behind the science – are a reminder of our complicated relationship with our favorite prehistoric beasts. New science is bringing dinosaurs to vibrant, feathery life as never before, yet we still cling to the familiar scaly beasts depicted in the king of the tyrant dinosaur films.

I was ten years old when I first watched the revived dinosaurs roar across the screen. I couldn’t wait for it. Magazine articles teased at how amazing the movie was going to be, promotional tie-ins brought dinosaurs and junk food together, and I convinced my parents to finally let me read the novel on which the film was based.

I devoured Michael Crichton’s book in less than twenty four hours, but even such direct imaginary stimulation didn’t compare to how I felt when I saw Velociraptor, Triceratops, Dilophosaurus, and, most amazing of all, Tyrannosaurus brought to life through the combined power of new paleontology and Hollywood special effects mastery. Jurassic Park came the closest we may ever get to what the film’s fictional genetic engineers tried to do – recreate the best possible approximation to dinosaurs as they were during their Mesozoic heyday. This is a high achievement, yet isn’t necessarily a good thing. Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs have fossilized in our imagination, overshadowing new findings and restorations that are making dinosaurs stranger still.

The convergence of film technology and scientific revision that made Jurassic Park such a success could only happen once, and made the film a classic. Prior to 1993, the cinema dinosaurs I knew were jerking puppets, animated caricatures, or stop-motion models that never seemed to mesh especially well with their human costars. Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs into our world, and made them something more than the mindless antagonists they were traditionally cast as.

Jurassic Park also debuted at a time when paleontologists were ramping up ever-more-detailed investigations into dinosaur biology. They delved into the microstructure of dinosaur bone, examined the ecology of the long-dead creatures, rearranged the dinosaur family tree based on a new methodology called cladistics, and began to realize that birds were dinosaurs too. Paleontologists have gained even more momentum since that Dinosaur Renaissance. What we know about dinosaurs is changing so quickly now that even the beasts we thought we knew just twenty years ago look unfamiliar to us now. If Jurassic Park were made today, the dinosaurian cast would be far more vibrant and complex than the monsters that set off a mid-90s wave of dinomania.

The biggest change to Jurassic Park is an extension of a paradox that runs to the core of the first film. Very early in the story, the fictional paleontologist Alan Grant rhapsodizes about how bird-like “raptors” – read: Deinonychus, changed to Velociraptor for the movie – must have been, and terrifies a small child in his attempt to prove that even avian-ish dinosaurs could be terrifying. (Slashing at volunteers with dinosaur claws is not a normal field practice, even after paleontologists soak up their usual allotment of beer and liquor at the end of a rough day in the badlands.) Yet, by today’s standards, Jurassic Park’s raptors look exceptionally scabrous and reptilian compared to the feathery creatures that real-world paleontologists have restored.

Where the film to be remade today, Jurassic Park would look less like an open-air reptile zoo and more like an aviary. Both direct fossil evidence – from feathers to quill knobs on bones – and the evolutionary relationships of known feathery dinosaurs has shown that Velociraptor was a feathery predator and that Tyrannosaurus was a gargantuan fuzzy carnivore. The extra integument wouldn’t have made them any less fierce. If you stopped to laugh at a fluffy Tyrannosaurus, you’d just be giving the theropod a head start. And even other dinosaurs more distantly related to birds might have had unusual body coverings – splashes of bristles or shaggy feather-like structures on the backs and tails of the park’s Triceratops and Parasaurolophus. No doubt Alan Grant would be thrilled by the makeover.

The irony is that Jurassic Park so firmly established the image of naked dinosaurs that many fans are resistant to the idea that their favorite dinosaurs were fluffy. In fact, Colin Trevorrow, who was recently tasked with directing Jurassic Park 4, commented that there will be “no feathers” in the next sequel. Despite the first film’s progressive take on the bird-dinosaur connection, including the parting scene where the avian dinosaurs we call pelicans fly alongside the helicopter carrying the catastrophe’s survivors as a reminder that dinosaurs are still with us, the franchise has been reticent to catch up with the best paleontology has to offer. The first fuzzy non-avian dinosaur was described in 1996, just three years after Jurassic Park initially debuted. If we were to go back to “Site A” now, we’d undoubtedly encounter dinosaurs made all the more bizarre by their body coverings.

Feathered dinosaurs via Dr. Brian Choo

Of course, diehard fans might say that the grotesque appearance of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs is because – according to canon – inGen researchers used frog DNA to patch up the missing bits of dinosaur genomes. That’s the conceit that allows “chaotician” Ian Malcolm to later feel smug when the dinosaurs, like the frogs the DNA was taken from, switch sexes to create a breeding population. But splicing a Tyrannosaurus with amphibian genes would make no sense when we know that birds are living dinosaurs. Indeed, the avian twig of the dinosaur family tree evolved 150 million years ago, and every bird today – from hummingbirds to penguins to pigeons – are living dinosaurs. There is a workaround, though. Some bird species are capable of parthenogenesis – females can lay viable eggs without mating with a male. “Life finds a way”, indeed.

