DMH said:
So what was used in Dungeon? They had a Utahraptor nest and they were about 12 feet tall.
In Dungeon -- what? An adventure in the magazine?
Anyway, you opened the floodgates for more information than you probably want, but here goes:
Deinonychus antirrhopus, which was the largest dromeosaur known at the time of filming of JP, is about two and a half to four meters long nose to tail, and would have weighed 50-75 kg. It would only have been able to reach about 5 feet tall tops, with its head fully raised. There was a lot of criticism from dinofans when Spielberg consciously decided to up the size of the animal to make it more fearsome (and even moreso that he was using the name
Velociraptor anyway, when
V. mongonliensis is only about half the size of
D. antirrhopus to begin with.) However, serendipitously,
Utahraptor ostrommaysorum was discovered during the filming of JP, and it was touted at least by some as vindication for Spielberg's artistic license.
U. ostrommaysorum would have been 5-7 meters long and weighed about a tonne, and using the posture depicted by Spielberg (which I favor, although it's not universally agreed) would have stood probably 2-3 meters tall at eye-level.
So the animals depicted by Spielberg are not completely outside the realm of possibility for a
Deinonychus, although they'd be abnormally large (perhaps for ones raised in captivity and fed a steady diet of steroid enhanced meat, and were already genetically pre-disposed to be on the large end of the creature's range that's not so unusual after all,) and they are comfortably within the range of a
Utahraptor. Most dinosaur experts will tell you that despite the name used, the creature depicted is an artistic vision of a
Utahraptor. As I should know; I was part of a working professional dinosaur list-serve at the time both JP2 and JP3 were released, where a lot of this came back up again and was rehashed quite often (not that I'm a working professional dinosaur expert, of course.)
Keep in mind that there isn't a single size of any animal anyway, anymore than you can say that a human is 1.75 meters tall or whatever. What is 1.75? An average? Across what population? Does it include males and females, etc.
Quite often what's reported for dinosaur sizes is the largest specimen we have, because that's typically the most impressive. For that matter, there are relatively few creatures for which we have a big enough sample to calculate a statistically useful average anyway. And we often don't know what other kinds of features could have affected the size of a given individual -- did dinosaurs manifest sexual dimorphism through size, for instance? Add to that that most statistics you see unless you really get into the technical journals use one sample from an entire genus, ignoring differences of speciation, to say nothing of other geographical factors.
So, the shorter answer to your question is, technically what you say in JP
could be Deinonychus, but they'd be really extraordinarily large specimens if so. They were more likely to be Utahraptors based on their size, which is what most dinosaur experts would claim when discussing the movie, although not at the maximum end of the scale for size for that creature, while the Utahraptors in Dungeon would, on the other hand, be about as big as Utahraptors would actually ever get.
