'''All movie/book-specific Headscratchers have been moved to their appropriate pages. If you want to ask a question specifically pertaining to one of those, please do so on the appropriate page. However, any questions are across several works may be asked on this page.'''
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[[index]]
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicPark1990''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicPark1993''
* ''Headscratchers/TheLostWorldJurassicPark''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicParkIII''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorld''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorldFallenKingdom''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorldDominion''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorldBattleAtBigRock''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorldCampCretaceous''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicParkTheGame''
* ''Headscratchers/JurassicWorldAlive''
[[/index]]
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[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Waivers]]
* Why didn't Hammond or Masrani have anybody who was going on board with either the Jurassic Park or Jurassic World projects as either guests or employees sign waivers? Then there wouldn't be any worrying about all these lawsuits.
** There almost certainly were waivers for Jurassic World, and would have been for Jurassic Park. Doesn't absolve the owners and operators of '''all''' responsibility. They still have to supply a reasonable expectation of safety to their patrons. The waivers are to cover guest stupidity (keep your windows rolled up near the Dilophosaurus) or sheer random chance (if there's a mass breakout for no real reason and pterosaurs are pterrorizing main street. . . oops). But if you fail to provide basic passive security for your dinosaur exhibits or let a few yahoos in your company test their proof-of-concept weaponised genetic abomination in your park, you deserve to get litigated into oblivion.
** Waivers are actually kind of useless against injury lawsuits. They mostly make people ''believe'' they can't sue you, when in fact there's usually still a way for them to sue you.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: The gaps in DNA]]
* This may seem like an out-of-nowhere question, but, why didn't they just fill the DNA gaps in the dinosaur DNA with DNA from other fossils of the same species?
** DNA doesn't really survive the fossilisation process, in any practical sense. Truly ancient fossils aren't really an animal's bones: they're the stone-hard mineral deposits accumulated over millions of years where bones (and, occasionally, softer tissues) ''used'' to be. And you can't pull usable DNA out of stone. This is why [=InGen=] was using mosquitoes preserved in amber as their source of DNA. (In real life, DNA chains will survive for no more than a tiny fraction of the 65-100+ million years since the dinosaurs lived, whether in fossils of their bones ''or'' within mosquitoes in amber that once sucked their blood.)
*** Then why not use DNA of the same species collected from other amber finds?
*** Even finding ''one'' amber-preserved specimen of a given species' DNA is implied to be astronomically rare. You could probably check every piece of amber in the world and not find enough samples from the same type of animal to reconstruct its entire genome.
** Wu explains in the novel that, because 90% of DNA is identical across all life in the planet, he was free to fill the gaps with pretty much whatever he wanted. The downside being the dinosaurs are less dinosaurs and more genetic chimeras. It's been stated that the geneticists ''should'' have filled the gaps with "nonsense" DNA that couldn't risk introducing another animal's genes into the dinosaurs, but. . . chalk that up to theme of arrogance and not really thinking about what you're doing.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Dinosaurs love juicy humans.]]
* Why do the dinosaurs in all the films seem to have a desire to eat humans exclusively, to the point of pursuing them for miles over several days? They expend far more energy chasing humans than they would get from actually ''eating'' them. One of the most outrageous examples occurs with the Spinosaurus in the third movie. Immediately after killing a T. Rex, instead of doing what any carnivore with so much as one brain cell would do and chowing down on the tons of fresh meat in front of it, it chases five humans across the island for the whole movie. WTF?!!!
** The Spinosaurus DID chow down on the Tyrannosaurus. After he killed the rex, the movie showed the humans running away and the Spinosaurus leaning over his kill and growling at them in a "Go away"-like way. They didn't see it again until the next day, after it had eaten and slept and went to patrol its territory.
** Humans are tasty. In the Spinosaurus example, it's like getting your Big Mac order, then seeing free cookies being given away next door. Screw the Big Mac.
** Assuming you've never seen, tasted, or ever heard of cookies before. The Spinosaurus didn't show at all in the first or second movies and consumed no humans in the third. Therefore, it would have no idea what they would taste like and wouldn't behave like that.
** Consumed no humans? Did you miss an awful scene involving a cellphone ringing inside the Spinosaurus? He ate at least one.
** He ate two humans. The first one was Cooper (the guy the other mercenaries were perfectly content to leave on the island in their panic to escape.) He got snatched up in the Spino's jaws right before the plane crash. The other guy was Nash. He was dragged out of the crashed plane by the Spinosaurus.
** It pains me to defend the travesty that is [=JP3=], but... Michael Crichton did actually make a thing of this in one of the books (the first one I think). When discussing how viciously the raptors behave toward their human visitors, Malcolm speculates that a lot of carnivorous animals will only attack humans once they have come to associate us with being a relatively easy meal, and wonders aloud as to when the raptors learned there was a benefit to attacking humans... {{foreshadowing}} the carnage to come later in the book. So, I guess somebody determined to defend the third movie could claim that Park workers presumably staffed the island at some point, and the Spinosaur could have eaten a ''bunch'' of folk before the movie started. I can't, however, remember which island the film is actually set on, so please excuse me if they did address this on-screen.
** The island is the same as in ''The Lost World'', Isla Sorna – hence Alan Grant's incredulous exasperation that he's been brought along to act as a guide to somewhere he's never been before.
** I always thought that it ate the people in the boat in the first scene.
** The dinos just scares them off, thinking that they are Compy or something, who will stole the T-Rex carcass. That's what I think.
** Or the ''Spinosaurus'' was primarily a fish-eater, as current theories claim, and it killed the ''T. rex'' out of territorial imperative rather than for food. Its elongated jaws weren't sturdy enough to disassemble a giant carcass. Humans, conversely, are small enough for it to swallow whole.
** New studies suggest that Spinosaurus, with its crocodilian-like jaws, may have fed on small and medium-sized prey like a crocodile: holding the prey and flinging its head back and forth to rip up the meal, and tearing pieces from the carcasses of large carrion with the same method. With evidence of Iguanadon bones in the gut regions of related animals like Suchomimus and Baryonyx and a Spinosaurus tooth in the wing bone of a Pterosaur, Spinosaurus may have been the equivalent of a Cretaceous grizzly bear, dining mainly on fish, feeding on carrion when possible and hunting other dinosaurs when the opportunity arose.
** That still doesn't explain all the chasing. It's one thing to eat a free cookie, it's another thing to chase it for hours on end, especially considering, size wise, these cookies are on the smallest end of the scale. It doesn't make even a little sense.
** I was under the impression the Spinosaurus just happened to come across them every time they encountered it.
** Yeah, they were in its territory for the bulk of the film and just had the rotten luck to keep running into the thing. Hell, the one time they're chasing the satellite phone's ringtone, they look over at the Spinosaurus and it looks just as surprised as they are.
** That was a Carnotaurus, a smaller carnivore with small horns over its eyes, not the Spinosaurus. The Spinosaurus makes its entrance from the water later in that scene.
