The footage was shot by a pioneering British cinematographer named Claude Friese-Greene, as the final segment of a 26-part travelogue of the British countryside he had been working on since 1924.

His project was to have been called The Open Road and was designed to promote the color film process his late father, William, had been working on since 1911 (and which he had continue to develop himself after his father’s death in 1921.) Their system had a revolving disc in front of the shutter that alternately exposed frames of standard black-and-white film through a red and then a yellowish-white filter. Later, after the film was developed, these alternate frames would be hand-tinted with red and cyan dyes and projected at 32 frames per second. Although the footage flickered heavily, it did indeed render color images.

Excited by the prospect of using the newly patented “all-British Friese-Greene Natural Colour Process,” the son founded Spectrum Films, and with his chauffeur-cum-assistant Robin Haworth-Booth set off in a motor car in 1924 to make The Open Road , a travelogue of the British countryside and villages. The idea was that these 10-minute segments would be shown before the main feature at cinemas and hopefully generate public interest and create a demand for more.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. With the exception of a showing of the first nine segments at a trade show in November 1925, none of The Open Road is believed to have been shown in theaters at the time or ever distributed. The flickering footage had a way of giving viewers headaches. And technically and visually, the “Natural Colour Process” was outclassed by the superior Technicolor process, which had been in development since 1916 and was already being used to good effect in America. The Open Road died before it could be released.

Friese-Greene went on to enjoy a successful film-making career but his patented color process was largely forgotten. In the years after his death in 1943 his original nitrate negatives of The Open Road – all 25,000 feet of them – were donated to Britain’s National Film and Television Archive.

And there the story of a long-ago dream and a 1920s road trip through the British countryside might have ended but for an extraordinary digital reconstruction of an hours’ worth of Friese-Greene’s original by a team of technicians at the British Film Institute – a two-year effort that combined cutting-edge digital technology with fragile 1920s negatives.

“It was more of a reinterpretation than a true reconstruction,” says Kieron Webb, the Film Conservation Manager at the British Film Institute who oversaw the project. “What we wanted to do was capture Friese-Greene’s original vision and colors as faithfully as possible, but without the migraine-inducing flicker.”

That proved to be a painstaking challenge. First a set of positives had to be made from Friese-Greene’s original negatives, fragile after nearly 90 years. These were then scanned. Next the frames were digitally separated into those that had been shot through the red filter and those shot through the yellowish white. Finally, software was used to create new frames for the film based on whatever motion was going on in the picture—a sophisticated bit of computerised legerdemain, with the computer working out the speed and direction of the motion it sensed in the footage. These additional frames helped smooth the overall viewing and reduced the jerky, head-ache inducing flicker.

And so it still is. Two years of work were required to recreate an hour of Claude Friese-Greene’s original vision – five minutes of which have been capturing the attention of You Tube aficionados. “I think we got the colors pretty much as he saw them,” says Webb. “There is still a bit of ghosting [a faint echo of a moving image, such as a raised arm or a person walking through the crowd]. But I don’t mind it. It kind of adds to the sense of looking back in time. We could probably have cleaned that up but this is supposed to be Claude Friese-Greene’s film, not ours.”

Is this even possible? NG staffer Melody Kramer caught up with Dr. David Ferguson, (@volcanotweet) a volcanologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University to ask him about the possible ramifications of stopping liquid hot magma in its tracks.

Spock performs his mission while standing on a tiny platform inside the volcano, surrounded by liquid magma. Would a non-half-Vulcan be able to survive standing on a platform in the middle of an active volcano?

That lava would be something like 1100-1200 degrees Celsius. You’ve seen footage of people in silver suits next to lava fields. Outside of those suits, it would be far too hot. And one other thing you realize if you’re near lava is that it really stinks. There’s all sorts of noxious gases. I can’t speak for Spock, but without any kind of protective clothing and breathing devices, a human probably wouldn’t be able to survive.

