The maps were pointed out by iwatchstuff, who found them at the Jurassic Park uber fan site Jurassic Park Legacy. There Terry Davis, Bernard Kyer, and Jeff Venancio reconstructed these amazing maps of the island based on concept art, facts and plot details. You can literally follow the story on the map. Click on the pictures for a closer look.

[More at Atticus Finch, via Reddit]

Sam Neill as Dr Grant, in Jurassic Park
Sean Bean and Viggo Mortensen in Lord of the Rings

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

Gerard Butler as Leonides in 300

Lawrence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead

The Harry Potter trio

Arnie in T2.

When I watched this film on TV a while back, I was on the fence about whether those were real-life lizards fighting — their motions were so jerky, their skins so fake-looking, I just thought they were really well-done Harryhausen-style stop-motion creations. But no — as various commenters have pointed out, those are real life lizards, being harmed in the making of this film. As English professor Michael Delahoyde puts it on his Dino-Films page:

The dinosaurs are photographically enlarged lizards, and are enjoyable to see eating and slurping the air, but distressing to see encumbered with all the glued-on crap to make them into things that look like dinosaurs only insofar as they don't look like lizards anymore. Pitting the two lizards against each other for the fight scene is inexcusable. More humans need to be killed instead.

It is really depressing to think of the film-makers making the lizards fight, just for a dumb spectacle. We definitely do not condone cruelty to lizards or other critters in the making of terrible monster movies.

In any case, to make it up to you, here's a giant green spider that hopefully was allowed to scuttle away unharmed after this take:

AICN spoke with The Wolfman director Johnston and managed to wrangle out a few hypotheticals out of the Jurassic Park 3 director. After saying the only way he'd get involved would be to revamp the franchise and take it completely off of the island, he explained why.

"Why would anybody go back to that island? It was hard enough to figure out the second and third reason for them to go, but it would take it off in a whole other trilogy basically, but when it gets to that level it's sort of about studios and Steven [Spielberg's] thing and who knows. I think we are at that point where we are due for another one if we are going to do it."

Off the island is very tricky, as it didn't work so swimmingly with Jurassic Park: Lost World. Personally I kind of like this idea. [Thanks, Gitemstevedave]...

Or they could just write a wholly original dinosaur story — I'm not sure which one is less likely to happen.

[xkcd]

Jennifer Check (Jennifer's Body)
Nature of Her Hunger: Demonic Possession — the result of a "virgin" sacrifice gone wrong.
Preferred Food Group: Boys, although she might make an exception for Amanda Seyfried.

Cal Thompson's ex-girlfriends (Peeps by Scott Westerfeld)
Nature of Their Hunger: Parasitic Infection, passed along through sexual activity.
Preferred Food Group: Whatever crosses their paths.

Lyekka (Lexx)
Nature of Her Hunger: Innate. She may look humanoid, but she's really a carnivorous plant.
Preferred Food Group: Pretty much anything and everything (including whole crews and countries at once), though she keeps her gums off the Lexx crew, out of affection for Stan.

The (Mostly Female) Carnivorous Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park)
Nature of Their Hunger: Innate. If you're going to keep Raptors and Tyrannosauri around, you have to expect a few casualties.
Preferred Food Group: Meat in general.

Heidi Barrie and Rhonda Kelley (Buffy the Vampire Slayer "The Pack")
Nature of Their Hunger: Hyena Possession, though they weren't very nice to begin with.
Preferred Food Group: High school principals.

Jodi Melville (Smallville, "Craving")
Nature of Her Hunger: Meteor-rock radiation, combined with an intense desire to be thin.
Preferred Food Group: Anything with fat on it.

Bilquis, The Queen of Sheba (American Gods by Neil Gaiman)
Nature of Her Hunger: Sacrificial. She devours men during the sex act to maintain her fertility goddess power.
Preferred Food Group: Men, though her preferred orifice for intake is not her mouth.

Zenelle (Madman)
Nature of Her Hunger: Mantis-like. Females of her species devour their mates.
Preferred Food Group: Men she's bedded, with the exception of one of the Mutant Street Beatniks, with whom she's fallen in love.

The Women of Eureka (Eureka, "Maneater")
Nature of Their Hunger: Chemical. An ancient spore turns the dial up on Carter and Dr. Stone's pheromones, and if what happened to the wolf whose lady friend got a whiff of his pheromones is any indication, the women of Eureka literally want to eat them up.
Preferred Food Group: Carter and Stone, though they never actually manage to sink their teeth into them.