** A size-chart comparing dinosaur sizes, from one of the earlier [=JP3=] DVD boxes, claims it's actually a ''Ceratosaurus''. Check Disney's CGI film ''WesternAnimation/{{Dinosaur}}'' if you want some Carnotaur action (or go to Disney's Animal Kingdom and enjoy the ride).
** Also, I think we're confusing two different scenes here: the Ceratosaurus shows up the ''second'' time they're looking for the satellite phone, while digging through Spino's poop. The first time is with the phone still ''inside'' the Spinosaurus, a la Peter Pan's crocodile. Moving on...
** Blame the keepers, maybe: if the predators were hand-fed by humans early in their lives, they may have come to associate humans with food, same as crocodiles fed chum by tourists will. They weren't chasing the humans because they were innately vicious, they were chasing them because they were expecting the humans to drop them a nice tasty half a cow.
** A major theme in the novel (and a more minor one in the film itself) is that the humans don't do anything to understand the dinosaurs, and many of their capabilities are a total mystery to the researchers (Raptor intelligence, Dilophosaurus venom, and even the reproduction of the animals). It is likely that they did not supply the water bodies in Isla Sorna with large fish, not knowing that Spino was a piscivore, which the Spinosaurus feeds on, thus forces it to go into direct competition with the dominant, pack hunting T-rexes. Spino, despite being the most powerful dinosaur on the island, is primarily a predator of human-sized terrestrial animals and large fish (which again are non-existent), which may explain why it was more interested in humans than both the dead Rex and the carcass it was just feasting on. Because Hammond's geniuses failed to supply the Spinosaurus with its natural diet, it targeted the next best thing (fossil record indicates Spinosaurs took on animals around human size), avoiding large dinosaurs and instead going after the humans.
** The implication from the film is that the spinosaur has possibly taken to swimming offshore in search of marine fish. How successful this strategy is is not seen.
** In the case of the raptors, they are just going for the easiest prey. In JP they are both incredibly clever (and not instinct reliant like the other predators) and also capable of revenge. It may have been both a 'take that' to the human masters and also their reaction after learning humans were softies.
** The Dilophosaurus attacked Nedry, who was in its immediate location, thus justifying the attack. The Rex in the first film attacked the humans only because they were right in front of it, and in the second took them on because they stole its kid. In the 3rd, the Rexes in the island may have gained some instinct that humans = trouble from The Lost World.
** In the majority of chase scenes, the dinosaurs chase humans either because they're the only things made of meat around, or the humans start running and thus probably kick in the dinosaur's predator instincts. Further encounters with the same dinosaur after that can be chalked up to the fact that the dinosaurs aren't really chasing the humans per se, so much as their paths are simply intersecting again by chance. We in the audience see it as "chasing" because 1) humans tend to see patterns in everything and 2) we know it's a movie and that we're watching the central characters.
** A major theory among the Jurassic Park community is that Spinosaurus goes through musth, making them more aggressive.
** The question is how did the Raptors learn humans were such easy chow. The Rex and Dilos could be explained as territorial kills and then scavenger instinct taking over once they smelled meat. The Mosasaur was hunger, and like a shark, liable to eat anything in range, and the Compys are scavengers who will eat just about any dead animal. But the Raptors will always go after humans when given the choice, so somewhere they figured out humans are easier to kill than any other prey on the island, but where did they learn this?
*** This is explained in the book. Before the raptors were put into their holding pen (the one we see in the movie), they were kept in an actual enclosure. But they kept getting to and mauling the construction workers, which is how they learned that humans were not only easy prey, but probably tasted good, too.
** [[FridgeHorror Best not to think about that one too hard...]]
** "How did the Raptors learn humans were such easy chow"? In the movie, literally ''the very first scene'' is a raptor learning that humans are easy chow by dragging him into its enclosure and ripping him to shreds.
** Maybe the Raptors aren't going after humans because they're easier, but because they're more fun...
** In the second film, the humans were going through their nesting grounds. It may have been a mix of protecting the young, defending the territory and a late night snack. The third film, they don't even eat the one mercenary, they just break his neck when they realize the humans figured out he's bait. They were only after them because they knew they had their eggs.
** And also, of course, RuleOfDrama. For all the possible explanations outlined above, at the end of the day if you're a storyteller you're going to get more tension out of a flesh-eating dinosaur chasing after the human characters because it wants to eat them than a flesh-eating dinosaur completely ignoring the human characters because it has no idea what they are or what they taste like.
** Some supplementary material from after Jurassic World heavily hints that the ''Spinosaurus'' is one of Wu's less ethical genetics projects, a "First Draft" for what would eventually become the ''Indominus rex''. This would explain its extreme durability and aggression. Raptors have an insanely high prey drive even compared to other dinosaurs in the series, and the rexes are shown to be highly territorial.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Animal cruelty]]
* How would the park not have been charged with animal cruelty for its practice of feeding live animals to the dinosaurs?
** Live animal feeding is used in ''some'' zoo and conservation settings in real life. The only point of contention is that the goat is tethered, rather than turned loose in the T-Rex paddock to be hunted naturally.
** Complete and total lack of jurisdiction, which is probably one of the bigger reasons that Hammond chose to purchase a couple of actual islands "off the coast of nowhere" in order to make his park. Unless what he's doing affects the residents/citizens of places with governments, there's not a lot anybody can or will do about it.
** It's possible at least some of the dinosaurs won't eat the animal if it's not alive or moving (particularly the T.Rex, as it can't see motionless things.)
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Lysine Deficiency]]
* How did the dinos survive without the protein they were genetically engineered to lack? If you mess with genes to create a protein deficiency, there is no way that that protein will be produced.
** They can't produce lysine, an essential amino acid. The scientists in story Failed Biology Forever by forgetting that many animals, humans included, can not produce their own lysine. They have to get it by eating foods containing lysine, which is also how the dinosaurs survived without supplements. It's a bit puzzling that they'd deliberately engineer a lysine dependency as a security feature given that most vertebrates already have it and survive just fine in the wild anyway.
** I got the impression in the book that the scientists only shoved this in so they could tell everyone "Oh, look, see, we're doing stuff so if they escape, it'll be fine!", assuming that most people wouldn't know about the inability to produce lysine being common and therefore would be impressed.
** Lysine can be produced by quite a variety of plants, and it's unlikely that you can get rid of all specific lysine-producing plants in a whole island, unless you use such means as.... Agent Orange. Even if you can, plants seeds have such... ''marvelous'' ways to reach such a place. See Krakatoa, for example.
** Inability to produce needed biological chemicals is a common method for handicapping ''bacteria'' used in genetic studies. If Hammond hired only specialized bioengineers to create his dinosaurs (specialists, who'd never studied botany or animal nutrition) they may not have realized that what constrains microorganisms in a petri dish won't suffice for vertebrates that can roam around and ''sniff out'' the nutrients they lack.
** The book even makes this fact clear by making a point that the dino's that had escaped the island were destroying a lot of farm crops of foods rich in lysine.