Spock stopped the volcano with a “cold fusion device.”  Is it possible to drop something in a volcano that would stop it from erupting?

There are examples of people who have tried to stop lava flows from harming anyone by dropping bombs on them. In the 1930s and 1940s in Hawaii, they tried to bomb some lava flows. They also tried this in Italy, at Mount Etna in 1992.

What’s the thought process behind bombing the lava flows?

When the lava erupts, it hardens around itself and forms a tube. The lava inside the tube is therefore insulated and can flow for several kilometers. So the thought was that if you drop a bomb on a lava tube, the bomb would smash the insulated tube and cool the lava.

Could anything bad happen as a result of bombing a volcano directly?

If you were to drop a bomb on a volcano, the best case scenario is nothing would happen. The worst, of course, is that the volcano would erupt. If you were to bomb a volcano in the right way, you would basically do the work for it, by fracturing the volcanic rock and allowing magma to escape.

But scientists don’t need to use bombs to destroy lava flows. I’m thinking of Eldfell in Iceland, which threatened a village in 1973. Folks there pumped sea water directly onto the advancing lava flow and successfully saved a harbor from being destroyed. Why is sea water so effective?

The idea is to cool down the lava. If you cool it down, it stops flowing because it hardens. They sprayed the front of the lava flow to make it solidify and then the rest of the lava piled up behind it. It was successful. The lava was advancing on this town and they were able to stop it.

Do we have anything more advanced than sea water to protect us from advancing lava flows?

The best thing to do is to try and predict where lava will go and not build your house there. But if you do have a house there, the best case scenario would be to divert the flow.

How does that work?

You can build large walls from Earth and try to influence the way the lava is flowing. This works for places where sea water doesn’t work. With sea water, you need a large reservoir—and you need a pump that can pump thousands of meters a second. That’s why most attempts to mitigate hazards try to predict when and where they happen.

How much advance notice do we have before a volcano erupts?

Most volcanoes have a waking up period of weeks to months before they erupt. As magma moves underground, it fractures rocks that cause small earthquakes. As a volcano approaches eruption, the number of earthquakes increase. And as new magma increases, the surface of the volcano wells up. You can measure the swelling of the volcanoes using GPS technology.

So are there any scientists actively working to stop volcanoes?

That’s pure fiction. It would just be unthinkable, really, to be honest. The way to stop it would be to slowly release the pressure. The only conceivable way is to drill down to release pressure but that would be, practically speaking, impossible. It’d be a tiny pin prick in a massive magma chamber. The scale of these things makes it inconceivable.

Does anyone ever mistake you for a Vulcanologist?

I get that joke a lot, yes.

Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann (Australia, Moulin Rouge!) teamed back up with his Romeo + Juliet star Leonardo DiCaprio to re-tackle Gatsby, and their effort is currently playing in theaters. Like Romeo + Juliet, the film is a colorful, bombastic ball of energy, a stylish retake on a familiar story that is rocked-up by contemporary music.

Although a number of critics have whined that the latest Gatsby film isn’t as good as the book, it makes for an enjoyable evening. The story weaves in commentary on organized crime, Prohibition, class struggle, Wall Street excess, and changing social values. And once again, the competing fictional towns of East and West Egg serve as provocative settings.

In a leafy part of Long Island with sweeping coastal views, East and West Egg sit away from the bustle and pollution of New York City. East Egg is home to the stately mansions of old money, while West Egg, just across a bay, is marked by the garish castles of the nouveau riche, punctuated by boho cottages. Commentary on American society in the Roaring Twenties wasn’t subtle.

Those rival towns got us thinking about other great fictional settings. Suggest your own in the comments.

1. East and West Egg

Source: The Great Gatsby

Real-life inspiration: Great Neck and Manhasset Neck, New York

Possible symbolism: Old vs. new money, excess, class struggle, privilege

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved his family to Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. The town was an up-and-coming suburb of the Big Apple that was attracting creative professionals and new money. Across a bay sat Manhasset Neck, home to many established wealthy families. Sounds a bit like East and West Egg, no?

