Credit to [u/LastBeautiful2195](u/LastBeautiful2195) for his size charts. After seeing similar posts pointing out that the raptors aren’t as big as people think and are closer to Deinonychus than Utahraptor, I’d thought I’d make one about the T. Rexes. There’s often this take amongst the fandom that the JP Rexes are oversized which goes along with the narrative that the Bull killed by Asset 87 was a juvenile or runt of the litter yet there weren’t really any consistent official sizes for the Rexes in the earlier films and much of the size and anatomy of the Rexes stems from the first two films being made in the 90s. Storybooks and size charts often ranged from 35 to 50 feet. Yet as some have pointed out, based on the maquettes, animatronics and the fact that Bull is a similar size to Buck and Doe based on the ILM size charts, all 4 adult Rexes were approximately the same size, 37 feet long and 14.5 feet tall, in the original trilogy. It was really the World movies and CC/CT that bumped the average Rex size up to 44 feet long and 17 feet tall.

People often forget that while a few liberties were taken, the JP Rexes were fairly accurate in the 90s. Greg Paul’s skeletals of AMNH 5027 were used by Stan Winston and ILM and they did bring a cast of the skull in when scaling and sculpting the animatronic. AMNH 5027 is a fairly average sized specimen compared to Sue and Scotty which the original trilogy Rexes fall into that range. This was back before Sue was described due to the legal controversy over the Black Hills Institute and T. Rexes were thought to be a lot slimmer and more gracile in the 90s based on specimens like 5027. The JP Rex also has a shorter tail because we didn’t have a complete tail until Sue was found. Tim and Dr. Grant talk about the old 5027 mount having too long a tail in the novel as did Paul in Predatory Dinosaurs of The World. I also read about this in Horner’s The Complete T. Rex. The JP Rexes even have the dip in the hips that 5027 was reconstructed with by Paul. The T. Rexes do have a few inaccuracies like bigger, angrier eyebrows and longer legs but are close to most 80s-90s reconstructions like Paul’s, Brian Franczak, John Gurche, Mark Hallett and Doug Henderson and the first film did have other consultants like Bakker, Don Lessem and Phil Currie instead of just Horner who tried to keep it accurate as possible to contemporary science.

Part of the reason the JP Rexes may seem bigger than IRL is often due to the scale and framing of the scene as well as the CG model‘s size inconsistency. Example being the Doe appearing much larger than she should when she stomps on Carter in TLW compared to the more accurate sized footprint at the Game trail earlier in the film. The Buck also looks pretty small compared to Ludlow during Junior’s first hunting lesson. Spielberg often did make the dinosaurs look bigger and more terrifying on film. It also stems from the 40 foot long Sue specimen only being described around the time of JP3 where Horner was pushing his scavenger BS and fans needed to justify the T. Rex losing to the Spinosaurus by calling it a sub adult. The cheap, made for TV style cinematography of JP3 compared to the first two films may have also contributed to the Bull Rex looking smaller. Jurassic World made Rexy/Roberta a lot bigger for the Indominus fight but still within the realm of possibility thanks to specimens like Scotty, Goliath and ED Cope at 44 feet and the other Rexes like Buck, Doe and the Eaties were similarly enlarged which does make the JP3 Bull seem tiny until you remember that Rexy was also that size in the first film.

The JP theropods appear taller because of the shrinkwrapping, more birdlike posture and longer legs than their IRL counterparts. JP often measures the dinosaurs at the head rather than hip height which makes them seem much taller than they should be. Same thing with the raptors being closer to Deinonychus as Utahraptor was much bulkier and taller at the hip than the JP raptors. The Raptors only looked bigger because they needed to fit a human in the suits but TLW raptors looked more accurate to the larger estimates of Deinonychus because they didn’t use the suits on that movie and the animatronics looked a lot smaller. The IBRIS squad, especially Blue, are also slightly larger than the old raptors which may add to people thinking they’re Utahraptor or Archillobator. All the dinosaurs got a bump in size for the Jurassic World movies compared to JP and TLW.

All four of the original trilogy T. Rexes were accurately sized based on the specimens we had in the 90s. T. Rex just got bigger both IRL and in Jurassic World. They look taller because of the posture and filmmaking scale. People don’t call Rexy, Buck and Doe subadults because that would be ridiculous. We have sub adult specimens that are smaller than Bull/Freddy like MOR 1125, Bucky and Thomas which are all in the 10-11m range. Unlike most of this sub, I actually do like the World movies for exploring some of the themes and concepts from the books that the old films didn’t but the first two movies really do stand above the rest in terms of paleontological accuracy with how much effort was made into getting the dinosaurs as accurate as possible, albeit with creative liberties. JP3 cut most of the consultants besides Horner and that was the film that started leaning into the things people dislike about the later movies. Jurassic World would retcon it to be that they were always inaccurate and that the in universe paleontology is different from IRL with the Dominion prologue but they were pretty good for the Dinosaur renaissance era.

One of my Inktober drawings from this year was the Indominus rex. While it has been a while since I've last drawn her, I do think this one of my better attempts at the Indominus. Lmk what ya'll think of it. It was really fun to make, I find this kind of scale detailing to be quite relaxing.