** Dinosaurs may be able to produce lysine themselves. With several million years of evolution, like the shark, dinosaurs would have come to be a near-perfect animal. Though not as intelligent as mammals, and still rather limited in some aspects, genetically, they would be highly efficient and advanced. In reality so little is known about these animals, how could we possibly expect them to show the usual behaviour of a present day species. Wu himself admitted that he and his scientists didn't really know what to expect from dinosaurs. His job was to simply clone them, and any other aspects were secondary. He described himself as a clock master; he tinkered around with his creations. He really had no idea of what to expect from organisms that went extinct 65mya. It would be upon cloning, that the scientists would have found lysine codes in the DNA, and wanting a way to control them, deleted these codes. The scientist knew that the dinosaurs would still be able to receive lysine by eating sources around them, but the herbivores were also genetically altered so that they couldn't chemically produce lysine, unless it's an [=InGen=] lysine tablet like the ones that were stated to be in use in the novels. Dodgson speculated that if pets were made, they could be made so that they can only eat [=InGen=] Petfood, so we know it's plausible for the animals to be engineered without the ability to even produce the enzyme, unless fed directly by an [=InGen=] supplement. This way, if there ever were to be a mass break out, even on Sorna, the herbivores would die without the lysine, and the carnivores wouldn't be able to receive lysine if they ate the herbivores, and starve to death themselves. But the problem, like all mass produced products, would be a sacrifice of quality in the face of quantity. The cloning process would become sloppy, and not only did diseases develop, but there were no longer any checks on whether or not the lysine contingency was working. When some of the animals bred, the DNA was no longer controlled. The lysine enzyme was once again either not withheld, or would be able to be produced by the dinosaurs themselves. I would like to believe the former, but either is likely.
** That explanation fails Occam's Razor, though. From an evolutionary perspective, not being able to manufacture certain amino acids, as long as you get sufficient amounts of them in your food, is an ''advantage'' because you're no longer using energy to create building blocks you have no use for. In other words, unless your primary source of food can't provide you with enough of that amino acid, weaning yourself off it is a good thing. Most vertebrates are so high up the food chain that they get their food either from plants, or from other vertebrates that, at some point, ate plants themselves to survive. Plants synthesize their own lysine. Ergo, vertebrates get lysine from eating plants or from eating things that eat plants (and, in addition, from the bacteria living in their guts). It makes little evolutionary sense for dinosaurs not to be lysine deficient by default (crocodiles and sharks, who lived in the Jurassic age, are), and it makes even less sense, even if they weren't by default, for them to suddenly stop working when their very environment (modern plants and bacteria) produce it in abundance.
** This appears to be a bit of AdaptationDecay from the novel. In the novel, the lysine deficiency was treated more as a way of keeping the dinosaurs docile and dependent on their human handlers, since they were engineered to be deficient in lysine, they were consequently being fed with food rich in lysine, and in theory if they were denied this food they'd quickly starve. It was intended to be a form of control; the dinosaurs escape, they get deprived of lysine, they starve to death. Of course, even in the novel this ended up not working, since it's heavily suggested that a bunch of escaped dinosaurs have just started hunting out food which is rich in lysine in the wild. The movie, however, appears to simplify this by treating the lysine deficiency as more of a potential genetic "kill-switch" than a way of fostering dependency.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Herbivore Park?]]
* After getting terrorized and nearly killed by dinosaurs, most people agreed it was a good idea not to open any park where there are huge dinosaurs, as too many things can go wrong. Makes sense on the surface, until FridgeLogic kicks in. Why not open a park that has only herbivores? Even Grant, one of the most vocal about the dangers of dinosaurs enjoys the times he has with the herbivores. Everybody loves a brachiosaur and a triceratops (unless it's trying to gore you, but that's no more dangerous than a rhino and we already have those).
** In all honesty, just because you're not directly under it in the food chain doesn't mean it's harmless. Remember the stegosaurus scene from the second movie where the [[TooDumbToLive screaming lady]] got to close to the baby and triggered MamaBear mode?
** There's a significant different between a rhino's 700+ pounds trying to gore you, and a triceratops 4+ ''tons'' trying to gore you. The implication is that the larger something gets, the more dangerous it is, which is literally true. However, proper domestication methods...
** Triceratops is supposed to have weighed 6-12 tons, which is coincidentally about the same as an elephant, yet few zoos have trouble with elephants, and elephants have trunks as well as their tusks.
** Captive elephants kill or maim their keepers rather frequently, whether in anger or out of sheer clumsiness. It's one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
** Also, the largest elephants get is about 6 or 7 tons, meaning a 12-ton Triceratops is pretty much twice the size of the largest elephant. That's not really "about the same."
** Do you know how long it takes to domesticate a species? A ''lot'' generations.
** Not when you have genetic superpowers, like in the books/movies. If they had spent years researching their methods and learning how to create non-aggressive dinos instead of trying to recreate the original creatures ASAP, they might have managed to make smaller, friendlier animals, something they still could have used the research to do after the first film. Instead, the idiots made an even worse error by bringing a 100% wild, born and raised, t-rex back to the States.
** Not so long in this case. The number of generations full domestication takes is dependent on just how young you're prepared to allow human contact, sure if you wait till adolescence before allowing human contact it'll take forever to domesticate them. But if you start when they're a few weeks old (and they could have done that because the first generation had no parents to be protective of them), or younger, it shouldn't take too many generations. Look at lions, they're lethal if you try to go near them in the wild, but there have been more than an few who were almost domesticated, and that was at only the first or second generation.
** That's ''taming'', not domestication. Tame means an individual wild animal was raised to be compliant around people thanks to how it's been treated; domesticated means it and its ancestors have been bred to be compliant from day one, without having to be taught.
** Additionally, tame wild animals have a much higher chance of behaving dangerously than domesticated creatures. A tame lion is ''still'' considered a wild animal, and any sensible person working with or studying them will tell you that it's ''foolish'' to think of them as domesticated.
** Domestication ''can'' happen fairly quickly if the species in question has the proper traits and only the very friendliest animals are allowed to breed. The Russian silver fox experiment did this: they had individual foxes in the program that were labeled "elite" (i.e. "behaving as fully-domestic creatures and likely to have pups that will do the same") within six generations, the number of these domestic foxes going up with each subsequent generation. Somewhere around 80% of the foxes are "elite" after 50 years. ''But'' there's no telling how well this would work with any given dinosaur species, or how long it would take. Likely more than 50 years.
** Indeed, there's no guarantee it would ''ever'' work. There are no truly domesticated reptiles, and the herbivorous dinosaurs under discussion weren't nearly as closely-related to birds as the carnivores, so may simply be too dominated by instinct to develop an affinity with an alien-to-their-era species.