Fitzgerald is known to have attended elaborate parties at mansions on Long Island’s North Shore, perhaps at the (now demolished) Beacon Towers, which bears a striking resemblance to Gatsby’s place in the recent film.

2. Springfield

Source: The Simpsons TV show

Real-life inspiration: Springfield, Oregon

Possible symbolism: Ridiculousness of contemporary American life

Fans of The Simpsons have speculated for years about the real-world inspiration for the home of Homer, Marge, and gang. Was it Springfield, Illinois, or Springfield, Massachusetts, or perhaps one of the other many Springfields? To tease fans, the show’s writers slipped in jokes about the mysterious location, often shifting the geography.

Part of Springfield’s charm is that it could be any town, but Matt Groening, the show’s creator, recently told journalists that he was most inspired by Springfield, Oregon, which is near his native Portland. Groening said, “I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, ‘This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield’. And they do.”

3. South Park

Source: South Park TV show

Real-life inspiration: Fairplay, Colorado

Possible symbolism: Small town U.S.A., myopia

Fairplay is a small mountain town in Park County, Colorado. It started as a gold mining town but is most famous as inspiration for the fictional South Park. Part of Fairplay is called South Park City, and the town is home to South Park High School. Like its fictional version, the town is also home to a burro race.

South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, grew up in Colorado, though neither was from Fairplay. Their long-running animated show has skewered many aspects of pop culture, from politics to celebrities, from environmentalism to gun rights.

4. Mayberry

Source: The Andy Griffith Show

Real-life inspiration: Mount Airy, North Carolina

Possible symbolism: Nostalgia, the American dream

A generation of Americans grew up watching The Andy Griffith Show in the 1960s. It was set in a fictional town called Mayberry, which many viewers considered the epitome of small-town, wholesome living.

Andy Griffith told Larry King in 2003 that one of the show’s creators had come up with the name Mayberry, although it’s worth noting that there is a real Mayberry in Virginia just 22 miles from where Griffith grew up, in Mount Airy, North Carolina. According to local news reports, Griffith frequented the Mayberry Trading Post while growing up.

5. Silent Hill

Source: Silent Hill video games and movies

Real-life inspiration: Centralia, Pennsylvania

Possible symbolism: Environmental pollution and disaster, greed, darkness

The popular Silent Hill video games spawned a series of horror movies, and both feature a nightmarish town overrun by zombie-like ghouls and strange phenomena. The creepy introduction to the first game puts the town of Silent Hill in rural Appalachia, and explains that it was abandoned because of a massive coal mine fire blazing under the surface.

Perhaps the creepiest aspect of all is that it is based on the real-life town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a coal mine fire has burned for 50 years.

6. Gotham City

Source: Batman comics, movies, and TV

Real-life inspiration: NYC (duh)

Possible symbolism: Crime, corruption, urban decay, redemption

New York Times journalist William Safire once described Gotham City, the home of the comic book hero Batman, as “New York below 14th Street, from SoHo to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the sinister areas around the base of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.”

Batman writer and artist Frank Miller has said, “Metropolis [home to Superman] is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night.”

7. Sunnydale (aka Hellmouth)

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series

Real-life inspiration: Generic SoCal towns

Possible symbolism: American life, horror tropes, pop feminism

Joss Whedon’s outstanding series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) featured the efforts of blonde teen Buffy Summers and her friends, the “Scooby Gang,” to protect their wholesome town (and by extension, the world) from an outpouring of vampires, demons, and other “baddies.” The fact that the fictional town Sunnydale was actually the center of a mythical “Hellmouth” was clearly meant to be ironic.

Stand-ins for Sunnydale landmarks were found across Southern California, which arguably has its own horrors beneath the sunny veneer. Whedon has also said he was inspired by many of the pleasant-sounding names used in classic horror flicks.

