While the movie "Jurassic Park" generates hundreds of millions of dollars this summer, the real thing will continue to languish under the football stadium at Brigham Young University.
That point isn't lost on Wade Miller, a geology professor and director of the Earth Science Museum at Brigham Young Uni-ver-sity.Buried in a storage space beneath Cougar Stadium is the largest unprepared collection of Jurassic era dinosaur bones in North America. Counting the other bones in the buried collection, the depository ranks among the four or five largest in the world.
Miller and other paleontologists hoped the hype surrounding the release of "Jurassic Park" might have included a direct boost in funding for dinosaur research. For example, Amblin Entertainment Inc. and Universal Studios could have let research institutions premiere the movie as fund-raising events before its release in theaters nationwide.
As it was, BYU was one of 15 organizations nationwide allowed to hold a fund-raising event using the movie.
Miller can overlook the inaccuracies in the movie - the fact, for example, that the two meanest dinosaurs in the movie, velociraptor and tyrannosaurus rex, didn't live during the Jurassic era. The lost opportunity to fund dinosaur research is harder to ignore.
"I'm disappointed that Steven Spielberg, Amblin and others really didn't do anything to help the science, and they could have," Miller said. "So many millions of dollars are being made, and none is going into the science of it."
While tens of millions of dollars are spent on dinosaur products each year - plastic toy dinosaurs,books, etc. - less than $1 million is allocated annually for research.
That's painful when you're sitting on one of the best collections of dinosaur bones in the world.
BYU's collection includes a full range of Jurassic dinosaur bones. One of the most interesting fossils in the collection is an egg found in 1987 in the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry in east-central Utah. A CAT scan revealed what is believed to be an embryo deep inside the 150 million-year-old egg.
"BYU has one of the finest collections in the world and virtually no money to study it," said James I. Kirkland, chief paleontologist with Dinamation International Inc., based in Fruita, Colo. "That's really sad. For very little investment, Amblin could have made a contribution to get that done."
He adds: "I want to know in my lifetime what they've got and what it means."
As "Jurassic Park" first began moving from book to the silver screen, there was talk of tying some promotional activities to benefit paleontological research, Miller said. The Dinosaur Society, for instance, wanted to put its seal verifying authenticity on products based on the movie.
A portion of the proceeds from product sales would have been returned to the society, which would have used them to fund research. That didn't happen, Miller said.
Over the past three years, Miller developed pewter Jurassic dinosaurs he hoped would have been included among the movie's product-related items. That didn't happen, either.
Steve Gittelman, president of the society, is philosophical about the lack of direct contributions from Spielberg, Amblin or Universal.
"Steven Spielberg has done things for the field even if he has done it for other reasons," Gittelman said. "He has created the best depiction of dinosaurs on video we have. They're far from perfect, but they are the best we have. He's created lots of interest in the field. How we capitalize on that interest is our job."
And in fairness, Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment have aided some causes with "Jurassic Park." Last week, proceeds from a showing of the film in Washington, D.C., went to the Children's Defense Fund and the Children's Action Network. Spielberg also contributed $25,000 to China for research on an ankylosaurus discovered in China.
Spielberg was given the privilege of naming that dinosaur: he named it "Jurassosaurus nedegoapeferkimorum" after the movie and all its main actors.