Paula Gray, Doris Kearns and the Other Women of Dudley, Arkansas (The X-Files "Our Town")
Nature of Their Hunger: Cannibalism in an attempt to gain immortality.
Preferred Food Group: Anyone not in the cannibalism club. But they don't screen for diseases, and a good bit of the town ends up with Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease.

Frau Totenkinder (Fables)
Nature of Her Hunger: Sacrificial. She eats children to increase her magical power.
Preferred Food Group: Children, including her own infants.

Jillian Boone (Fringe, "Midnight")
Nature of Her Hunger: Bacterial. She's been infected with a sort of vampiric syphilis as part of an elaborate blackmail ploy.
Preferred Food Group: Spinal Fluid

The Women of Moodley (Doghouse)
Nature of Their Hunger: Infection by an Airborne Toxin.
Preferred Food Group: Men.

Giganta (DC Comics)
Nature of Her Hunger: Murderous. When you're giant, it's a handy way to dispose of people.
Preferred Food Group: Ryan Choi, The Atom, though just she ends up puking him up later.

Maryann Forrester (True Blood)
Nature of Her Hunger: Epicurean. She happens to know the perfect recipe for human (and shifter) hearts (and makes Tara an unwitting accomplice to her cannibalism), though she also needs a humanoid sacrifice for her god.
Preferred Food Group: She has a particular affinity for supernatural beings, though nothing undead.

Janet Weiss and Columbia (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)
Nature of Their Hunger: Unwitting. When you're invited to a dinner party, you generally eat what's placed in front of you.
Preferred Food Group: Meat Loaf — as in the person, not the stuff that's baked with tomato sauce.

Lizzie (My Favorite Martian)
Nature of Her Hunger: Monstrous. Thanks to a gumball that transforms humanoids into other creatures, Lizzie (who is normally shaped like Darryl Hannah) turns into a carnivorous alien beast.
Preferred Food Group: Bad guys.

Giggerota the Wicked (Lexx)
Nature of Her Hunger: Epicurean — in her words, she "likes to eat."
Preferred Food Group: Pretty much anything, although she finds brains too salty.

Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors)
Nature of Her Hunger: Innate. She's a mean, green mother from outer space.
Preferred Food Group: Anything human.

Helen Sherman (Torchwood, "Countrycide")
Nature of Her Hunger: Epicurean. She and the other villagers happen to enjoy human flesh.
Preferred Food Group: Travelers.

Miss French (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Teacher's Pet")
Nature of Her Hunger: Mantis-Like. Actually, she is a giant praying mantis.
Preferred Food Group: Male virgins, no matter how much they boast about their supposed "experience."

Every Female Zombie Ever
Nature of Their Hunger: Innate. Fish gotta swim, zombies gotta chomp.
Preferred Food Group: Any living human, but there's sometimes a special emphasis on brains.

We spent a lot of time following producer Frank Marshall.

Talking to the press at a round table, Marshall was asked:

Do you think Land of The Lost hurt the chances of Jurassic Park coming back?

No, no. I think Land of the Lost is a comedy. I just think, I have to see if they can come up with a story, we don't have a story yet.

Later in private, we pestered Marshall some more about the possibility of another Jurassic. He looked us kindly in our big optimistic eyes and said it was more of a "back burner project." Clearly, our hopeful look hadn't changed, because the Producer leaned over sadly, and said, "At this point, you could call it a long shot." No matter, we take this as a call out to you dear readers: write Frank Marshall the best dino-story ever. You deserve a better class of dinosaur.

In other movie development news. Round tables touched on The NeverEnding Story and tried to find out details on the child-like empress.

What can you tell us about The NeverEnding Story movie you're working on?

We love the book. We've always thought there was an opportunity there because there are a lot of elements in the book that aren't in the movie. It's another one where we're still working on the rights. It's a huge thing to get it. And once we get that, we'll bring on a writer. But that's kind of off in the distance, but it's a great story.

Mammoths lived and died pretty much exclusively in very cold climates, so paleontologists have been able to find a few of them freezer packed for freshness. With access to such well-preserved specimens, geneticists have sequenced roughly 70 percent of the species' genome. At the same time, some labs are hard at work sequencing the elephant genome, which is the closest match to the mammoth currently alive on Earth. So Nature decided to find out exactly what it would take to bring a real, living woolly mammoth into the world again.

