Jurassic Park
I know the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park is a juvenile, but that might not explain why Nedry said "big brothers" to one...
He's not an expert, he's just a guy that "helped" with the park's computers, so he could be refering to the raptors, or even Rexy, when he said to the Dilophosaurus in the film "I thought you were one of your big brothers. You're not so bad."
Nedry is casually referring to the larger attractions with 'big brothers', the animals he thinks of as actually intimidating even though he's petrified in the moment.
It’s not a juvenile. It’s fully grown. Between 3 movies and multiple seasons of animated shows, all of them are the same size. That’s a fully grown dilo in universe. Unless, coincidentally, literally dozens of them seen on screen are all juveniles.
I think it’s more of another case of a misconception being retroactively made the official design. Another would be the fact that the Triceratops animatronic was painted in a mottled, primarily muted green with greyish spots color scheme, but since the only time we see it in the movie is when it’s covered in dirt and dust, a lot of its other appearances also depict it with that same drab brown color, as opposed to the actual spotted green coloration.
The Dilophosaurus in the book was large and strong enough to pick Nedry up in its jaws by his head, meaning it was significantly larger than the film version, much like the real animal. It’s not out of the question to assume the film version was intended to be a juvenile, especially paired with Nedry’s “big brother” comment.
After all, the embryo theft scene shows we only saw some of the animals on the island, so it’s not hard to believe there were likely other Dilophosaur specimens, and only the small one was able to get out of their enclosure.
I liked that explanation too. Dinosaur sizes varied a lot even within the same genus, so even if we haven't found it quite yet, it stands to reason that there could be different dilophosaur species that are vastly different sizes.
Hell, people were bitching about the raptor sizes in the movie, and only a few short months later they dug up the first Utahraptor!
I think at this point we have to accept that as the canon size. But the original Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus absolutely was intended to be a juvenile, despite people claiming otherwise.
He was. There's no evidence to suggest that the Jurassic Dilophosaurs are just Juveniles. The reason the one from the movie was so small is because they needed to save on budget to build the animatronic.
As for the lore itself, I've always been a proponent that the Dilo's size and venomous saliva spit is a consequence of the cross-genetics that Wu had to play around with in order to create them. It stunted them from growing full size, but gave them a defense that they could compensate with.
But even according to the novel, most people assume all dinosaurs were huge. They genuinely get surprised to see a small dinosaur, so Nedry probably assumed that anything he encountered out in the park would be big - probably too big to bother noticing something like him.
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u/deadblood0 8h ago
Nedry is casually referring to the larger attractions with 'big brothers', the animals he thinks of as actually intimidating even though he's petrified in the moment.