Artistic License Paleontology / Jurassic World Dominion

While the prologue and film aim for a greater degree of accuracy than previous films in the franchise, liberties still are to be expected of a Jurassic Park movie due to studio demands.

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The Prologue

• As explained by this video the prologue features:
  • An Oviraptor that is fairly accurately feathered, but it's missing the pennaceous feathers on the arms and rectrices on the tail that the real animal had, it is also depicted with hair like feathers covering the body rather than bird like contour feathers. Its egg-eating behavior, however, isn't this; While may seem a relic of when this was thought to be its main diet, but it is well-supported as part of an omnivorous diet. Indeed, the visual effects artists even used a crow doing just that for movement reference.
  • The Moros also zig-zags this trope. The individual in the prologue is much smaller than it should be, but its proportions are in line with a juvenile tyrannosaur so it may not be fully grown.
  • The Ankylosaurus and Pteranodon in the prologue look mostly the same as their cloned counterparts, even though the T. rex doesn't.
    • The Ankylosaurus still possess the old monster trope of spiky-shell armor (although the side spikes seem to be made hidden from view with the lighting), when the real animal had high keeled osteoderms in the pelvic region, rounder osteoderms near the front, their cervical half rings point backwards, lacked flat rectangular plates, and had wide ovular bodies. It also had a much broader beak that didn't have a pointed tip. It also had shorter legs and couldn't gallop.
    • Pteranodon still lacks pycnofibers and has the wrong anatomy altogether. Their heads should be larger than their torsos, they shouldn't have hands separate from their wings or grasping feet that can lift a human, their wing membranes attach at their ankles instead of their hips, wingtips end in sharp pointed tips rather than being slightly blunted, and their wings fold in from the sides with their hands facing forward when they should fold in with their hands rotating backwards.
  • The Giganotosaurus has an oversized dorsal hump resembling a Concavenator, it is also covered in crocodilian skin and scutes which form a dorsal sail and tail fin, none of which the real animal had. It is very large, more reflecting the upper end of how big the genus got as opposed to the average. It seems to be more based on Acrocanthosaurus, a fellow carcharodontosaurid that did actually live in North America (though still long before Tyrannosaurus).
  • Besides all that, Giganotosaurus and Tyrannosaurus never interacted in real life, due to living on different continents and different time periods^note  Giganotosaurus existed earlier in the late Cretaceous(Cenomenian) that Tyrannosaurus(Maastrichtian). And even if they did, Giganotosaurus would not have been able to kill Tyrannosaurus with a bite to the neck, given its relatively weak jaw strength due to its much narrower head (although slicing the neck isn't out of the question).
  • Nasutoceratops has roughly the right anatomy, but their tails are too long, their head is too large, their feet have the wrong anatomy, and their bodies are too rhino-like in build.
  • The Dreadnoughtus in the prologue have elephantine feet with four toenails much like the cloned sauropods, implying that this is a natural trait of the group in the Jurassic Park universe and not (as had sometimes been assumed previously) another mutation derived from gene-splicing. Actual sauropods had only three claws on the back feet and a single thumb claw on the front.
  • The Iguanodon in the prologue looks a tad too small, though it might not be fully grown. Its forelimbs are also smaller, though not to the extent of Mantellisaurus.
• Since this is supposed to take place in Western North America 65 million years ago Alamosaurus, Avisaurus, Anzu, Triceratops, a dromaeosaur or Trierarchuncus, Edmontosaurus, and another Tyrannosaurus should have replaced Dreadnoughtus, Pteranodon, Oviraptor, Nasutoceratops, Moros, Iguanodon, and Giganotosaurus respectively.
• On a more pedantic note, the prologue is stated to be 65 million years ago. It's now believed the extinction of the dinosaurs was somewhere between 66 and 65.5 million years ago.
• The franchise's usual defence for it's inaccuracies is that it's dinosaurs are genetically modified clones whose genomes have been mixed with modern animals. But since this prologue is takes place in the past and features the original dinosaurs, that excuse obviously does not apply.