8. Twin Peaks

Source: Twin Peaks TV show and movie

Real-life inspiration: Towns in Washington state

Possible symbolism: Darkness in all of us, hypocrisy, surrealism

Running for two seasons in 1990 and 1991, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks brought surrealism to the small screen. The bizarre cult-hit was a kind of black comedy sendoff of soap operas and was set in a fictional town in Washington state.

Twin Peaks exteriors were shot in Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington, although the small-town characters with dark secrets were probably intended to be much more universal.

The only question is, which is weirder, Twin Peaks, Washington, or Eerie, Indiana?

9. Star City/Starling City

Source: Green Arrow comics and TV show

Real-life inspiration: Various locations in the comics, currently NorCal; TV show is vague, with city skylines shot in Frankfurt, Germany, Philadelphia’s Center City, Back Bay in Boston, and Tokyo.

Possible symbolism: Crime, corruption, vigilantism

The DC Comics hero Green Arrow first appeared in 1941, as a kind of Robin Hood version of Batman. A billionaire playboy by day and crime fighter by night, Green Arrow appears on the small screen now in the CW show Arrow.

In the TV show, Arrow’s home is called Starling City. According to comic books, Star/Starling City was placed on the Great Lakes in the 1960s. In the 1970s and ’80s it shifted to New England, but more recently it has been placed in northern California, in the San Francisco area.

10. Cloud City

Source: The Empire Strikes Back (and derivative works)

Real-life inspiration: None

Possible symbolism: Technology, dreams, the future

What kid doesn’t want to visit Cloud City, the hovering metropolis perched above the fictional planet Bespin? Overseen by Lando Calrissian, Cloud City was the site of Han Solo’s betrayal. It also shows up as a colorful setting in various Star Wars stories and video games.

What is your favorite fictional town? Perhaps Woodbury from The Walking Dead? Or Smallville? Vice City from Grand Theft Auto?

Here are some of my favorites:

There’s Hadfield’s guide to brushing your teeth in space (and avoid getting toothpaste up your nose).

Here’s how to use a barf bag if the food floating in your stomach decides it wants to resurface.

Here’s how space life affects your vision (and check it out when he lets go of the microphone for a second and it just floats in front of him).

Here’s how to clean up a mess in space (which will just “float around until it runs into something”). Handy pieces of equipment: Baby wipes, goggles, “a Russian rag.”

And finally, here’s what happens when you cry in space. Hint: Tears do not fall on their own!

What was the impetus for the book?

First of all, I was shocked that things I took for granted most people didn’t know. We scientists have done a poor job of communicating. There was a wildly popular, but scientifically anemic book, The Secret Life of Plants, published in the 1970s.  I wanted to set the record straight. The truth is so much more exciting than pseudo science.

And?

I wanted to convey the sense that science is an exciting process full of kooky people, amazing people. It’s a social endeavor. Not just one person sitting in a lab.

Plants can sense up from down. They can discern light, color; they have a tactile sense. They sense smells. Isn’t this rather sophisticated for a lower form of life?

It is if you don’t consider that all organisms need to sense their environment in order to survive. Even algae move toward the light to allow for photosynthesis. So we aren’t special in that respect [of having senses]. The only difference is that we are the only ones that think about what we are doing.

Let’s talk about why plants have all those skill sets.

Plants can’t run away. They are rooted. It’s the key to their evolution. Animals can survive by running away.

It’s surprising to learn that tomatoes have 25 per cent more genes than we do.

Plants use their genetic complexity to sense and survive adversity. It’s compensation for the inability to run away.

And, it turns out, we share a lot of the same genetic sequences. So that tulip staring me in the face is more closely related to me than I ever imagined?

On the one hand we have a huge diversity of form. There’s you and a giant oak. But we do have a unity of genetics. Those genes had to evolve from a common ancestor. Of course, we are talking two billion years of history since animals and plants shared a common cell.

