Sometime last week I finished making video clips for Jurassic Park. It’s not a hard task given today’s technology. What is problem is my ISP. It’s been a royal pain for me to get online and place them on the site. There are so many people on during the summer the internet slows to a crawl throughout the day. I guess it doesn’t matter if you have dial-up or broadband, the same result occurs. I’m sure you all know someone that it happens to constantly or maybe it happens to you as well.

Anyway, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve released 14 high quality Jurassic Park video clips, 15 to 50 seconds long, at a resolution of 416 x 224. As we were making these clips it was decided upon to use the XviD codec over the normal MPEG Layer-1/2 compression that we’ve used in the past. The end result from using the XviD codec showed excellent compression while maintaining superb quality in an MPEG Layer-4 format. Even more entertaining are the file sizes– they’re extremely small. Of the clips created the largest file size is 4.88 mb! This is a dream for dial-up users, and a 2 second wait for those using broadband.

More is due to follow in the next couple of weeks before we all head off to school again. If there is anything you wish was on the site (but isn’t) or you have something for the site, please contact us! We’re always here working to enhance the Jurassic Park community.

New research on the Albertosaurus shows dinosaurs actually went through the teenage phase. The teenage phase is classified as sudden growth spurts, not puberty (at the moment). Researcher Philip Currie from University of Alberta believes they are more human (mammal-like) than reptilian. Gregory Erickson from Florida State University confirmed the discovery while putting together the first non-avian (non-bird related) dinosaur growth chart.

The chart compared twenty-two Albertosaurus fossils from a bone bed in southern Alberta, where the ages of the creature ranged from two to twenty-eight years old when they died. They plotted measurements of weight and size of the Albertosaurus. They have concluded that the growth and death patterns did not fit reptiles at all.

The explanation for this is simple—throughout a reptile’s life, say a snake, they continue to grow. Reptiles never cease to stop growing, which is why they can become so big before they die. In the case of dinosaurs they, they reach a certain point and stop growing, just like mammals.

This is an amazing discovery among itself, and will possibly pave the way for us to revamp our outlook on dinosaurs. Possibly prompt Spielberg and his dinosaur expert to take this new discovery into consideration for Jurassic Park IV. It makes me wonder if inGen would have discovered this when they were manipulation the dinosaur DNA in an essence to make them grow faster for a profit. Read more about it at CNEWS – Research confirms dinosaurs had teenage phase, making them more like mammals.

I’m all pretty sure most Jurassic Park fans remember the heart-stopping incident with Alan Grant and Lex. A few days ago, July 1 to be extract, a good friend of mine CyborgCompy pointed me to an article at sciencenews.org. It would seem scientists at University of Oregon in Eugene have discovered that the Tyrannosaurus probably had the best vision in its class. This creature had an ability to see non-moving objects and a focal length of up to 3.7 miles. It would go to show that Alan Grant and Lex would be in for a world of trouble. Here is an excerpt:

 T. rex had a binocular range of 55°, which is wider than that of modern hawks, Stevens reports in the summer Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged.

“It was a selective advantage for this animal to see three-dimensionally ahead of it,” Stevens says.

Stevens also considered visual acuity and limiting far point—the greatest distance at which objects remain distinct. For these vision tests, he took the known optics of reptiles and birds, ranging from the poor-sighted crocodile to the exceptional eagle, and adjusted them to see how they would perform inside an eye as large as that of T. rex. “With the size of its eyeballs, it couldn’t help but have excellent vision,” Stevens says.

He found that T. rex might have had visual acuity as much as 13 times that of people. By comparison, an eagle’s acuity is 3.6 times that of a person.

T. rex might also have had a limiting far point of 6 kilometers, compared with the human far point of 1.6 km. These are best-case estimates, Stevens says, but even toward the cautious end of the scale, T. rex still displays better vision than what’s needed for scavenging.

This article is definitely worth the read. To read more about our friend, the Tyrannosaurus, click here. It might save your life if you ever end up on Isla Sorna (again).

I woke up this morning and decided I was going to release version 11 of JPdb to the public today, regardless if I have all the content I wanted to publish with or not. As you can see from the links we have, we have a lot of content on the way. Most of which are being written up by myself and co-webmaster Samfan. Sadly, Samfan had to fly home to Hawaii this week and will be back in approximately 3 weeks. I’ll make the best of it now, so if you find any errors on this new design please contact any one of us. Also, free free to join the forum and post about.