** Herbivores in nature are, on average, more violent and aggressive than carnivores. Carnivores have to worry about getting as little as a skin lesion infected, and thus crippling their ability to hunt. Herbivores don't have as much problems as they eat plants, which don't run away. Look at nature...which African animal kills the most people? It's not the lion, leopard, or crocodile...it's the hippo. Not to mention it says in the book that herbivores can be pretty bad-ass too (the pachy scene). A herd of cows? Go right in. A herd of bison? Be wary, but go in (which is kind of stupid in my opinion, seeing as bison can run faster than a human and are very aggressive). A herd of African buffalo? Stay the heck away from them.
** But you can see bison and hippos at a zoo. And you don't want to pet them, just watch them. A major problem in all 3 films was "crap, how do we escape the bloodthirsty and for no reason (more or less) aggressive T-rex/Raptors/Spinosaurus". The Stegosauruses in The Lost World just bothered them because the "scientists" messed with their kid. Don't go playing with a buffalo calf while his mother watches you. A herbivore zoo would probably be much safer, not ''the'' safest thing in the world, but if they happen to get out of their cages stay away from them and they won't be following you over the whole island trying to eat you. I suppose.
** There is an old saying[[note]]lemme guess, it was already mentioned in the book[[/note]]: carnivores run for their supper; herbivores run for their lives. When it ''is'' time to fight, herbivores aren't going to half-ass it.
** Also, note that ceratopsians like Triceratops apparently were likely omnivores in the style of pigs and hippos. Who's to say that a Triceratops wouldn't eat a person?
** One could simply make a park full of small herbivores. I remember reading in a book that it's estimated that a majority of dinosaur species were no larger than sheep are now, (which would make sense from an ecological standpoint). One could easily fill a park with small herbivores with little worries about safety. Sure, people would prefer to see the big dinosaurs, but if a park offered the chance to see living, breathing dinosaurs, who would honestly turn that opportunity down?
** Depends on how small you mean by "small herbivores." Even the books themselves point out that herbivores can be more destructive than carnivores for a variety of reasons... and a few spooked trikes can do a lot more damage than a single rampaging rex.
** Two words: invasive species. The threat of herbivores escaping is as bad if not worse than the threat of carnivores escaping, for the simple fact that triceratops and stegosaurus have no natural predators left in the world. Left to their own devices, they would breed uncontrollably and overtake any territory that they can reasonably survive in, with disastrous ecological and ultimately economical results.
** Although those species would have an extremely hard time escaping to the mainland, would be too large and visible to avoid detection (and hunting/eradication) in most environments, and probably would not breed prolifically enough to infest anywhere significant. They're not rabbits. All this assuming they weren't instantly poisoned by alien plants, or otherwise offed by the atmosphere, bacteria, etc.
** Plus, the most important reason they didn't do a herbivore-only park: [[RuleOfCool T-Rex sells.]]
** The funny this is in the book it ''was'' suggested that they engineer the dinosaurs to be more docile and passive to their human controllers, but Hammond being a cheapskate shut down the idea because it would be added cost.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: All Guns, No Shooting]]
* Guns are shown to be in abundance, but are NEVER used effectively.
** I think someone was trying to keep the franchise somewhat family-friendly because kids are the biggest fans of dinosaurs and families bring in the most cash for the franchise.
** And ''I'' wonder who, in the first film, you would expect to use a gun effectively? The paleontologist? The adolescent girl? The computer programmer? Muldoon is the only character in the whole movie who has even the remotest reason to have ever used a gun at all, let alone a semi-automatic shotgun.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Nublar Raptors vs Sorna Raptors]]
* At the end of the first novel, we see that the raptors on Isla Nublar have formed a stable, seemingly even caring pack dynamic. But in the second novel, the raptors on Isla Sorna are essentially completely insane, attacking and killing even members of their own pack, because "they didn't have parents to show them how to act." Then what about the Nublar raptors?
** I have admittedly not read any of the novels but... didn't you just answer your own question? Two different raptor groups living on ''two separate islands''.
** But neither island group had parents to show them how to act, so why did one group turn out fine and the other not?
** It's been a long while since I have read the second novel, but as I recall, the point was made that the ecosystem wasn't an accurate representation of behaviour because of the presence of a prion disease in all of the carnivores. The raptor nest in the second novel is representative of a gathering of youths, none of which reach full maturity. I suspect that a group of untrained adults (as in the first novel) would do a better job instinctively rearing their young than the all-dino cast of Lord of the Flies.
** The Nublar raptors ''were'' raised "properly." All of them spent some time in the nursery growing up under the careful care of a human, so they learned about the importance of parents nurturing their young from humans. By contrast, the Sorna raptors were factory-bred and had no one to care for them in their initial months, not even humans in nurseries. They grew up like you'd expect an intelligent creature to grow up without any sort of social structure to develop within. Interestingly, there actually appear to be two distinctly different groups of raptors on Nublar. The ones nesting in the flood-control complex on the south side of the island appeared to have developed the functional pack dynamic, while the group contained in the pen on the north side of the island act like a slightly less insane version of the Sorna raptors - they attack their own wounded, kill and eat the baby raptor in the nursery, and are incredibly vicious and aggressive, possibly as a result of having hunted and killed humans repeatedly.
** It's also possible that the Sorna raptors' violent behavior might have been related to [[spoiler: the Mad Cow-esque prion disease that all the dinosaurs on the island were infected with and doomed to eventually die from]].
** Ahhh... here's your answer to this one: [[http://jplegacy.org/board/showthread.php?t=20201]]
** A related issue: whether the Sorna Raptors' aggressive insane behavior is a result of lack of parenting or the prion disease, it begs the question... why aren't the T-rexes similarly affected in their behavior? Shouldn't they be showing the same lack of care towards their offspring that the Raptors do?
** There weren't very many T-rexes on Sorna. I recall only hearing about five, two parents and three offspring. So they may just be naturally protective of their young, and their close relations keep big fights from breaking out. T-rexes are also treated as far more even in temperament than raptors.
** Also the raptor's intelligence may be an ironic factor. I haven't read the books, but in the third film Dr. Grant even speculated the raptors could be sentient. For a sentient or at least very intelligent beings nurturing is very important. T-rexes are big and dangerous, but they are essentially just animals acting instinctively. The Sorna raptors were too smart to follow their instincts, but they weren't socialised, so they were just violent.
** A lot of elements of The Lost World novel are essentially FixFic for the original. Probably, someone pointed out to Michael Crichton that, without adult raptors to show them how to behave, the "wild" raptors on Isla Nublar shouldn't have had stable, caring pack arrangements. So the wild raptors on Isla Sorna don't.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Why are the dinosaurs so tough?]]
* Why do they always seem to portray the dinosaurs as seemingly made of iron? I mean, sure, busting through the wire fence in the first movie okay, but in the second the rex rams a bus and comes away unscathed (buses are meant to survive rolling after all, and the engines in most of them probably weigh as much as a rex), and in the third Pterodactyls are seen carrying people around, despite most of the evidence suggesting that could carry very little more than themselves.