A Gloriosa daisy flower in a vase. Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

Let’s talk about some of the shared biology between plants and ourselves.

One of the coolest is our response to light.  We respond to light knowing when we should be up and when we should be asleep. Plants respond to light as well, and so we share a circadian clock. Also, plants can respond to mechanical stimulation. A Venus flytrap responds to a fly by generating an electrical signal, in the same way our heart responds to electrical signals to contract.

Is it true that plants don’t care whether you play Mozart or Black Sabbath. They won’t grow faster either way?

There is no real evidence that plants have musical taste. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they respond to vibration.

Let’s talk applications. How does a plant’s ability to see or smell translate into the practical world?

We know that a plant senses light and shade. If plants are crowded next to each other, they sense shade and become tall and spindly. But if you breed a plant blind to the shade, then you can put more plants together, they will put their energy into growing more leaves and fruit, and you can grow more food in a smaller area.

What kind of reaction do hope for in publishing your book?

I am happiest if it makes people rethink their existence.

If you’ve been watching the FX network’s retro spy series, The Americans, which has its season finale tonight, you may or may not have noticed a recurring cameo by the National Geographic headquarters building as seen from the window of the show’s FBI headquarters (that’s us in the picture above, with our flat roof and long panels of glass).

Then again, perhaps you haven’t paid attention to this, focusing instead on the schemes and schisms complicating the lives of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Mathew Rhys and Keri Russell), a pair of deep-cover Cold War KGB agents in Ronald Reagan’s Washington D.C., who are trying their best to blend into the background.

But since I work in the building, I’ve been more than a little distracted when its image comes on screen. So I talked with the show’s production designer, John Mott, about our architectural cameo and how he went about recreating the early 80s feel for the critically acclaimed series. I also found out why the weather’s always so nice.

A Whole Lot of Trickery

Set design involves “a whole lot of trickery,” Mott says, which is especially appropriate for a show in which no one is quite what they seem.

The fake FBI office, for example, is set on a raised platform to make it seem to be several stories above the ground. Extending the backdrop well below the line of sight out the windows keeps the camera from accidentally revealing that the view is of a static, 80 foot by 16 foot backdrop. But even the backdrop itself is elaborately disguised.

The view, which Mott would only say “looks a lot like” the north façade of the National Geographic headquarters building, is a composite modern-day image created by a Los Angeles-based company that creates studio backdrops. For authenticity, it has been scrubbed of anachronistic clutter such as satellite dishes and cell phone transmission equipment. Since I recognize our neighboring buildings, I can also see that our headquarters and its surroundings have been reversed, creating a lovely geographic and visual pun for this show. West is east and east is west.

The backdrop is specially made so it can serve as both daytime and nighttime window dressing. The back is printed black to block out light, except for the windows, the Washington Monument, and other accents that let light from behind it shine through during the evening scenes. To further fool the viewer’s eye, the whole image is slightly out of focus to make the buildings appear more distant, and the skies are always clear. “If there’s any clouds you might get fixated on them because they don’t move,” Mott says, “so that’s why it’s always a nice, pleasant day.”

Getting the Feel Right

As geographers, my colleagues and I care about what gives a place its identity, so I asked Mott how he went about creating a sense of place for the show. As a period piece, there’s a lot of additional legwork involved. “It’s set in 1981 in D.C., but shot in 2013 in New York City, mostly in Brooklyn,” he points out. So what does it take to get things right, to make a modern place look old and make a fake place look real?

“It comes down a lot to feel,” Mott says. “What your gut tells you, based on experience and research. We do a lot of research.” Not just about the details of an era, but where things are headed to allow little hints about things that are starting to change, like color preferences. The end result is “something sort of made up but not completely wrong,” he says.

The actual FBI headquarters is about a mile and a half from where Mott placed it, and looks out along Pennsylvania Avenue with a view of the Capitol, not across M Street with a view of our building, but there are a lot of tall buildings with rows and rows of glass windows nearby as well, so it works.

