At least Will Ferrell is wearing the right kind of vest to be a paleontologist.

The new movie Land of the Lost stars Will Ferrell as paleontologist Rick Marshall, who invents a time machine that takes him to an alternate Earth where dinosaurs still dwell. Pop Omnivore wants to know: Does this film, based on a 1970s children’s TV show, do justice to paleontologists, not to mention dinosaurs?

For an expert opinion, we spoke with Thomas R. Holtz Jr., dinosaur paleontologist at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. (Warning: This interview contains spoilers—and references to poop and pee!)

Before we discuss the scientific content of this film, I must ask: Was it funny?

People are not going to be disappointed. It’s pitched as goofball comedy. That’s exactly what it is.

As a paleontologist, how do you assess the movie portrayal of a paleontologist?

I don’t think the movie knows what a paleontologist is! The Will Ferrell character works primarily to develop time warps to travel sideways in time, so he should be a physicist. And when you see him working, he’s working at the Page Museum in Los Angeles; he’s in a sort of classroom lab that’s covered with not so much fossils as the skeletons of modern vertebrates. When he gives a presentation to a bunch of kids, it’s on time warps and things like that, not about dead animals found on the ground. Yet they call him a paleontologist.

Just for the record, what does a paleontologist do?

A paleontologist studies fossils, the remains of ancient living things. The first part of that [is] going out into the field and finding fossils, but that’s only the first part. You [also] bring them to museums, prepare them, CAT scan them, measure them, look at them under microscope.

Does the movie at least dress its paleontologist correctly?

Thankfully there are no pith helmets, which is the cliché. Back in the day, paleontologists used to wear them. [In the movie, Ferrell’s character is] in field gear of various sorts, including a vest with all the pockets.

You have such a vest?

Yes. But paleontologists also wear a lot of T-shirts.

Any theories as to why Ferrell is a paleontologist in the movie?

He’s a paleontologist so he can interact with the dinosaurs. The running gag is he’s always wrong about the biology or behavior of the dinosaurs. Anytime he says they won’t do something, they do it.

For example?

[He] assumes that if he douses himself in hadrosaur urine …

And a hadrosaur is?

A duck-billed, plant-eating dinosaur.

Now, back to the urine.

He assumes that dousing himself will keep the predators from going after him. Everyone else would think the urine would attract the predators, which it does. They sniff him out easily. It’s a good gag, but the premise isn’t based on biology.

How so?

Dinosaurs wouldn’t pee lots and lots and lots of urine. They’re part of this group of reptiles called diapsids. Today’s diapsids are lizards, snakes, crocodiles, and birds. The way they get rid of nitrogenous wastes from their kidneys is not by peeing lots of liquid. It’s by excreting this white sticky paste. So when you find the white paste on your car, the bird hasn’t pooped on it; it’s peed on it. That way they conserve a lot more liquid than mammals or amphibians.

The pee mistake has been made before?

Even Walking with Dinosaurs got this infamously wrong. In one scene in this 1999 BBC documentary, a big predator marked its territory by peeing all over it. Mammals do that because we pee a lot. Reptiles wouldn’t.

In general, how do the Land of the Lost dinosaurs come off?

The dinosaurs weren’t super-realistic. But honestly they were better looking and more realistic than some that have shown up on documentaries on some of the cable networks.

Will you name cable network names?

I won’t name names.

But will you name dinosaur names? What dinos did Land of the Lost portray inaccurately?

They based the raptors and the compys on the Jurassic Park movies. In both cases, they are [depicted as] scaly dinosaurs. What people forget is that science has moved on since Jurassic Park came out, in the early ’90s. [We now] know the compys, which were between the size of a chicken and a turkey, were covered with fuzz, and the raptors with feathers. Get over it, folks: If you’re going to have raptors, from now on you’ve got to put feathers on them.

The old “dinosaurs had brains the size of a walnut” joke is also trotted out.

The actual T. Rex brain is bigger than a walnut. It’s not big compared to a mammal, but it had one of the larger dinosaur brains compared to body size, and the largest in absolute size—not as big as a loaf of bread, but bigger than a banana. Although in an animal that’s six tons, that’s not saying that much.

Who was the brainiest dinosaur?

Small raptors had bigger brain-to-body size. They were the smartest dinosaurs.

I understand there were pterodactyls in the movie as well.

Jurassic Park III put teeth in the pteranodon. “Pteranodon” means “wings without teeth.” In Land of the Lost, as far as I could tell, the babies did not have teeth, and it looked like mom did not have teeth.

Overall, thumbs up or thumbs down for Land of the Lost?

My wife said, “This sounds like a movie intended to make the moviegoer feel smart!”

And who wouldn’t want to feel smart?

Exactly!

—Marc Silver

Photo: Universal Pictures/MCT

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