The Film

• Parasaurolophus are still shown to be bipeds despite being quadrupeds. Large hadrosaurs were likely primarily if not exclusively quadrupedal, they might have been able to rear into a bipedal posture but likely only to run^note the size chart correctly depicts both the adults and juveniles as quadrupeds when standing still though. Word of God states that the bipedal ones seen in the film are juveniles and the adults are quadrupeds, but the hypothesis that hadrosaurs started off as bipeds and grew into quadrupeds is now discredited.
• The Dreadnoughtus in the film is almost kaiju-sized, or at least as big as the largest lognkosaurine sauropods like Argentinosaurus. The real animal, while still immense at 85-plus feet long, would have been closer in size to the Brachiosaurus.^note  Though it's worth noting that the found remains of Dreadnoughtus are suspected to be from a still-growing sub-adult.
• The Therizinosaurus has its hallux held off the ground like a typical theropod foot. Therizinosaurs are known for having all four of their toes bearing weight as a very atypical feature. Given its position within Maniraptora, it should possess wing and tail feathers, given its size it also probably would have had a sparse coat covering the body rather than heavy dorsal fluff. Its posture is also too horizontal and its pot-belly^note which results from gastralia making it appear to have a potbellied profile. is less pronounced. It also has an overly-large head and blocky face, as opposed to real therizinosaurids with narrower, smaller heads.
• Atrociraptor and Pyroraptor are over twice the size of the real animal, their feet are oversized with huge pads, they have sickle claws that are too small, have skulls that abruptly end after the eye, eyes too far forward in the socket, teeth extending behind the eye and have scaly reptilian faces with slit pupils^note dromaeosaurs would have almost certainly had rounded pupils, due to their close relationship to birds. Slit pupils are also mostly found in animals that are relatively low to the ground, like cats, snakes and crocodiles. The only known bird with vertical pupils is the highly specialized black skimmer.
  • The Atrociraptor, while possessing non-pronated hands, is just as oversized and featherless as the franchise's Velociraptors have always been, if not more so, given that Atrociraptor was slightly smaller than the coyote-sized Velociraptor.^note They were actually planned to be Deinonychus early on in the filming process, which would have made their size more realistic.
  • The Pyroraptor, while leagues better than any other dromaeosaurid in the franchise, is about twice the size of the real animal, possesses a featherless underbelly and legs when the entire body should have been covered in feathers, has the pennaceous wing feathers attached to the wrist instead of the second digit on the hand, its hands are featherless and covered in scales. It also keeps the lizardlike head of the JP raptors: real dromaeosaurs would have had fully-feathered heads with only the snout uncovered.
    • It is also shown to be fully capable of diving and swimming underwater much like a cormorant or a penguin. While the real animal may have been able to swim it was most likely a mediocre swimmer at best.
• Dilophosaurus return but (due to the Grandfather Clause) remain undersized and sporting speculative fills and venom as per the first film. They also hunt in dramatically large packs when no more than three Dilophosaurus specimens have ever been discovered together at a time. It also lacks the notch in the upper jaw that its Park rendition possessed.^note Though the possibility that the notch is concealed by lips isn't entirely out of the question.
• A major story aspect involves genetically modified locusts which have ancient Cretaceous genes within them. There's no evidence of any gigantic, prehistoric locust species from any time period, never mind foot-long, spiky monster-locusts from the Cretaceous. Insects of such sizes had not existed since the Carboniferous, long, long before the dinosaurs, and the lower oxygen and vertebrate competition in the Mesozoic meant few insects that did coexist with dinosaurs grew any bigger than ones today. Additionally, there's the simple fact that there were no Cretaceous locusts anyways since acridids evolved after the K-T extinction event likely to replace herbivorous insects that died off during it.^note The acrididoid group is known from the Mesozoic, just not acridids in particular, so it's possible that these were where the locust genes come from, but this is never stated in the film.
• The Dimetrodon has crocodile-like skin and sprawling legs, despite being a mammal relative, its head is a little too small and shaped more like a tyrannosaur's, its neck is a bit too long. Realistically, Dimetrodon should have possessed smooth, glandular skin, somewhat comparable to hippo skin, and should walk with more erect limbs closer to that of a mammal^note Dimetrodon would only have had scaly skin on the underside similar to the scales found on snake's belly, crocodile-like scutes like the ones shown have no evidence supporting them. The fact that Lystrosaurus, the other stem-mammal in the film, lacks these inaccuracies makes them all the more jarring. The tips of the spines should also not be covered in the sail, being exposed for a few inches at least.
• It's explicitly stated in the film that Giganotosaurus is the largest carnivore to have ever walked the Earth. Realistically, there's no way to actually know that for sure, since we know of several other large theropods, such as Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, which are in a similar size range and it's impossible to know which got the very biggest due to the incompleteness of the fossil record (in fact, based on known specimens, the largest T. rex were probably heavier than the largest Giganotosaurus, and Spinosaurus was mostly likely longer).
• Lystrosaurus is portrayed with a ridge along the back of its head, making it resemble a primitive ceratopsian. This was probably not present or was at least much less noticeable in the real animal, as this area would've served as attachment point for the neck muscles.
• Microceratus has its eye placed too forward in the skull.