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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/11/jurassic-park.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>So it turns out that the 1990 Michael Crichton novel <em><a rel="nofollow" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)" target="_blank">Jurassic Park</a></em> is, indeed, a work of fiction. (Personal note: despite the snark to follow, the book is one of my all-time favorites — I clearly remember devouring it in 24 hours straight while ill in a hostel in France.) If the monsters and melodrama didn't give it away, then this chart seals the deal:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Not the most glaring issue with <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/JurassicPark?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">#JurassicPark</a>, but this plot from Michael Crichton's original 1990 novel looks pretty darn weird. /1 <a rel="nofollow" href="https://t.co/8dQujwIVNf" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/8dQujwIVNf</a></p>
<p>— David Gerard (@EmpiricalDave) <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/EmpiricalDave/status/1067941351478710272?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">November 29, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>That chart seemed like a clever plot point at the time. The smooth bell curve was evidence for our protagonists that the dinosaurs were not, in fact, a controlled population produced in a lab by scientists: they were breeding. But besides the fact that the chart suggested half of a <em>Procompsognathid </em>was somehow roaming the Costa Rican forest, it was <em>too</em> smooth. David Gerard simulated a population of 29 dinosaurs (drawing their heights from a Normal distribution, and plotting it in R), and the resulting chart was invariably much more jagged:</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The problem with this is that the density estimate still looks too clean. I made a few density plots in R (using the default settings) from data generated from a Gaussian. /13 <a rel="nofollow" href="https://t.co/hb4uoRkCv4" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/hb4uoRkCv4</a></p>
<p>— David Gerard (@EmpiricalDave) <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/EmpiricalDave/status/1067941372412469248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">November 29, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>Check out the whole Twitter thread: not only is it an interesting plot-check for a great book, it's a great Statistics lesson soon.</p>
<p>Twitter: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/EmpiricalDave/status/1067941351478710272" target="_blank">David Gerard's Jurassic Park thread</a></p>
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