FAQ

It's called a ground penetrating radar gun or a Fossil Finder used to search for buried fossils without digging. It had the appearance of a two wheeled dolly, and mounted to it was a post in which a shotgun shell was inserted. When activated, two people would stand on it to hold it down and it would fire the shotgun shell into the ground. It would then analyze the reflections of the sound waves created from the blast to produce an image of what was underground. This image was then sent to a computer system underneath a canopy. An interesting fact is that while the machine uses sound waves to detect what is under the ground, making the machine a Sonar machine, the technician refers to it as using Radar.

When he refers to the Raptor as "The Big One", he means that it's the dominant Raptor of the pride, a.k.a. the Alpha.

Much of our DNA is identical to other species. Thus, there's two points to consider:

A. It is more probable that the gaps in the damaged dinosaur DNA fall in the "shared" code.

B. The geneticists at InGen likely assumed that dinosaurs were reptilian, and thus chose amphibians as the closest possible parallel. In the novel, they use a variety of other base DNA sequences to fill the gaps, not just frogs, and it resulted in that only dinosaurs with the frog DNA expressed the mutation. It's also likely that, whatever DNA they used, embryos in which they guessed wrong in how to fill in the gaps didn't develop into a viable animal. Finding viable matches was therefore laborious, hence the more "industrial" facility at Isla Sorna.

John Hammond did not recruit Dr. Malcolm. Gennaro did. In fact, Hammond did not want Dr. Malcom there and displays disdain for him. After the accident with the raptor at the beginning of the film, the park's investors hired an attorney to do a thorough investigation of the park. The attorney brought along Dr. Malcom to assist with the investigation. The investors probably felt that Dr. Malcom would present an outside, unbiased perspective of the park.

Malcom's arguments in Chaos Theory doesn't have much to do with the dinosaurs directly. The novel explains this in much greater detail -- that even the scientists creating and trying to control the dinosaurs on the island cannot contain them, that nature will find a way for the animals to break free from their paddocks and become the dominant life form.

It's quite possible they did or that Hammond had another team of scientists do so in another location off the island. It's likely the geneticists created plant life from the era for the herbivores to have a food source akin to what they would have had in their time. Ellie just happened to find one that she knew to be extinct while driving through the forest to the open plain where they first see the Brachiosaurs.

We don't see the goat when the Rex actually approached, so it's likely that it did react. The last shot of the goat is it laying down in the pouring rain. Also; the goat was chained up. It couldn't flee.

It's likely this was a new adult raptor being brought in, not the "Big One", and it was killed during the attack. So there were still only three velociraptors.

Alternatively, this was The Big One being brought in. But she manages to run in to the paddock before anyone successfully shot her.

It's possible that there are various sections of track along the tour that the cars can be diverted onto so they can be turned around if they need to quickly head back to the visitors centre. It's somewhat like the sidings along a railway line; the tracks are changed remotely so that the cars go along the alternative track, they basically do a u-turn, and are then sent back along the main track. Alternatively, they could just be reversed.

In a previous draft, there is a small scene where Arnold states that he has found a way to turn the vehicles back the opposite way via a loop.

Paleontologist Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) are invited by billionaire philanthropist John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to tour, and hopefully endorse, Jurassic Park, an amusement park he has developed on Isla Nublar, an island off the west coast of Costa Rica, featuring living dinosaurs cloned from prehistoric DNA. Joined by chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), Hammond's lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), and Hammond's grandchildren Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), the six of them set out in two electrified Ford Explorers for a tour of the park. Meanwhile, the park complex's computer expert, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), has disabled the park's security system so that he can make his escape with some stolen dinosaur embryos, enabling the dinosaurs to escape from their electrified enclosures.

Jurassic Park is based on a 1990 novel of the same title by American author Michael Crichton. Crichton also wrote the first draft of the screenplay, which was later rewritten by American screenwriter David Koepp. The popularity of the movie resulted in three sequels: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022).

Isla Nublar is a fictional island, although Costa Rica is a real country in Central America (see map) bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Caribbean Sea on the east. Isla Nublar, if it were real, would be located 120 miles off Costa Rica's west coast, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. However, most of the film was actually shot in Hawaii and California.