Mott also wanted the sets to show the differences between the worlds of the Soviet spies and the American FBI agents.

“My visual concept is that the Russians inhabit the old world and the FBI inhabits the newer world. Interestingly, the FBI building is a Brutalist building, which people associate with the Soviets,” Mott says.

“I created an interior that was in keeping with the exterior. The feeling of a solid building that was futuristic at the time. I thought about what kind of furniture there would be. I wanted them to be leaning forward.”

Of course there is also plenty of action and intrigue happening at the KGB’s Washington headquarters, known as the residentura. “For the Russian set, I wanted to say that the Russians are trying to move forward but are stuck in the past. Lots of ornament, decoration, patterns. They love wallpaper, love baroque.”

Beyond the Studio

Many of the scenes are shot outside, which poses another set of challenges. For the Soviet residentura, the show uses an establishing shot of what was the Soviet Embassy in the 1980s but became the Russian ambassador’s residence in 1994.

For active shots, the crew has a lot of phone booths that they bring along. They also remove inappropriate signage and late model cars, and they replace them with things that have the right look. “It’s very tough to get all or even most of it period, so afterward we will go in digitally and remove things,” Mott says.

Luckily, the show “is mostly about the drama, about people’s relationships, and not about running down Constitution Avenue and firing at people. That plays to our strengths,” Mott added.

Despite all this planning and hard work, the goal of the set, as it is for any spook worth his or her salt, is not to get noticed. As Mott puts it, “If you don’t think about it too much, we’re probably doing our jobs.”

-Brad Scriber

That was a plot point in the first Hangover movie, and now it’s a real-life story. The Salina Journal reports that last Saturday, a woman who’d gone to the circus went to the bathroom … and there was a tiger “at most two feet in front of me.” The tiger had escaped after its performance. The woman says, “I turned around calmly and walked back toward the door. Someone opened the door and said get out.”

And so she did.

In case this kind of thing should ever happen to you, here’s the advice of tiger expert Philip Nyhus, associate professor of Environmental Studies at Colby College.

1. “Stay calm. The tiger is probably just as surprised as you are.”

2. “You’d want a barrier between you and that tiger. There’s pretty much no good that comes from people and tigers coming together. If you have a door, close the door.”

3.  “Distance would be important. Keep your distance. Don’t get close.”

4.  “Don’t look like food: Don’t run with your back to the tiger. That may actually set off a tiger. A tiger is hard-wired from more than 10,000 years of evolution to run after small things and grab them by the neck and crush the vertebrae. So if you are facing the tiger, it is probably a good thing. Try and look big. Walk backward slowly.”

5.  “Call for help. Make noise.”

6.  If things aren’t going well: “Throw something at it to distract it.”

Above all, hope that the tiger is not a hungry tiger.

A tiger shows off its pearly whites. Photograph by Dilip Mehta, Contact Press Images/National Geographic.

You are an elephant activist.

Five years ago I got involved with elephants here in Los Angeles. There was a bull elephant at the zoo that was living a pretty stringent and brutal life. So I got involved because we were trying to free Billy from the L.A. Zoo. I had read a lot about elephants. I had feelings that elephants shouldn’t be in zoos. Probably no animals should, but least of all the big ones, and the elephant is the biggest. What the elephant endures living in captivity became a symbol to me—a very obvious symbol—of all the suffering we perpetrate.

Do you remember the first time you saw an elephant?

I do. In Detroit at the zoo. It was the Hall of the Elephants. There was only one elephant. I remember he or she was up in a big cage in a dank kind of cement building. I went up some stairs. The elephant was up there at the top. The little set of stairs made the elephant seem bigger and more majestic and yet kind of meager in that cage, in that dank, dark environment. I think it was more scary than enticing, probably because the elephant was indoors in this really confined, strange environment. I never loved zoos much as a kid. I liked the monkeys; kids always like the monkeys, I guess; they’re doing monkey antics. But big cats walking up and down in a cage—it’s pretty grim,

The documentary makes the point that some zoos, like the Oakland Zoo, have created big spaces for elephants to roam. Does that make you feel less anti-zoo?

