The New York Natural History Museum was the most famous cinema predators

A shark painted from a plaster model and a dinosaur That, in its initial version, it had traits inspired by a frog. That was the starting point of two of the posters more iconic cinema, Shark and Jurassic Parkand both were born, in part, in the same place: the American Museum of Natural History of New York (AMNH).

What began as a visit to take notes ended up becoming a blow of effect that marked the aesthetics of the Blockbuster. Neither sharks or extinct reptiles, the true protagonist was in the Fifth Avenuesurrounded by skeletons.

The most feared shark arose from a chance

Before the director Steven Spielberg will seek to represent a tyrannosaurus with agile movements and dynamic posture, similar to those of a rapaz bird, the artist Roger Kastel He had turned a nude scene and the advance of a lethal bite in the perfect image to sell novels in the seventies.

The cover of pocket Jawswith a swimmer outside the shark emerges from the background, he was born from the instinct of Kastel and what he could observe in the museum. As I didn’t know any sharkswent to AMNH in search of references. There he found Various plaster models They were being cleaned.

Took the opportunity to Make sketcheswhich would later combine until shaping the great target. Of that drawing, one of the most Commercial cinema influential.

When Universal He bought the illustration to turn it into a poster, Kasttel was not yet aware that he had just made history. He didn’t even see the original again. “They sent him to Hollywood and they didn’t return it to me,” he explained years later. The work disappeared as if the sea had swallowed it.

The poster was censored in Boston and Fort Lauderdale, but that only helped multiply its diffusion. He cinema study clung to the image as a life jacket and exploded in t -shirts, cups and even board games.

The creature also gained physical form. For filming, Spielberg commissioned a real -scale mechanical model, nicknamed Brucethat was a technical challenge for its size and for the constant interaction with water. It was an animatronic shark of more than seven meters, whose rigidity ended up conditioning the final assembly of the film. The awkwardness of the model forced the director to hide it during much of the footage, a limitation that, paradoxically, intensified the suspense.

A bad fossil and an unforgettable poster

Eighteen years later, the famous director re -trusted the same New York museum to shape another predator, although this time the challenge was even greater: it was not enough with a shocking drawing, the animal should come alive without giving problems. To achieve this, your team combined Animatronics and digital effectsan absolute novelty in 1993.

Phil Tippett, Stan Winston, Dennis Moren, Mark Crash McCreery, Mike Trcic… Everyone put their grain of sand to design a predator that imposed respect and moved as if he had been there from the Cretaceous.

The first step, however, was to return to the basics: fossils, bones and replicas. The designers visited the AMNH and studied the skeleton AMNH 5027the most famous of all. That skull, poorly mounted for decades, influenced the way in which T.rex was represented in films and books, including that of Michael Crichton. In fact, the designer Kidd chip He was inspired by that fossil to create the cover of Jurassic Parkthe same that would later adapt to the movie poster.

The project, which in its early stages considered the possibility of providing the dinosaurs of amphibious facial features, such as folds or protuberances similar to those of some frogs, ended up consolidating an aesthetic that mixed scientific rigor with visual terror.

John Gurche and Mark HallettReference Paleoartists, advised in the anatomy and biomechanics of animals. Even several sculptures were discarded that did not convince Spielberg. Only after multiple redesign and internal discussions, a design that the director liked, although the original anatomy did not respect the director. “We wanted me to have a fiercest look,” said sculptor Mike Trcic.

Two impossible creatures linked by a visit to the same museum

Unlike the poster of Sharkthat stayed in a painting that never returned to its author, Jurassic Park He needed busts, scale models and animated creatures that shared flat with actors and artificial rain.

The roar of the T.rex, the tremor of the water in the glass and the car door opening with violence would not have worked without an animal that seems real. And that creature, just like the great target that emerged from the Kastel brush, began to take shape between showcases, bones and exposed models.

The New York Natural History Museum was not only useful. It was decisive. There they gestated, with pencil or clay, two of the most images Recognizable of modern cinema. A shark coming out of the depths and a dinosaur with the eyes shining in the rain when looking through the window of a car: both have more in common than it seems.