Scientists used ancient mosquitoes that had fed upon dinosaurs and then became trapped and preserved in the resin of coniferous trees (amber). From the mosquitoes, they extracted the preserved remains of blood. From the blood, they extracted the dinosaur DNA. Any gaps in the DNA sequence were filled in with frog DNA. The resulting embryo clones were subsequently treated so as to produce only females so that there would be no natural breeding. The animals hatched normally, were nurtured on Isla Nublar, and some were then transferred to the 'park' seen in this film.

When Gennaro arrives on the raft one of the guys says "[I bet] 1000 pesos he falls". Then somebody tells Juanito they found something. Finally Juanito takes the amber containing the mosquito and says "How beautiful you are...will be". After that, he says "Luz, más luz... muchachos échenme luz!" or in English "Light, more light... guys, give me some light!"

Though we never find out in the film, the novel offers the answer. The Triceratops (in the novel, it was a Stegosaurus) digests food like vegetables or fruit by swallowing small stones (called "gizzard stones") that crush and mash the food in the stomach. The stones it eats are too close to the poisonous West Indian Lilac berries. Therefore, when it replaces the stones every six weeks or so, it simultaneously picks up fallen berries and is poisoned again. This is suggested in the scene where Dr. Sattler crouches down by the lilac berry bush, picks up some small stones, and plays with them in the air for a second. She fails to find berries in the animal's excrement because the berries are regurgitated along with the stones.

Some viewers have assumed that the car tumbles over the other side of the track (the opposite side of the 'road' from where the T.Rex approached) but this is not true. It does show some minor flaws but, overall, it explains this scene not to be a total goof.

The Visitor's Center was still under construction. A large open space was present for the T. rex to enter, right behind the white canvas from which the second raptor appeared in the finale. Supposedly, the T. rex followed this raptor in.

Michael Crichton's method is a concept that may one day be possible but, at present, we cannot create something even close to the original animal. The ethical and religious issues alone are enough to stop the development of one anyway.

Crichton was fully aware of this when writing the story, but he needed a way for dinosaurs to exist in modern day. So, he created a plot device using cloning. In the book, however, it was explained that these were not exact replicas of their prehistoric ancestors but "Dr. Henry Wu's creations" made from fragments of DNA available, and corrected and changed according to the needs of the client, Mr. Hammond.

The animals replicated in this way would have represented a truly towering achievement in the biological sciences -- the manufacture of fully synthetic organisms with structures based on theoretical models as opposed to truly observed biology. The fact that the dinosaurs are manufactured display the characteristics of natural organisms, including responding to environmental pressures (such as the all-female population, and lysinergic biochemical pathway degradation) increases the magnitude of the achievement. To put it simply, these are manufactured creatures made to look and act as real dinosaurs would have, but they are not 100% clones.

Although scientists have been able to create totally synthetic life and, at least theoretically, if you used the DNA of a bird (the current believed closest relative to the dinosaurs) to fill in the gaps, you could create a dinosaur-like animal. This also explains how the dinosaurs were able to spontaneously change sex, whereas real dinosaurs presumably wouldn't have this ability. It may also explain the ferocity of some dinosaurs that in real life may not have been quite as hostile such as the Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III (2001).

Due to the fact that according to both the novel and movie, these "dinosaurs" are actually just human-engineered mutants, most of these inaccuracies can be explained in-universe as being just the results of the geneticist's tampering. The closest the films have come to acknowledging this is in Jurassic Park III (2001) when Grant says "What Hammond, and Ingen, did at Jurassic Park was to create genetically-engineered theme park monsters, nothing more; nothing less." -- the novel at least made it clear that the clones are just approximations, and not real dinosaurs. However in Jurassic World, Dr. Wu mentions that his creations are not real dinosaurs and simply what people expect to see. That the real animals would look quite different.

