A Deleted Eternals Scene Reveals A Jaw-Dropping Truth About Dinosaurs

Whether you have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Jack Kirby-born comic book characters known as the Eternals, or you were merely one of the many moviegoers around the globe who tuned in to contribute to Marvel's big-screen adaptation that earned $400 million worldwide (via Box Office Mojo), you know that these super cool superhumans really, really don't like Deviants. In fact, they've been waging war with them for millennia. Like the Eternals, the Deviants are created by the Celestials, whose experimentations resulted in the mutated race of not-so-nice creatures. 

Deviants evolve and develop faster than humans and, at one point, used their many physical and intellectual advantages to enslave their mortal counterparts. The Celestials eventually beat their malevolent creation into submission, and the Eternals (the Celestials' nicer, prettier creation) have been protecting humanity from these fast-healing, shape-shifting "genetic mutations gone wrong" ever since. While some have noted that audiences' first introduction to a Deviant came in the form of the purple-skinned, Infinity Stone-hungry Thanos (Josh Brolin), a deleted scene from "The Eternals" reveals that even the least Marvel-savvy among us has known about one particular group of Deviants since grade-school: the dinosaurs.

In a deleted "Eternals" scene now available on IGN's YouTube channel, Lia McHugh's Sprite drops a series of information bombs on Sersi's (Gemma Chan) historian boyfriend, Dane Whitman (Kit Harington). Sprite is first seen reanimating a rather foreboding "dinosaur" skull in London's Natural History Museum. But when the well-meaning (if blissfully ignorant) Dane approaches her to ask if she's looking for her "aunt," Sprite decides she has no time to suffer the mortal's ignorance gladly.

The child-like Eternal, who is actually thousands of years old, says it's "ironic" that Sersi would be giving a speech on the importance of apex predators since she "helped wipe out an entire species of them." Understandably, Dane is amused but incredulous. When Sprite points to the skull and explains it "was a Deviant's head," the unintentionally condescending historian and scientist says, "Well actually, it's the head of a Smilodon. A genus of the extinct Macrodontini sub-fam—" before Sprite cuts him off. "Why can't they ever get Thena's likeness right?" she wonders aloud at the base of a statue of the goddess humans know as "Athena."

The revelation that dinosaurs were a group of genetically modified monsters whose extinction came at the hands of her fellow Eternals (and not, say, a meteor) may be big news to any human willing to believe it. For Sprite, our understanding of the prehistoric creatures is just one more illusion on a list of many she's created over the years.

"Eternals" is now available to stream on Disney+.