The diversity of life during the Jurassic was eye-watering, yet only a small fraction has been replicated and played out on screen by Hollywood for the consumption by audiences.

This problem stems from dinosaurs taking centre stage, at the expense of the other species of flora and fauna from being properly represented on screen.

Even then, there are problems with representing dinosaurs.

If audiences who watched the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies have been led to believe what the past was like, they would develop unrealistic notions of what the prehistoric era entailed, and inevitably, become species-ist (people who develop incomplete or negative knowledge of other species and hate or fear them because of their own bias).

Yes, Jurassic Park and World movies showcase a variety of dinosaurs and shed light on the prehistoric era, but they are not accurate and complete representations, as they are far too limiting in scope, and have a tendency to compress an entire epoch into something unrecognisably thin.

There is more nuance.

Who can speak for dinosaurs?

What is necessary is a plenitude of narratives and to steer away from marginalisation of other minority species.

But the abuse committed to prehistoric creatures is more egregious, as they cannot speak for themselves now, because they are dead, and despite many species of the ancient animals having a loud, shouty voice.

English wasn't their lingua franca, but that doesn't mean we cannot speak on their behalf.

Let's be scientific and reasonable here.

Let's set aside sociological notions of ethnicity and the humanities talk of fulfilling diversity quotients.

If we were to trace our ancestry all the way back to the prokaryote, we can safely say we are part of the lineage that dinosaurs were derived from.

Prokaryote, then dinosaurs, and then us. Right?

If we cannot even get the representation of dinosaurs right, there is no room to talk about representation of other groups.

This is evidently so, as the length of the prehistoric era has far outstripped the current epoch that humans find themselves in.

Hundreds of millions of years versus 20,000 years or so.

Yet, year in and year out, all we get to see in the media are representations of humans.

What happened to the narratives of the past five hundred to six hundred million years? Why have we stayed silent?

The paucity of representation of what came before us is staggering.

Marginalisation of Asian dinosaurs

Within the Jurassic Park universe, representation is a harrowing ordeal.

The dinosaurs recreated by CGI or animatronics to conjure cinematic magic are species found in Europe and America.

This is a clear silencing of other dinosaur species.

Dinosaur species, for the uninitiated, unschooled and uncool, have been uncovered in Asia, such as China, as well as some even being found in Malaysia.

But these species were nowhere to be found on screen each and every time Jurassic Park movies played to sold out crowds, and despite five movies already being made about this dinosaur subject.

Even dinosaurs are misrepresented

Worst of all, the most blatant misrepresentation is the lack of feathers on the dinosaurs featured.

The present scientific consensus is that modern birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era.

Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park movies ought to have avian characteristics. Yet, these have been sorely missing.

A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx in Germany.

You wouldn't have known this even after watching the entire Jurassic Park franchise, would you?

Prehistoric Other

Speaking of the silenced: Trilobites were actually the building blocks of the prehistoric era.

Their diversity would far outstrip the species of dinosaurs.

If five movies have been dedicated to dinosaurs, then it is fair to say about 17 movies can be made by Tinseltown about trilobites alone, if fair representation is called for.

The sheer amount of screen time taken up by dinosaurs in all the Jurassic Park movies would make it appear that dinosaurs were far more common and multitudinous than they really were, compared to other flora and fauna.

However, if the total biomass of other species of flora and fauna that were smaller than the dinosaurs were combined, they would far outweigh dinosaurs by many orders of magnitude.

Yet, it was dinosaurs that continue to get the most screen time.

Trilobites have inner lives too that have not been explored and showcased.

This is the equivalent of being dinowashed.

Why aren't Asians eaten more often in Jurassic Park franchise?

But we shall save the most serious violation for the last.

One obviously disturbing trend is the lack of Asians being eaten by dinosaurs.

Does this speak to the unpalatable nature of being Asian, despite Asians being one of the most populous groups in the world today?

A thought experiment: If a dinosaur were to roam free across the Earth in 2018, the odds that it will eat an Asian is about 4.4 out of 7.

If you cannot do the math, you are actually the problem.

Unwholesome representation aside, the performance of symbolic violence does not appear to be extemporaneous.

The brachiosaurus sneeze in the first Jurassic Park movie in 1993 is -- you guessed it -- a fiction.

Dinosaurs cannot sneeze. Period. Sneezing is a mammalian feature.

Why are we foisting upon dinosaurs, which are more birds than humans, our own biological function?

Why are we erasing their traits to replace them with ours? To make them more relatable? To make them less Other?

Moreover, a T-rex cannot outrun a jeep.

Movies simplify too much

The Jurassic is but a tiny slice of an epoch that many might have heard of but not many know about.

It doesn't exist in the minds of people living in Singapore or overseas, as a fully fledged, complex era, but as a caricature.

I’ve heard the same stories over and over again, solidified into tropes that supposedly define the Jurassic: Sharp teeth, loud roars, biting and running wild and getting jabbed by the Triceratops.

There are people who think the entire prehistoric era is the Jurassic, and many don’t realise a giant sloth was actually a real creature.

Dinosaur motivations when demanding representation stem from the same place as non-dinosaurs: A desire to be portrayed in all their complex, nuanced, contradictory glory; to recognise themselves onscreen (if dinosaurs were still alive now), and for others to recognise them as the fully formed prehistoric beings and community that they are.

This is important because it affects the way people perceive them and, by extension, the way in which we connect or stand in solidarity with their struggles and challenges.

The Jurassic Park franchise doesn’t meet this need, no matter how nice it might be to see resurrected Mesozoic plant life displayed all over the park in a Hollywood film.

Because can someone please explain the science? How did the scientists in Jurassic Park resurrect Mesozoic plant life displayed all over the park? Where did the DNA come from?

Yes, the dinosaurs were crafted after retrieving 66-million-year-old blood from a fossilised mosquito found in hardened amber.

But what about the plants?

Inaccurate.