1). Build the DNA from scratch using the basic chemicals that make up all base pairs, with the reconstructed mammoth genome as the recipe. You might have to fill in some gaps in the mammoth genome with elephant, in case we can't find enough frozen mammoths to complete theirs.

2). Get two copies of each of the dozens of mammoth chromosomes into the nucleus of a viable cell. This step is like giving someone directions to a far-away place by simply giving them the latitude and longitude. We can sort of do this on a small scale, but we probably don't have the technology to make this happen with mammoths yet.

3). Make the cells into an embryo. You'd probably use an egg from a modern female elephant to accomplish this, essentially creating a clone of the "artificial" mammoth DNA you'd manufactured.

4). Bring the embryo to term. Using an elephant as a surrogate mother seems logical, but apparently there are logistical problems with a modern elephant's internal structure. Robot mammoth mom, maybe?

5). Find some more frozen mammoths so you can create genetically distinct clones. You'll never have a breeding population without some genetic diversity.

Creating a real-world Jurassic Park (or, in this case, a Pleistocene Park) would be just about the coolest thing ever. Oddly enough, nobody mentions chaos theory in the Nature article, but there is a way we could cheat JP-style. By comparing the mammoth and elephant genomes, we could genetically engineer a "mammophant" that looks pretty much the same as a woolly mammoth, but isn't. Image by: rpongsaj.

Resurrecting the mammoth? New research raises the prospect. [Ars Technica]
DNA sequencing: Mammoth genomics. [Nature]

Jurassic Park Crunch
This 90s cereal turned your milk the color of dino-vomit. Jurassic Park Crunch had dinosaur and egg shaped marshmallows with whole wheat crunchies, but the biggest draw was the roaring box sweepstakes. If your cereal box roared upon opening, you would get to go to the Jurassic Park island itself, or Universal Studios, I'm not sure which. I just remember being promised dinosaurs.
 
 
 
 
 
Wheat Hearts and Sugar Jets:
Whatever Mr. Peabody wants me to eat I will.

Powerpuff Girls Cereal
This 90s cereal combined multi-colored Rice Krispie treat-like bits that were laced with POP ROCKS. Plus the Powerpuff ladies kick major butt.

C-3PO's Star Wars Cereal
Kelloggs brought us spacey droid goodness with this 1984 cereal. Their slogan was "A New (crunchy) Force At Breakfast" and had "twin rings phased together for two crunches in every double-O".

Bill And Ted's Excellent Cereal
Cinnamon oats and marshmallow notes? Excellent.

Star Wars Cereal
General Mills' super new Star Wars cereal made grocery shopping a terror as they slapped Hayden Christensen's face on every single box, thankfully they also gave us plenty of Obi-Wan.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Adams Family Cereal
Creepy and cooky cereal from 1991.

E.T.
Created in 1984 this E.T. had his own blend of chocolate and peanut butter cereal, which now sells for a whole lot more. One lucky owner sold his box of E.T. at an Australian auction for $800.

Batman Cereal
Tiny Bat-symbols from 1989; I always wondered what Bruce Wayne would have thought about this. I also assumed it would taste like Capn' Crunch but instead it tasted just like sugar.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal
With pizza shaped marshmallows, sold.

Ghostbusters Cereal

Gremlins Cereal Commercial (breaks down half way sorry!)
This Cap'n Crunch rip off came out in 1985, just don't eat it after midnight.

GI. Joe Cereal

Star Trek Promo Box

The Spock Box.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Monster Cereal (With Star Trek Promotion eeek!)
Hey - You can't have a cereal post with out giving the original monsters their due.

Seriously, there is so much crazy scifi cereal I couldn't name them all... so I've compiled a gallery of other cereals equally as teeth rotting for your viewing pleasure:

And finally, although I can't justify putting Mr. T on this list, I'm including Pee Wee's breakfast of pancakes and Mr. T cereal, as both are fantastic.

The Toronto Raptors represented a glorious first step for the science fiction nickname movement. Sure there's the Nashville Predators of the NHL, but they haven't taken the initiative to go invisible on the ice, and that is disappointing. The Raptors went dino after picking from a short list of Beavers, Bobcats, Dragons, Grizzlies, Hogs, Raptors, Scorpions, T-Rex, Tarantulas, and Terriers.