Even though the original Jurassic Park dinosaurs will remain featherless when they return to theaters, imaginary paleontologist Grant’s insistence that dinosaurs were exceptionally bird-like is spot on. It’s a reminder of what the franchise could reclaim if science and special effects are brought back into collaboration again.

Perhaps a film like Jurassic Park can only exist under just the right conditions. In 1993, paleontology had just radically shifted our understanding of what dinosaurs were like, special effects had advanced to an astounding degree, and dinosaurs had been demarcated as b-movie kitsch for so long that a serious, scary science fiction fable offered an unprecedented opportunity. Without some future revolution in special effects or a jarring image change for dinosaurs, we might never have the chance to pull the veil back on amazing dinosaurs in the same way ever again. Yet dinosaurs as we know them continue to change and evolve as our understanding draws more detail from their bones. Those new images from the scientific community are trickling piecemeal into pop culture, but the resistance to the very idea that some of our favorite dinosaurs were enfluffled underscores the need for a film to popularize our shifting perception of prehistoric life. We need a little more of Grant’s abashed love of bird-like dinosaurs more than ever.

Jurassic Park is more than an extreme case of science communication success. I expect that as the upcoming generations of paleontologists establish themselves in academia and as the talking heads of basic cable documentaries, they will draw a formative part of their fascination back to the film just as their mentors and advisers cited the Tyrannosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History or books of dull, swamp-bound dinosaurs. Simultaneously, the film is a kind of flickering museum. Not just of 1990s style and the days when interactive CD-ROMs were a source of novel excitement, but, despite their inaccuracies, dinosaurs as we saw them at a time when paleontology was truly just beginning to investigate biological questions that always seemed beyond the reach of science.

Now that we’re going back to the original Jurassic Park, we can gauge just how far the science has come and how much more wonderful our new dinosaurs seem. I hope the franchise follows its own precedent. When the tale of Jurassic Park eventually continues, why not celebrate and preserve our new fuzzy, fantastic dinosaurs?

Brian Switek is a science journalist who writes the Laelaps blog at National Geographic. His forthcoming book is My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs.

According to a new Consumer Reports investigative study published Thursday, there is rampant variation in the price of generic drugs as large U.S. pharmacy chains — including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target — mark up the prices of generic drug versions for common medications by as much as 18 times what wholesale chains like Costco charge. That price variance ends up costing Americans, who spend an average of $758 out-of-pocket on drugs every year, hundreds of dollars in unnecessary spending each month.

Consumer Reports compiled the data by contacting hundred of pharmacies throughout the country and asking what their drug prices were for generic versions of Lipitor, Plavix, Actos, and other common medications. The results were striking, with pharmacy representatives claiming that the higher prices were necessary for covering overhead, and considering that selling medication constitutes most of their revenue and profit margins:

Costco was the least expensive overall, and you don’t need to be a member to use its pharmacy. A few independent pharmacies came in even cheaper, though their prices varied widely, as did grocery-store pharmacies. The online retailers Healthwarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com also had very low prices. On the other end of the spectrum, CVS, Rite Aid, and Target had the highest retail prices. [...]

A representative of CVS told us that its retail drug prices reflect other services offered by the chain, including drive-through windows, automated prescription refill systems, free outreach programs to help make sure patients are taking their prescriptions correctly, and 24-hour pharmacies. Costco pharmacies, the cheapest overall, are open only from 10 a.m. to 7 or 8:30 p.m. and are typically closed on Sundays.

“Big-box stores such as Costco and Walmart use the pharmacy as a traffic builder for their stores, whereas traditional chain stores, such as CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens, make the majority of their revenue and profits from the pharmacy,” says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, Ph.D., Pharm.D., a professor of pharmacy economics at the University of Minnesota.

The study’s full findings are illustrated in this chart:

The use of generic drugs — rather than their brand name counterparts — actually drives down spending on medications, consequently lowering Americans’ out-of-pocket costs and government spending on public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But the Consumer Reports investigation suggests there are significantly more savings to be had.

This isn’t the first time generic drug makers have been in the news this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up Federal Trade Commission (FTC) v. Actavis — which one expert dubbed “the health care reform case of 2013″ — a case centering on the legality and antitrust implications of so-called “pay for delay” arrangements in which brand name drug makers pay off their generic drug counterparts to delay a drug’s generic version from entry into the market. If the FTC winds up winning that case, it could save Americans and the government billions of dollars on drug costs every year. But as this new report demonstrates, they could save much more if pharmacies stopped jacking up their rates to startling degrees.