This topic has became one of the most frequently discussed among paleontology enthusiasts, mostly because of how much our understanding of these creatures has progressed, and because there are many fans of Jurassic Park who refuse to accept that the dinosaurs in the movie are in several aspects inaccurate. Further, since to many moviegoers these films provide the sole source of information about dinosaurs, arguments about the topic occur frequently when a more knowledgeable person points out their ignorance. These inaccuracies aren't all mistakes. While some dinosaurs were indeed changed to make them better movie monsters (especially the raptors), most are the result of the relatively limited knowledge we possessed back when the movie was made. It should be noted that paleontology is an ever-advancing field of science, and as such, our image of these animals is always changing. A general overview on these paleontologic inaccuracies:

* The Tyrannosaurus is in fact one of the most accurate to appear in any popular media, including documentaries. However the shape of the head is too blocky and a bit wide, while the eyebrow ridges are far too pronounced (the animal in reality possessed only smaller "bumps" in front of the eyes). The arms appear to be just a tad too long and articulated, and the hands are able to twits. In reality, the wrists were fixed into a nearly immobile position, facing each other, but this is a relatively new discovery. As is the one made about the creature's hide: fossilized skin impressions show the animal had a heterogeneous, goosebumps-like skin texture on parts of its body, as opposed to scales, and this is evidence that, at least early in its life, T. rex was feathered. Further, it belongs to the coelurosaurian dinosaurs, whose defining features include having fuzz or feathers -- modern birds and raptors also belong to this group. Scales were present on its throat-sac and on various parts of its body, though, like the underside of its tail. In the film, Dr. Grant states that its vision was based on movement, however we have no way of knowing this. We do know its eyes were very developed and that T. rex had great binocular vision, so it probably had no trouble seeing anything. Unlike the movie, the original Jurassic Park novel mentions that the inefficiency of the beast's eyes was actually due to gene-modification, and not a natural handicap.

* The Triceratops is also highly accurate, though we now know that its front feet had five toes instead of four, three of which were long and clawed, with the other two ending in stubs. These were also quite slender, and the back legs even resembled the legs of birds. In the movie, they are more elephantine. Also, a spectacular fossil find, an imprint of the skin of Triceratops, tells us that the scales on its belly were large and rectangular, while (most amazingly) the back of the creature may have had porcupine-like quills protruding from it.

* The Velociraptors in the movie became so embedded into public mind that a lot of people find it hard to accept that the real animals looked almost nothing like them. The raptors here are actually based on Deinonychus, a wolf-sized American dromaeosaur, rather than the Asian and turkey-sized Velociraptor. The book points this out, the movie does not. Even so, the anatomy of these "Deinonychus" is wrong in nearly every aspect. They are too big -- shown to be able to look a human right in the eye, however true Deinonychus would only come up to our waist or chest. This is because the legs of raptors were surprisingly short. Despite what the movie tells us, they (or at least the more advanced raptors, such as Deinonychus, Velociraptor and the gigantic Utahraptor) were bad runners, and likely ambushed their prey. Their claws weren't suited for slashing, as their inner rim was more rounded than sharp, better suited for climbing and puncturing than making cuts. The tail of raptors is shown as relatively short and bendy in the movies, but they were really much longer and quite stiff (the animals belonged to a dinosaur group called tetanurae, meaning "stiff tails"). They were flexible to a degree, but incapable of flailing around. The skull of the movie-raptors is blocky and stout, and doesn't match that of any known dromaeosaur. Their arms, or rather wings, are almost human-like. In reality, they were unable to rotate their wrists, meaning their hands were permanently stuck in a "clapping" position. They would thus have been unable to open doors. They also didn't hold their wings in front of their bodies. Paleontologists believe they held them at their sides and to the back. This made them more aerodynamic, and kept their feathers from touching the ground.

Most famously, raptors were feathered. Fossilized feathers show these were the same as the pennaceous feathers of modern birds, and not the type of primitive "fuzz" that a lot of other dinosaurs (for instance T. rex) had. Their arms were lined with long, sturdy feathers, the type birds use for flying -- many smaller raptors were indeed capable of using them to glide through the air, although not being able to lift them above their shoulder-line, they couldn't flap their wings. The wing-feathers extended from their middle digits, not from their wrists as many erroneous reconstructions show, which would have made the hands even less dexterous. Essentially, they had "wings with claws" rather than "arms with feathers". Raptors were covered head-to tail in feathers, and possessed fans on the end of their tail. Only the tip of their snout and their feet had scales, although some even had feathers sprouting from their toes.