** It makes the movie more exciting, and it always [[RuleOfCool looks cool]].
** In the case of T-Rex vs bus, it helps that the bus and the Rex are both in motion. The force equations mean that a running Rex ramming a speeding bus makes it less of a "running into a brick wall" situation; some of the bus's weight is being displaced by forward movement. Also, the Rex is on overdrive under a crazy chemical cocktail, so therefore if it felt pain, it didn't really have to react to it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: No radio tags for the dinosaurs?]]
* Not sure if I might have missed this, but were the dinosaurs (at least in the first film) radio-tagged? The herbivore may not have required it, but I can't see not wanting to know where the predators are at all times.
** Not mentioned in the movies, so it can be inferred that they weren't. In the books, the Isla Nublar facilities used a combination of cameras and motion sensors to keep track of the animals in the island, not radio tags. In fact, if they had thought of radio tags, they would've noticed the whole "animals are escaping their pens and building nests elsewhere" thing a whole lot sooner.
** In the books, they tried using radio collars on the raptors (I think Hammond wouldn't let them use them on any other other animals) but the raptors were smart enough to chew them off.
** Which doesn't explain why the raptors' tags couldn't have been implanted inside their body cavities, as is commonly done for RealLife animals that can't carry an external tag (e.g. beavers or otters whose hydrodynamic shapes would be impaired).
** That raises another question. In the second novel, the animals that were set free on Isla Sorna were ''all'' radio-tagged so that the LAN’s monitoring system could keep track of them. The idea was to set them loose for a time, and round them up later. The question now becomes obvious: since all the animals in the original park had been released and recaptured on Site B, ''why didn’t they leave the radio tags in place as part of the monitoring systems on Isla Nublar''? There would have been no need for the obviously fallible motion-sensor arrays, and there would not have been any way in which the velociraptors, for example, could have escaped notice when they went to their nesting site.
** Hammond didn't want to fit the "show" animals with radio tags. Remember, every issue with basic park management created problems.
** But the radio tags were stated to be only 2 cm × 2 cm (''i.e.'', the size of an adult man’s thumbnail). It's unlikely a casual visitor to the park would notice a tag that small on an animal as large as the dinosaurs in the park. Furthermore, in the book, it's revealed that the animals have identification markings tattooed on them — Muldoon reads this information off the sole of a hind foot of a hadrosaur that had been killed by the ''T. rex''. So in summary, Hammond is willing to allow for ID tattoos on the animals, but not for them to retain the radio tags, once they’ve been integrated into the park environment.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: How did the juvenile T. rex get out?]]
* This is for the novel: before the adult ''T. rex'' breaks out and attacks the cars, a shadowy form runs between the cars. None of the characters really see what it is, but later assume it's the juvenile ''T. rex'', and that guess is implied to be right when the juvenile attacks. Fair enough; but how did the juvenile get out? The fence is in perfect condition until the adult breaks out.
** The fence right next to the cars, yeah. But the juvenile could've broken out through another section of fence in the paddock.
** Then what, did it just stealth its way along the road? And if I remember correctly, when the JP crew is doing its repair work, it only mentions one section of fence down at the T. Rex paddock.
** It's feasible that the juvenile may have either burrowed under the fence to escape the paddock that way; it wouldn't leave any other broken fence segments and, if in deep enough foliage, would likely go unnoticed by the repair team, or if there was a river in the enclosure, the fence may have rusted enough in that section for the juvenile to swim under and go around the fence until it reached the road (which, if done a half-hour before the cars got there at a leisurely stroll, would leave it plenty of time to slip between the two safari cars and into the darkness of the forest before the adult could bust the fence down and cause havoc).
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Too many mosquitoes in amber?]]
* ''How are there so many perfectly preserved mosquitoes lying around?'' I mean, there are quite a few species between the two islands, and finding a millions-of-years-old animal that's perfectly preserved in amber isn't an everyday occurrence, let alone one that contains usable dinosaur blood. Are we to assume that there was an improbably wide variety of dinosaurs within a relatively small area, and every single mosquito in the area drank the blood of a different species, then sat on a tree and got trapped in sap? Or are they digging up these fossils all over the world? How do they know where to look? How do they know that every bug they find has dino DNA? How do they know beforehand which dinosaur the blood belongs to? Why are all of the dinos on the island famous stock dinosaurs (save for the raptors, but [[TheRedStapler as a result of the movie]] they've become Stock Dinosaurs...), and never any lesser-known or virtually unknown animals?
** The book explains both subjects. Early on, an investigator comes to interrogate Grant about [=InGen=] and Hammond (due to the funding he receives from them.) He states that Hammond has all but monopolized the international amber market, which baffles the government because it isn't particularly precious and has no strategic value. We're meant to infer, once we learn about the mosquitoes, that Hammond was stockpiling all the amber he could get his hands on ''because'' preserved mosquitoes were so incredibly ''rare'', and IIRC the book goes as far as explaining how finding a mosquito with usable DNA was rarer ''still'' . That's why there's hardly a couple dozen species roaming around on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna, next to the vast variety in the actual palaeontological record. Also, later on, Grant's group asks Dr. Wu about knowing what kind of animal a recovered DNA strand would yield. Wu basically shrugs it off and goes (paraphrased) "We just grow it and see what happens." It's reasonable to think that, once the splicing has resulted in a viable animal, they'd look it up in the known palaeontological archives, try to match it as closely as possible to the existing record, and categorize the DNA itself in case they ran into another strand of the same species. In fact, one of the reasons Grant was brought over was to confirm that they got their taxonomy ''right''.
** The man must have the luck of the gods to get such a solid variety of ''big'' dinosaurs, considering how many of them there were. More likely is that he'd get tons of small ones from all over the place, and/or a whole bunch of closely related and unremarkable species from one area alone.
** In all fairness, they probably did. But with such a monopoly over amber, it's possible that they kept harvesting until Site B yielded the "best" or most popular varieties (or ones that could be useful for waste management, like compys,) and then the focus of production shifted to these big-name dinos.
** Also, the entire reason the Isla Sorna facility even existed was to mass-produce whatever they grew from the DNA they got from the mosquitoes. They were basically just cooking up Frankenstein dinosaurs using all that DNA they found until they got something that survived to hatching.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Where did they get the extinct plants from?]]
* Right before TheReveal in the first movie, Ellie is looking at a leaf of some sort, remarking that it's from a plant that should be extinct. We all know where they got the DNA to clone dinosaurs, but how were they able to do the same thing with plant life? The only evidence of extinct plant life would be in something like petroleum, and trying to pull viable DNA out of that would be like trying to pull an egg yolk out of a cake.
** Presumably some plant matter was trapped in some of the same amber they found the mosquitoes in. It has something like three lines of exposition, so it's unclear whether it was cultivated from viable seeds from the amber (horrendously unlikely) or cloned (horrendously expensive and pointless in a dinosaur amusement park). It's perplexing why it's in the movie in the first place-- they probably just wanted to distract Ellie with something shiny and green so that Alan could be the first one to see the live dinosaurs.
