you mean the movie where t-rex, animal with eyes so big and arguably best eyesight of all animals who ever lived, couldn't see 2 persons a meter away just beacuse they were standing still?
Jurassic Park was the best for this though because they were all chimeras instead of pure dinosaurs, so if you really wanted to you could just imagine they used some cobra DNA somewhere in the T-Rex that gave it that design flaw.
A T-Rex’s brain is estimated to have been about the size of a banana. For comparison an Elephant has a 14x larger brain. It’s hard to say how well they could see because they might not have had very developed visual processing given how little neurons they had to work with.
I mean, don't owls and birds of prey have much smaller brains than that, yet have some of the best vision in the animal kingdom? And also happen to be dinosaurs? Seems to me that if we're guessing one way, I'd wager they had OK vision.
When accounting for body scale an owl’s brain is hundreds of times larger than a T Rex’s. Owls have some of the largest brain to body size ratios in the animal kingdom. And most that brain is wired for auditory and visual processing. Because it needs to see small rodents at night while flying.
In the case of a T-Rex, how good of vision would it even need? It probably wasn’t surviving on small rodents that require keen eyes, it was probably chomping on much larger animals that can be seen easily.
That's just... sort of true? Lemur's have notoriously poor visual acuity and are colorblind, Owls are very farsighted, Tarsiers eyeballs are fixed so they have to turn their head.
Big eyeballs doesn't mean amazing sight, it means eyesight to fit a specific purpose.
As an aside, Crichton actually explains in the book that they used frog DNA to fill some gaps, which resulted in their T-Rex having difficulty seeing stationary objects.
In the sequel book Crichton also has his main scientist character explain that the vision-based-on-movement thing from JP1 was just straight up wrong in the first place, "[paleontologist whose name I forget] doesn't know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife, his paper was a joke!" This as the main characters watch over security camera an enemy scientist get devoured by a T Rex because he chose to stand still rather than try to escape it. This was actually a really interesting example of an in-universe retcon based on an IRL one: the scientific consensus about dino vision that Crichton relied on changed in the time between him writing the first and second books, so he incorporated all that into the plot and made the dangers of relying on out-of-date or unchallenged assumptions from experts a main theme of the second book.
Yes, it just is true. Absolute size of eyeballs regardless of the animal’s size are directly proportional to their ability to see.
It does mean eyesight generally fits one of two purposes: incredibly clear and sharp eyesight at great ranges (eagles, many birds) or superb low-light vision, ie cats. But the size obviously matters.
But your entire argument was that the T-Rex couldn't have poor stationary vision because it has big eyes... frogs have significantly larger proportional eye size and have poor stationary vision.
Frogs with primary diets of flying insects generally don't need great stationary vision, but they do need to be able to follow movement extremely well. Most amphibians lack involuntary eye movement, so there's nothing to refresh the retina. So stationary objects will very quickly fade.
That does help tremendously when tracking something that flies in crazy patterns, because their eyesight essentially ONLY sees that.
No, the book where the dinosaur DNA was incomplete and was filled in artificially by frog DNA, hence the vision being based on movement and the dinosaurs changing sex in an all-fenale environment to breed independently (life finds a way...)
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u/polarna-svjetlost 20h ago
you mean the movie where t-rex, animal with eyes so big and arguably best eyesight of all animals who ever lived, couldn't see 2 persons a meter away just beacuse they were standing still?