There are a number of theories regarding their hunting strategy. The famous Fighting Dinosaurs fossil, in which a Velociraptor and Protoceratops were found locked in combat at the time of their death, shows the raptor sticking its claw into the herbivore's neck, which many see as proof that raptors used their claws this way -- others claim that the animal was trying to push itself away from the Protoceratops, and that the raptor wasn't the real attacker in this scenario. Another theory says that they would have gone for smaller prey, and then clawed it to death while standing upright over it, using their wings to balance themselves and to keep other raptors away by forming a "shield" around their meal. It is unlikely that they used their teeth or wing claws for killing. There is no evidence to suggest raptors were pack hunters. This theory was based on several Deinonychus skeletons that have been discovered together with the skeleton of a herbivorous dinosaur, but recent studies indicate that these weren't found together because they formed a pack when alive, but because they came to feed off the carcass, and subsequently fought over it, during which many Deinonychus were killed -- their remains also show signs of scavenging, meaning they could have eaten each other. Also, while raptors were probably smart for dinosaurs, they likely lacked the necessary intelligence needed for coordinated assaults. However there exists a fossil trackway that shows a bunch of these animals walking in a group, so the question of whether they were social or not has yet to be cleared. Furthermore, different types of raptors had different jaws -- velociraptorines had relatively weaker jaws than dromaeosaurines, which suggest that they relied primarily on their claws while hunting, which would have been more useful for bringing down larger prey. Thus some scientists still believe that the pack hunting theory holds water.

* The Dilophosaurus is another animal whose appearance the movie famously changed. For starters, it's far too small -- true Dilophosaurus were about 6 m long, and as tall as a person (described in the book but not the film). The one in the movie could be just a juvenile, though (as Nedry says "I thought you were one of your big brothers. You're not so bad." implying that it was in fact a juvenile, yet just as deadly). The iconic frill was, however, only made up by Steven Spielberg, and its venom-spitting ability is also artistic license, used to demonstrate what little fossils actually tell us about dinosaurs. Accordingly, neither of these traits have any scientific basis, nor do they make logical sense: if a carnivore attempted to attack another animal in this theatrical manner, the prey would have plenty of time to just run away. The shape of the animal's head is also wrong: it's short, stout and compact, whereas the jaws of Dilophosaurus were famously thin and long, and the upper jaw had a small notch at the tip, which the movie version lacks entirely. Likewise, the palms should be facing each other, and the animal had four fingers, not three.

* Brachiosaurus is shown chewing by moving its jaw from side to side, which is a motion the skull was incapable of doing. Further, its teeth were only meant for stripping off branches, while the stones the animal swallowed did the grinding. Brachiosaurs were the sauropods least capable of rearing up on their hind legs, especially as their backs sloped toward their rear, and because their hind legs were shorter than their front ones. On their front feet, they only had one claw, while the other four fingers were reduced to mere stumps. Sauropods were famously believed to have had their nostrils placed high up on their foreheads. But the latest studied show that they had fleshy tubes running down their face, and the nostrils were located on their noses. It is worth noting that the Brachiosaurus here (as well as in just about any popular media) was based on fossils that have since been reclassified to a related genus, Giraffatitan, which was for almost a century regarded as a species of Brachiosaurus. We now see them as different genera, and the build of Brachiosaurus would had been slightly different -- its torso would have been more tubular, for example, and the "bulge" on its forehead would have been less pronounced.

Gallimimus should be fuzzy, with the arms being lined with sturdy wing feathers, and their palms should be facing inward.

Yes. The series was to have been a direct sequel to The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), itself a sequel to this film, and was to be the premise of the Chaos Effect line of toys, depicting scientists cross-breeding dinosaurs that are decreasing in their population, five years after the second film.

It went far into production, even including creature designs and meetings with Steven Spielberg himself, but the project never took off. The toys were too far into production to be withdrawn and were ultimately released to mixed reactions. Rumors persist that producers are still considering making this show, but it is highly unlikely.

There are two cuts with a length of 11.12 seconds. No profanity has been removed, even though it has been done in the "Back to the Future" films. The two cuts remove two of the more graphic sequences, those being Gennaro's death and Arnold's arm.