Meet the cosplaying paleontologist who teaches Jurassic Park fans about dinosaurs

Many paleontologists credit Jurassic Park and its sequels for sparking an obsession with dinosaurs that set them on their career path. Yet as their education progressed, some budding scientists became disillusioned with their beloved childhood franchise because of the inaccuracies and outright dinosaur falsehoods it has propagated.

Gabriel-Philip Santos isn't one of them. The director of education at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Los Angeles, Santos has carried his early love of Jurassic Park forward into his career as a paleontologist and science communicator. Santos knows there's a lot these films get wrong about dinosaurs. But he also believes they provide paleontologists a tremendous opportunity to engage with the public—even if that means clearing up some misconceptions about feathers and frog DNA. That's something Santos does regularly through Cosplay for Science, an outreach initiative he co-founded that hosts science panels at Comic Con conventions and runs pop-up museums focused on everything from Star Trek-inspired technologies to the paleontology of Pokémon.

Whether or not you've paid attention to the Jurassic franchise in recent years, it's still going strong, with three Jurassic World movies released since 2015 and a fourth installment hitting theaters in July of 2025. After finally renting and starting to watch 2022's Jurassic World Dominion late last year, I called up Santos to chat about what these films get right and wrong about dinosaurs. My main takeaway? Despite all of the franchise's flaws, the Jurassic films have played an incomparable role in fueling public interest in paleontology.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.