Elephants should not be in captivity. There’s not enough room no matter what you say. But a zoo can be made better. A circus cannot, because they have to really dominate an elephant to teach them to stand on their head, ride a bicycle.

And now elephants are being slaughtered for their ivory.

All you can say to people is don’t buy ivory, don’t buy ivory objects, and lobby or sign petitions. And don’t go to zoos or circuses either, it just fosters bringing more elephants [into captivity].

What would your little girl character Edith Ann say about elephants?

We did some animated Edith Ann’s and we never got this one animated: Edith reads about elephants and what good mothers they are. And she wishes her mother was an elephant—Edith would be a lot happier, the elephant mother would take better care of her, be kinder. Then she imagines an elephant for a mother. They go to the supermarket, her mother knocks shelves over. They can’t get through the aisles, go out to the mall, she’s ruining stuff and causing havoc everywhere. So Edith Ann gets over [her wish for an elephant mother.] Maybe we’ll get to do it some day.

(Editor’s note: To read about the tragic slaughter of elephants for their tusks, see the National Geographic cover story from October 2012.)

This week, nearly 20 years later, I saw the film in IMAX with a new twist on a popular technology: 3-D. 

It was even better. The close calls seemed closer, the Velociraptors bigger and badder, the jump-out-of-your-seat moments even jumpier. I was also amazed how convincing the dinosaurs still looked, even after two decades of advances in special effects.

But I wondered how those two decades have changed what paleontologists know about the movie’s dinosaurs. So I called Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. The main difference? “Feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers,” he told me: Recent science suggests many of the movie’s dinosaurs bore plumage.

The feathered T. rex relative Yutyrannus, pictured in an illustration by Xing Lida, National Geographic

For instance, instead of the gray, pebbly skin portrayed in the movie, “Velociraptor would have been as feathered as a bald eagle,” he said. (Also see “‘Jurassic Park’ Raptors Had Feathers, Fossil Suggests.”)

Much of the evidence comes from raptor fossils discovered in China’s Liaoning Province (map), where ancient, low-oxygen lakes preserved the animals perfectly as they died. Some of the fossils still bear “true, honest to goodness” feathers; others have bumps on their shoulders that show where big wing feathers would have attached, Holtz said.

The same may also go for T. rex. Just last year, scientists discovered Yutyrannus, a one-ton, distant cousin of T. rex that was covered in fuzz, like a chick. So “we can’t dismiss the possibility that even a giant T. rex had some feathers,” Holtz said.

(Also see “Did the Real T. rex Resemble the One in Jurassic Park?”)

Another Jurassic Park denizen that was also plumed: the ostrich-like Gallimimus, a flock of which nearly runs over Tim, Lex, and Alan Grant while they’re trekking through the park.

Feathers may have kept the prehistoric creatures warm, attracted mates, or even protected eggs if dinosaurs fanned their arms over nests, said Holtz, who is disappointed that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 4—to be released in June 2014—won’t have feathers either.

I asked Holtz whether scientists still think Velociraptor was smart enough to open doors, which happens a few times in the movie—in one instance, a raptor turns a door handle to get to Lex and Tim hiding in the park’s kitchen.

He said that Spielberg and Crichton overshot while trying to dispel the idea that dinosaurs are dummies. Velociraptor was probably only about as smart as your backyard opossum, Holtz said. What’s more, further analysis of its skeleton has revealed it wasn’t nearly as fast as a cheetah, as game warden Robert Muldoon says at the beginning of the film. Instead it was short and stocky, like a jaguar, and relied on stealth instead of speed.

“It would have been dumber than in the movie, and slower than in the movie,” Holtz said. “But I still wouldn’t want to meet one without some serious weapons.”

