This is my rendition of a scene from the movie Jurassic Park in which the main cast sets eyes on a Brachiosaurus roaming among eucalyptus trees on the island of Isla Nublar. I did this in celebration of the movie’s thirtieth anniversary.

What makes this scene particularly potent for me is that it shows the awesome power of witnessing an extinct dinosaur that had been extinct for a hundred and fifty million years in the flesh. You can sense the characters’ disbelief upon laying eyes on a living creature that they had only known from fossils and artistic reconstructions. That experience is something none of the movie’s sequels, even the better ones, could replicate since they all take place at a point in time when everyone has come to take cloned dinosaurs for granted. There’s really something to be said for the initial revelation of seeing those animals alive for the first time, and that’s what I wanted to capture here.