** Of course it's horrendously expensive and pointless. This is John "Spared No Expense" Hammond. Putting in something expensive and pointless in an effort to recreate an environment that feels more "authentic" is right up his alley.
** It's even lampshaded by Ellie, when she points out that a particular type of plant around the pool area appears to have been chosen for aesthetic reasons alone, as it is highly poisonous and has no place in such close proximity with humans.
** Or maybe Ellie just happened to have discovered the botanical equivalent of a coelacanth, growing naturally on the island. New species are identified in rainforests all the time; having one turn up on an island where there happens to be a dinosaur-recreating facility would be ironic as hell, but not impossible.
** Does everyone forget that not all mosquitoes suck blood. Only the females suck blood to feed their eggs, the males drink pollen. If 100myo female skeeters' stomach contents can be retrieved, why can't the pollen from a male skeeter's stomach be retrieved? In fact, we don't even need mosquitoes, palaeontologists often collect surrounding rock at a dig site, to test for pollen. This fossilized pollen tells the palaeontologists what forms of foliage survived back then, and even provide some plant DNA. Any DNA that wasn't complete (all of it, probs) was likely filled in with its closest living relatives.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: "You bred ''raptors''?"]]
* Why, oh ''why,'' did they choose to breed raptors?
** One part "it was a miracle they found viable raptor DNA in their amber samples at all, and they can't be choosy about keeping or discarding an absurdly rare resource"... and nine parts RuleOfCool.
** Also, money. And face it, raptors are cool, scary, and would make tons of money if they could just showcase them properly.
** Although, the main reason raptors are "cool" is because of ''Jurassic Park'' (the work, as opposed to the park) bringing them into the public consciousness; before that it was all about the UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex.
** And if the park had gone off without a hitch raptors would have become popular in the movie's universe as well. Seriously, if you saw these creatures in the flesh in real life, wouldn't you think it was fucking awesome? Of course you would.
** The only way they could have known the raptors would be so deadly is if they cloned them. Once they had them and started realizing how dangerous they were, the humans were learning how to best contain the raptors while the raptors were learning how to best escape. Once they had them and had thought they had devised an adequate cage for them, why not keep them?
** Think of it this way. In a normal zoo you have a range of both carnivores and herbivores. Likewise, Hammond wanted a good variety of predatory species to showcase. Raptors would have been a perfect example of the smaller, faster predators that were most common in the Mesozoic. They had no way of knowing how intelligent and dangerous the raptors would turn out to be.
** Also, consider who's doing the cloning here: ''geneticists.'' Not palaeontologists, zoologists, or animal behavior experts. Grant knows what raptors can do from careful analysis of their physiology and the fossil record. Wu and Hammond have no idea until they actually grow them and see how dangerous they are firsthand. Among the reasons Grant was called in as a consultant (to sponsor the authenticity of the animals, to verify the taxonomy, etc.) is to ask a dinosaur expert just WHAT these dinos can do and how to deal with them.
** Even Grant, the dinosaur (and specifically raptor) ''expert'', is unprepared for the reality of how vicious and capable the raptors are (moreso in the book than the film). But yeah, the main reason is that [=InGen=], having gone to all the expense to clone the animals in the first place, aren't about to destroy them. You can see shades of it in the movie (Muldoon's comment that "They should all be destroyed") but moreso in the book. Each of the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar cost MILLIONS of dollars to create. Hammond isn't about to let a single one die, for any reason.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Why Only Dinosaurs?]]
* Why dinosaurs exclusively? The novel did show off some giant dragonflies (which were around before mosquitoes), but why not mammoths? There are frozen carcasses of them that they could have taken a blood sample from. And to go with an earlier point, if they got so much Amber they could create famous dinosaurs along with a ton of not so famous ones, eventually they could have gotten a Mammal sample that has the white blood cells that the novel said they'd need to clone mammals.
** I wondered about that. Maybe they could tell the difference between dino and mammal blood cells and sent the latter samples off to their scientists at Ice Age Adventure. Also, amber can be dated. Likely they only use samples from the Mesozoic period anyway to keep things consistent.
** In the book, his first trick is making a pygmy elephant, his computers can probably identify enough markers to tell mammals from dinosaurs. The reason in story probably is that with a few notable exceptions the least famous dinosaur will excite people more than the most famous extinct "modern" animal. What's a mammoth but a hairy elephant or a sabretooth tiger but an oversized cat with oversized fangs when compared to a T-Rex. Also if I remember properly WordOfGod stated that Crichton very specifically avoided putting anything from the Cenozoic in because his consultants complained that about a lot of people's paleontological ignorance, not out of a stylistic choice. Same way you'll occasionally hear complaints about the book being titled Jurassic Park even though the majority of the dinosaurs (and certainly most famous) are all from the Cretaceous. Given the sheer number of samples at the La Brea Tar Pits the reason Hammond isn't cloning mammals is because he doesn't want to. Given his character he'd probably have gotten around to it once Jurassic Park was running smoothly and it's just one more sign of his arrogance that he didn't start with those animals infinitely easier to obtain, control and care for first.
** Also, the pygmy elephant wasn't genetically engineered; the book mentions that it was actually made using hormonal tricks. Hammond would take it around to fundraisers and let his investors ''assume'' it was done by genetics without ever correcting them.
** Hypsilophodon. Othniela. Dilophosaurus. How many of those are famous? The Mammoth would be far more famous. And I at least would find, say, a Giant Ground Sloth to be a cool attraction? For all I know, Jurassic Park Four is going to play on Spinosaurus's surprise arrival and do a Mammoth vs T.Rex fight.
** Fame isn't the only factor. Raptor dinosaurs were relatively unknown until ''Jurassic Park'' (the book and film), and both elevated them to stock predators in every dinosaur story since. Likely the park would have done the same thing.
** Maybe it's because of the climate. Mammoths and saber-tooths are Ice Age mammals and a park off the coast of Costa Rica would have been too hot for them. Had Jurassic Park been successful enough, Hammond might have been able to buy an island off the coast of Russia to start building Paleolithic Park.
** There's a scene toward the end of the first act of the book where Dr. Wu is explaining the park's rather (especially for the time) eclectic selection of dinosaurs. Basically once they had retrieved the DNA from the amber and filled in the gaps in the code, they still didn't know what it was until they actually grew it.
** Plus, let's be entirely honest here-- RuleOfCool. I'd wager that more people would find the idea of seeing actual dinosaurs exciting than seeing mammoths or sabre-tooth tigers. Dinosaurs are long-dead giant bird-reptiles that haven't been seen on the planet for 65 million years. Mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers are basically furry elephants and large cats with bigger teeth that humans were hunting not too long ago (relatively speaking).
