Science & Technology influenced Jurassic Park

The novel is built on a specific scientific argument and takes a side in it. Crichton wrote it during the dinosaur renaissance, when Robert Bakker, John Ostrom and others were making the case that dinosaurs were fast, warm-blooded, socially complex animals related to birds rather than sluggish reptiles. That is the whole reason the book is frightening. The raptors hunt in coordinated packs, the tyrannosaur moves at speed, the animals are shown with bird behaviour, and Alan Grant is written as a Bakker-style palaeontologist who says so. Crichton consulted working palaeontologists, and the effect ran backwards: the film sent a generation into palaeontology, and the species it made famous, Velociraptor, was reassessed publicly afterwards in ways the book had already anticipated in outline.