Former Blockbuster magnate Wayne Huizenga is selling his majority stake in the Miami Dolphins, one of the most storied franchises in football, to New York real estate developer Stephen Ross for $1.1 billion. Considering their one-win season last year, now might be the time for an image change. When the Miami franchise was established in 1965, fans chose between the Mariners, Marauders, Mustangs, Missiles, Moons, Sharks, and Suns. There's clearly a precedent for starfaring water mammals in this town, and they have a perfect model in the wonderful world of David Brin's gregarious, sexually-charged dolphins. Perhaps eventually they can uplift the Dolphin fans into sentience as well.

Los Angeles-area moguls have been promising a return to the NFL for the city since Rams moved from L.A. to St. Louis in 1995. They'll need a new name for a new franchise. Do they have any idea how much of a hit Cylons would be? Plus with Battlestar Galactica soon to be off the air, many of the real Cylons will be looking for work. Edward James Olmos is already drooling at what he'll net in related autograph sessions. The NFL at that point can work on getting actual Cylons to replace their terrible referees.

Seattle first professional baseball team was called the Pilots. Clearly the flying meme didn't work out because the Pilots were moved to Milwaukee and renamed the Brewers by now-commissioner Bud Selig. Baseball promised Seattle another team, and the nickname became the Mariners, a franchise that has never made the World Series in its history. For our part, we blame it all on the team's current mascot, The Mariner Moose. Gifted with the perfect model of an actual Mariner in Marvel Comics hero-villain Namor, this franchise chose a Moose. We suggest that 100 losses in a season should have them rethinking this, and opting to append a Sub- to that Mariner. Namor shall be ignored no longer!

The increasing speed at which planes now cross the Atlantic has made Europe an option for a new generation for U.S. born players. NBA commissioner David Stern has talked loosely about establishing the first European franchise in order to mine a lucrative market. What better name for the solitary, constantly traveling franchise than the Hitchhikers? You could sell The Guide next to team trinkets and jerseys, and Marvin's head kinda looks like you could be dribbling it anyway. You play clips from the radio show on the loudspeaker during time-outs; hell throw in Roger Waters' The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking during time-outs. Tell me you wouldn't root for that team.

A common theme in Crichton's work is that science is evil, and tampering with the forces of nature will get your face bitten off, writes Brotherton on his blog:

The theme of much of Crichton’s work is that of Frankenstein: playing god brings destruction. This is the message of Jurassic Park and Prey, for starters. There are related themes in books like Sphere, which indicates that there are things that humankind is better off not knowing... When a writer devotes so much time to pointing out the great arrogance and hubris of scientists and how it always brings doom, well, I think that sucks. We don’t have enough positive examples of scientists in books and movies.

And yet in the course of criticizing science, Crichton makes fundamental scientific errors, Brotherton points out. Most amusingly, he thinks "chaos theory" means every complex system will automatically break down — which means the space shuttle shouldn't be able to fly. And of course, Crichton has been lecturing whoever will listen about the "hoax" of global warming, disparaging the work of real climate scientists.

Brotherton links to a fascinating deconstruction of the bad science in Crichton's global warming hoax book, State Of Fear, at RealClimate.org: Crichton dredges up the myth that all scientists believed in the 1970s we were on the verge of an ice age. And in an appendix, Crichton compares the study of global warming to the 19th century academic study of eugenics: both were supported by foundations and had academic support, so ipso facto they must be equally valid. Right? Meanwhile, over at Nanotechnology Now, Chris Phoenix deconstructs the weird science in Crichton's fear-nanotechnology opus Prey, including the idea that atoms can pass through glass. (In which case, lightbulbs wouldn't work all that well.)

[Mike Brotherton]

Follow the links to awesome galleries.

Stan Winston Studio

Robots

Scary Monsters

Friendly Creatures

Gooftastic

A few photos and some specimens preserved in alcohol are all that remain of the Tasmanian Tiger - it was hunted to extinction early in the 20th century. Those alcohol-preserved bodies had enough DNA for the scientists to recover. They injected a few genes for cartilage development into mouse embryos, and the genes functioned, basically taking the place of the mouse genes that usually serve that function. It gave the researchers a new look into the genetics of a vanished species.