** Also reptilian/amphibian DNA, is actually a lot less complex than mammalian DNA. There is a good possibility that they ''couldn't'' clone mammals ([[spoiler: until a few years before Fallen Kingdom]]) because look at evolutionary adaptions, reptiles and amphibians haven't changed much over the millennia, mainly getting smaller. But with mammals, those have changed and adapted so much that you probably wouldn't recognize most of what mammals are descended from. Look at prehistoric dogs/wolves, they looked very different to what we have today, or even several thousand years ago. Their genetic diversity, through human breeding programs and through evolution, shows in those ancient dogs. They looked like the dog that would scare werewolves, but in general it is possible that they just couldn't do complex mammal DNA with the tech they had.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Nedry's plan has holes]]
* In the first movie, Nedry's plan makes sense since he seems to be a permanent member of staff. But in the book, he's only there for the weekend. Why risk driving away from the control room? Why not just steal the embryos, keep them frozen in the shaving cream canister, and take them with you when you leave at the end of the weekend, then turn them over to Dodgson?
** The canister has only enough coolant for 36 hours. And he couldn't have then had the blackout to bypass security occur just before the weekend ended, as they'd want to keep him around longer to make sure he's got that bug ironed out.
** But since that was his back door, he could "fix" it in five minutes. Put his plan into motion Saturday night, grab the embryos, get back to work. Even if they want him to stay extra days because of how many bugs there are, he could surely find an excuse to get back to San Jose briefly on Sunday.
** In 36 hours, there's a good chance the missing embryos are noticed and security is beefed up-- which means more intrusive searches of anyone leaving the island, longer delays before departure, and a greater chance that either Nedry is discovered to have stolen them or it takes longer than 36 hours for him to reach Dodgson, by which point the embryos are no use. If he's going to steal them, better steal them and run.
** It's a good point. He has the shaving can decoy and, with Wu gone, there's no lab worker present. Furthermore, I believe, the coolant lasts for 36 hours ''upon activation''. If it doesn't, that's the reason he had to carry on with his plan.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Could they make less aggressive dinosaurs?]]
* One of the criticisms labeled at Hammond is his unwillingness to use their genetic engineering to make the dinosaurs more docile. The problem with this criticism is that the DNA found in the mosquitos was already heavily degraded, to the point that it required the insertion of frog DNA as spare building blocks to complete it for cloning. Just how much can this DNA be tampered with before cloning becomes impossible? In addition, I may not have a degree in genetics but I'm pretty sure that aggression isn't just localized in one gene that can simply be taken out to produce immediate domestication. Last time I heard, aggression came from a complex interaction of various numbers of genes and environmental factors to produce aggressive behavior.
** The actual criticism was to make them slower and lazier. Up to that point the general public thought of dinosaurs as big slow dumb animals. He could have played to their beliefs and made a safer park. How complicated that would be IRL is impossible to know. In the book they discuss making dinosaurs small enough to keep as pets that would be utterly dependent on [=InGen=] brand dinofood for survival. Considering it's heavily implied that the reason the raptors are capable of breeding is because of the frog DNA spliced into them and not a natural ability of the raptors I think it's safe to assume they could have cooked up all manner of chimera. They didn't because they wanted an "authentic" experience.
** It also has to do with cost. In the book Wu is advocating going to "Version 5" (if I recall correctly) shortly before the park is ready to open, and they already have hundreds of dinosaurs on-site. Each one of these animals cost ''millions'' of dollar to create. Scrapping them all and starting over with new versions would cost loads of money, and delay the park's opening by several more years. It should be noted that, in the book, Hammond objects to killing the dinosaurs less because it's immoral and more because it's unprofitable.
** Not to mention it'd be considerably cheaper to just ''drug'' the animals they've already got than to re-design their genetics and clone a whole new batch. We know they have tranquilizers that work on the dinosaurs, because the capture-team from the second movie used them.
** Also, part of the theme of the book/movie is that for all their confidence, the people behind Jurassic Park don't fully understand what they're unleashing. The creatures they're creating have been dead for sixty-five million years, and ''no one'' knows fully what to expect from them or how they are likely to act. They can only make educated guesses at best. The Raptors are vicious little bastards, but is that because Raptors are naturally vicious little bastards or because their DNA is imperfect in some way? And how do you know that if you tamper further with it to try and make them 'better', you won't end up making them worse instead?
** For starters, it wouldn't make sense that all the carnivore dinos are so hostile and agressive at any moment. Plenty of people have walked away just fine from close encounters with bears, lions, wolves, etc. Usually as long as they are not hurt, hungry, or have a reason to feel threatened, a large predator won't bother attacking you because there is no gain to that. Of course, in Jurassic World it was explained that the dinosaurs were created purposefully to be bigger and meaner than natural.
*** This one's just simple RuleOfDrama: which one provides more conflict and tension, a carnivorous dinosaur hunting out humans for most of the movie because it's hostile, aggressive and hungry, or a carnivorous dinosaur which ignores humans most of the time because it doesn't really recognise them and isn't hungry for the most part? It's a sci-fi thriller about a dinosaur park going wrong, not a paleontological lecture.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Frog DNA]]
* If they used frog DNA to "fill in the blanks" in the dinosaur DNA why don't they look like a combination of frog and dinosaur rather than just dinosaurs?
** [[http://www.businessinsider.com/comparing-genetic-similarity-between-humans-and-other-things-2016-5 Much or our DNA is identical to other species]]. Thus, two points: a) it is more ''probable'' that the gaps in the damaged dino 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 fact, in the novel, they use a ''variety'' of other base DNA sequences to fill the gaps, not just frogs, and it resulted that ''only'' dinosaurs with the frog DNA expressed the mutation allowing them to change sex. It's also very likely that, whatever DNA they used, embryos for which they guessed ''wrong'' in how to fill in the gaps didn't develop into a viable animal. Finding viable matches was therefore very hard and laborious, hence the more "industrial" facility at Isla Sorna.
** A bit of brilliance in hindsight, they actually do look more like frog-dinosaurs than real ones. Their skin is more frog/toad like than the feathers we've since learned were widespread. Even based on the paleontological knowledge of the time, the skins of most of them were far too smooth and soft compared to what little had been found at the time (mostly hadrosaur skin impressions, which were pebbly with adjoining scales, like a crocodile). It probably wasn't intended by the filmmakers, but the end result is basically toad-dino's.
** Also, they probably tried experimenting with other animals, but were more successful with the frog-DNA.
** Why not use the DNA of animals more genetically similar to dinosaurs like alligators or chickens?
** Because they were idiots. And worse, cheap idiots (whatever Hammond claims to the contrary). They got hold of DNA to fill the gaps, not caring about the provenance (because DNA is almost entirely interchangeable anyway) and used that without ever bothering to consider what might happen. In the novel, they use several different animals as "filler" and it's only the dinos with frog DNA in particular that can breed.
** Idiots or not, chicken DNA would have been easier to appropriate than frog. Wouldn't using the DNA of birds be more practical given they themselves are dinosaurs? Would the dinos look more like how they really were, feathered and all?