And Holtz believes that Crichton made a mistake setting the book in then-modern times. That’s because adult Brachiosaurus—the four-legged giants that leave Ellie and Alan awestruck—take up to 30 years to mature, which means that the dinosaur-cloning technology would have had to exist in the early 1970s. Even in a cloning fantasy movie, that strains credulity, says Holtz.

Speaking of the cloning technology, Holtz noted we still can’t recover enough viable DNA to bring a T. rex back to life. However, scientists including North Carolina State’s Mary Schweitzer are recovering biomolecules from ancient fossils—so, in that sense, the “knowledge of biochemistry of ancient life has become a reality.”

Even if we did bring dinosaurs back, he added, there’s a fundamental problem—the chemistry of modern air.

“For creatures like passenger pigeons or even the woolly mammoth, the world hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “For a Cretaceous dinosaur, the atmosphere is going to be different [in terms of the] amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen—it’s not going to breathe properly in our atmosphere.”

Despite his nitpicks, Holtz said he liked Jurassic Park—it was the first movie he paid multiple times to see in the theater. It was also the first film to introduce the public to dinosaurs beyond T. rex—giving “scientists and the public a common language to use.”

After seeing Jurassic Park in 1993, I wrote hundreds of pages of a sequel, in which many of the park’s dinosaurs swim to an island off Honduras and establish themselves anew. (My plot also involves Ellie and Alan roaming the island on horseback, which just happened to be my teenage passion.) I never sent it to Crichton, but I’m happy that I’ve gotten the chance to write about the movie 20 years later.

The show never made it completely clear why anyone would put a venomous creepy crawler in their mouths. One bushman said the mouth action was for “cleaning” the insect. The contestants themselves cooked up other possible scenarios. A horrified Joey Graceffa, who almost fainted at the idea of touching one, wondered if perhaps the environment of a human mouth might paralyze the scorpion. Contestant Caroline Cutbirth was sure the goal was to put the scorpion to sleep before the next step in the challenge—letting the arachnid nestle in her hand, then dropping it into a jar. “Goodnight!” she told the scorpion as she slid it into the bottle.

Or maybe … human saliva might tame a scorpion?

To find out more, we turned to Lorenzo Prendini, the curator of of Arachnida in the invertebrate zoology division at American Museum of Natural History.

Prendini, who studied scorpions in Africa and is a South African native himself, says that first of all, human saliva would not paralyze a scorpion. And he said it would be “far-fetched” that the animal would enter a calm state because of the dark, cave-like insides of the human mouth. While scorpions in the desert need to retain some humidity, they are much more tolerant of dry conditions.

At any rate, he could not imagine a good reason for putting a scorpion in your mouth unless you were planning to eat it (scorpion kebabs are an Asian delicacy). Although … it does make for extremely entertaining television.

That brings us to our next question—how did the bushmen manage to not get stung? Well, that depends how aggressive the species is.

“[The Scorpionidae family] is more docile, and they tend to be characterized by large pincers, a slim metasoma or ‘tail’ that is very narrow,” Prendini said. “The venom is comparatively weak in the animal.”

That means that while a sting may still hurt, it is much less dangerous than that of the more aggressive and venomous Buthidae, distinguished by delicate pincers and robust tails.

The scorpion on The Amazing Race, he noted, “is Opistophthalmus wahlbergi (family Scorpionidae), a common species in the Kalahari Desert. This scorpion is harmless—its venom is very mild—as painful as, or less painful, than a wasp sting. You will notice that the man is holding the scorpion by the stinger so that it is unable to sting him in the mouth. However, before he puts it in his mouth, it is grabbing hold of his finger with its powerful pedipalp chelae, or pincers, which is probably quite painful. It may be able to grab his lips or his tongue with those strong chelae. I’m not sure how he avoids getting his mouth pinched!”

The key to not getting stung, Prendini added, is to not alarm the scorpion. Though, we should warn you, don’t try any of this at home! —Linda Poon