Pulling usable DNA from a fossilized bone or egg is a far cry from a preserved specimen, so species that were wiped out thousands or millions of years ago are going to be a little harder to bring back. There has been a lot of controversy regarding the Tasmanian Tiger project - is it even possible to bring back a living Tasmanian Tiger? And if it is possible, is it really something we should do? Even if the extinction was brought about by humans, I think the law of unintended consequences is going to bite us in the ass if we go too far down this road. Still, I'd be first in line to ride the automated SUV past the T-Rex enclosure. Image by: Universal Pictures.

Tasmanian tiger DNA 'resurrected'. [BBC News]

The 1970s: 1975's Jaws is widely considered the first summer blockbuster. The original Star Wars came out in May 1977 and grossed about $307 million domestically in its first run. The other big summer blockbusters of the late 1970s were Jaws 2, Animal House and Alien, according to this site.

The 1980s: Science fiction scored about one summer blockbuster per year, or maybe two in a good year. Except for the late 1980s, when science fiction had a bit of a slump. Here's the roundup, by year. (A year with an asterisk is one where no science fiction film hit the top 10 movies of the year, box-office-wise.)

1980: Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back ($209 million)
1981: Superman II ($108 million)
1982: E.T. ($359 million) and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan ($79 million).
1983: Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi ($252 million), Superman III ($60 million) and War Games ($80 million)
1984: Ghostbusters ($260 million) and Star Trek III: The Search For Spock ($76 million)
1985: Cocoon ($76 million) and Back To The Future ($211 million)
1986: Short Circuit ($41 million) and Aliens ($85 million)
* 1987: Predator ($60 million) and Robocop ($53 million)
* 1988: None. (Although Big and Willow were big summer hits.)
1989: Batman ($251 million), Honey I Shrunk The Kids ($131 million)

The 1990s: The number of science fiction movies in the summer's biggest movies increased slightly, with some ups and downs. Some years, the biggest blockbusters included films with a lot of special effects and action-adventure themes, but no overt science fictional elements.

1990: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($135 million), Total Recall ($119 million), Back To The Future Part III ($88 million), Flatliners ($61 million).
1991: Terminator 2 ($205 million)
1992: Batman Returns ($163 million)
1993: Jurassic Park ($357 million)
* 1994: None. (Although True Lies, Speed and The Mask were in the top 10, and non-summer films Stargate and Star Trek: Generations were in the top 20.)
1995: Batman Forever ($184 million), Apollo 13 ($172 million), Waterworld ($88 million)
1996: Independence Day ($306 million), Phenomenon ($105 million)
1997: Men In Black ($251 million), The Lost World: Jurassic Park ($229 million), Face/Off ($112 million), Batman And Robin ($107 million)
1998: Armageddon ($202 million), Deep Impact ($140 million), Godzilla ($136 million), The Truman Show ($126 million)
1999: Star Wars Episode 1 ($431 million), Wild Wild West ($114 million)

The 2000s: It's really just in the last five years that we've seen more than two or three big science fiction movies dominating the summer pretty much every year. A lot of these have been franchises, comic-book movies and sequels, or some combination of the three. The box-office take of the top 10 movies has increased dramatically, with every year's top 10 movies each grossing well over $100 million.

2000: X-Men ($157 million)
2001: Jurassic Park III ($181 million), Planet of The Apes ($180 million)
2002: Spider-Man ($404 million), Star Wars Episode II ($302 million), Signs (228 million), Men In Black II ($190 million)
2003: The Matrix Reloaded ($282 million), X2: X-Men United ($215 million), Terminator 3 ($150 million), Hulk ($132 million)
2004: Spider-Man 2 ($374 million), The Day After Tomorrow ($187 million), I, Robot ($145 million)
2005: Star Wars: Episode III ($380 million), War Of The Worlds ($234 million), Batman Begins ($205 million), Fantastic Four ($155 million)
2006: X-Men: The Last Stand ($234 million), Superman Returns ($200 million)
2007: Spider-Man 3 ($337 million), Transformers($319 million), The Simpsons Movie ($183 million), Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer ($132 million)

Note: Data is from BoxofficeMojo.com. Dollar figures aren't adjusted for inflation. I left out movies like the original Indiana Jones trilogy, which is clearly fantasy. (Unlike the new Indiana Jones movie, if all reports are to be believed.) I also left out spy movies that might have a few science-fiction touches aren't really about a science-fictional premise. Feel free to bitch at me in the comments.