** In the *JP* universe, birds evolving from dinosaurs seems to be a fringe theory, perhaps yet to be widely accepted by the time of the first movie. A group of paleontologists titters at Dr. Grant for suggesting it, and clearly the Park's geneticists thought frogs and lizards were closer to dinosaurs than birds.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: I have clone tech, lets make an amusement park!?]]
* This might have been brought up before but Hammond can clone prehistoric creatures from very degraded DNA and Frog DNA, he mentions that if he had cloned endangered condors Malcolm would have no problem with what he is doing, well... yeah? He has at his fingertips the ability to take most animals (and plants somehow) and reproduce them, and judging by the fact that most of these dinos are full grown, he has either been cloning since the early 80s or he has some way to genetically program them to grow faster. If he had went into the repopulation and livestock business he would've been able to fund Jurassic Park on his own, but instead he sinks his money into a theme park. While, yeah, cloning cows or bengal tigers, snowy leopards or pandas might not be as "exciting" as a dinosaur park, he would probably become essentially a saviour of many, ''many'' endangered species and create food for ''millions''. But no, let's has a theme park that (as shown in Jurassic World) people will get bored of like a zoo. It is never indicated whether or not he actually does do this anywhere, I just think it should've been brought up.
** Firstly, there's a lengthy scene wherein every character who's even vaguely a scientist spells out exactly why John Hammond's decision to focus his energies on recreating dangerous prehistoric reptiles is a massively bad idea, so it's not like the viewer's supposed to think that Hammond has made the best decision here even before the dinosaurs get loose and start shredding people. They just focus on "this is going to go spectacularly wrong" and "you're messing with things you don't fully understand" as counter-arguments because they're more persuasive and dramatically compelling for their case than asking "hey, why not give the condors a chance as well?"
** Secondly, this is probably a bit of an appendix holdover from the novel, where Hammond is a lot more of a venal, greedy money-hungry capitalist than his more lovable and cuddly film version. In the novel, Hammond could not give one single shit about saving condors or curing famine, he wants to make bank, and feels building a dinosaur theme park will make him more money than either of the first two (he's also kinda stupid). Film!Hammond admittedly seems like the kind of bloke who'd probably be a bit more into conservationism and famine relief, but then this brings us to...
** Ultimately, though, this is AnthropicPrinciple meets RuleOfCool. In the real world, Hammond focussing his efforts on reviving endangered species populations or addressing world hunger would indeed be more socially productive, but (a) this isn't the real world, it's a story; (b) it's not a story about reviving the condor or curing famine, it's about bringing dinosaurs to life, (c) let's face it, bringing dinosaurs back to life would be much cooler and more exciting than condors; (d) given point (c) the story about reviving condors would probably be less exciting to watch, and (e) if you want your exciting story about bringing dinosaurs back to life, someone's got to focus on bringing them back to life at some point. Essentially, [[AnthropicPrinciple if Hammond doesn't focus on cloning dinosaurs there's no story, and since]] [[MST3KMantra it is just a story you gotta relax and accept it]].
** Finally, it's worth noting that these issues aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing that says that [=InGen=] can't at some point use their cloning technology to revive endangered species, address world famine ''and'' have their cool dinosaur park. We just focus on the cool dinosaur park bit because, as noted above, that's the more interesting story.
** Pretty sure human cloning is illegal, even in real life.
** Where was human cloning brought up in this question?
** It's addressed in the movie's Flea Circus scene. John Hammond is a showman who developed cloning technology specifically to create a genuine spectacle, not a scientist who developed cloning technology and then tried to figure out how to use it and settled on "Dinosaur Zoo!" Neither he nor anyone else involved in the decision making process at any stage cares about improving the world; they care about improving their own bottom line. Not thinking through the implications of what they're doing is kind of the entire moral of the story.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Enclosures not well-designed for sightseeing]]
* The ''entire point'' of the park is to let people see the dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs are placed in giant paddocks where even something as large as a T-Rex can stay completely hidden, which leads to Malcolm complaining about the lack of dinosaurs on the tour. How did Hammond not see this coming? I know that he shows poor judgement on security measures, but when it comes to spectacle he's the guy who "spares no expense". If he's so focused on spectacle, why didn't he think to put the dinosaurs in smaller enclosures where they could actually be seen (similar to zoos)?
** The park is still under construction and the visitors are basically beta testers. Had they all returned safely, Hammond would have used their feedback to improve the tour before opening.
** Furthermore, this is, in essence, the same problem that real-life safaris run into - there's simply no guarantee that you'll see any animals.
** This issue is also addressed much better in the Jurassic World resort, with for example the T-Rex in more of an aquarium space (a building with hardened windows and raised, internal balconies overlooks the Rex enclosure), and there are specialised rolling (and pilotable) glass bubbles (again, hardened against herbivore dinos) to check those out up close.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Why doesn't anyone put one and one together?]]
* How could the people in the control room miss ''all'' the clues about the people lost in the park. Like, Arnold, Harding and Muldoon know the cameras and motion sensors don't cover the river, but they never consider looking for Grant and the kids there. Muldoon even watches the Tyrannosaur chasing ''something'' on that very river. Speaking of Muldoon, he knows that Compies always follow the scent of wounded animals or carrion. Yet he completely ignores their agitated behaviour when they're heading for Nedry's body a few steps away from him. Muldoon and Gennaro even notice the headlights of Nedry's car in the distance but don't bother to check them out. Mind you, this is when Muldoon is supposed to look for a jeep and four people already. Of course you don't always act smart in emergency situations, but isn't paying attention the most obvious thing to do when you are on the look-out for something or someone?
** I suspect you may have missed too much context. Muldoon didn't notice the compys, that was Harding and Sattler, who followed them on their way back from the ill Stegosaurus. And while they may have gotten close to him, at the same time they came into radio range and even with poor reception, it became obvious that Hammond wanted them back ASAP. A few chapters later, Muldoon was busy fixing fences when one of the work crew pointed out the headlights in the distance, but he figured it was a maintenance light or something, and he knew he had a lot of work to do so he dismissed it. At that point they had decided on using the motion sensors to locate Grant and the kids, but since it was nighttime and they weren't picked up, they figured they'd probably holed up somewhere to sleep.
** Thank you for adding the context. Agreed, Harding and Sattler had no reason to follow the Compies. Muldoon on the other hand should have reacted differently. He had one of his two cars and his weapons gone. If I were him, I'd be eager to find them. If nothing else, he should have thought about the car when he saw two lights in the jungle that hadn't been there before. But maybe Crichton was fooling around with us anyway and those weren't even the jeep's headlights. We never find out.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Trike civil warfare]]
* This question pertains to pretty much any work in the franchise. In the original novel, as the park is coming to a "Jurassic equilibrium" and all the animals are mingling, it's noted that some of the Triceratops are fighting each other, one even getting killed. But they shared the same paddock right from the beginning, fences and all. How did the park operators plan on having them not fight to the point of possible death during even the point where they were nominally in control of everything?
[[/folder]]
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