Headscratchers / Jurassic World Dominion

Ressurecting Dimetrodon

• How did Biosyn manage to bring back Dimetrodon? There were no mosquitoes during the Permian.
  • Given their more crocodilian appearances as opposed to the more quasi-mammalian features Dimetrodon is now known to have it's not unlikely Biosyn just made genetic chimeras from various reptiles to make something that at least visually looks like a Dimetrodon, and then marketed it as such.
  • According to content in the official Masrani global website, Dr Wu managed to clone Mosasaurus by using an iron analyzer on a fossilized mosasaur skeleton to retrieve DNA fragments, which he believed to be the only way to recreate aquatic life in the absence of mosquitos. Presumably, Biosyn could've used the same methods to clone Dimetrodon, especially since Wu was working with them at the time.

Biosyn Giga

• How come Biosyn's Giganotosaurus looks more like some sort of Acrocanthosaurus/Concavenator hybrid?
  • One might assume it's a hybrid, as none of the park's dinosaurs are really pure, but that doesn't quite explain why the Giga in the prologue looks the same while the T. rex is feathered.
  • Good old Artistic License – Paleontology.
  • Biosyn's dinosaurs are probably more "pure" in the sense that they filled in the genome with close relatives like other allosaurids than with foreign clades.

Varying dino speeds

• During The Chase in Malta, one dino is just barely able to keep up with Claire on foot and leaping across rooftops, two of the same sort are able to keep up with a motorbike for several miles. Why the huge difference?
  • You can't build up speed, let alone maintain that speed, when you have to keep turning. Owen had to stay mostly in a straight line on (relatively) wide streets that gave the raptors space to get alongside him, while Claire was able to maneuver through and across buildings, forcing the raptor to slow down several times.
  • That raptor should have caught up to Claire almost instantly. It was behaving purely on Rule of Drama.

French Intelligence incompetence

• Why did Barry allow Santos to put her hands behind her back to use the laser pointer instead of immediately going up to arrest her or outright drop her? In fact, why weren't the intelligence agents pulling security, allowing Santos to just walk in and paint them all? They would all be immediately dead if it was one of the goons with an MP5. A raid on a dinosaur black market where all sorts of dangerous animals are being trafficked should have had way more than just four guys with pistols and a sniper.
  • Delacourt had only just gotten his hands on Maisie and Beta, it's likely that the exchange was set up pretty quickly and they had to prepare a team at the last minute. Their tactics were still pretty terrible, but they might not have had time to organize more guys with better equipment.

Hyperloop security

• Isn't a Hyperloop, by definition, supposed to be sealed? Admittedly, this Hyperloop doesn't have vacuum tunnels but they should at least be secure along their entire length so that animals don't just wander onto the tracks. Having the tracked exposed to the amber mines is a major oversight and should at least have been bricked up and secured with a door.
  • Maybe those control chips they use to bring the dinos into the compound are also designed to keep them away from the tracks, like an invisible fence. The Dimetrodons stayed at least a few yards away from it, and the Dilophosauruses at the end didn't get into the train tunnel where Dodgson was until after all the primary systems had been shut down.
  • But it's been estabished since the original film that uh, um, life finds a way. Bringing a load of dinosaurs into a small area will lead to breeding, which leads to dinosaurs without chips in their skulls. Not to mention non-dinosaur animals, like the deer we see, and even unfortunate humans might accidently end up in these tubes.

Going to Biosyn

• Why did Ellie need to break into Biosyn and get DNA from one of their specimens? Genetically engineered locusts with prehistoric genes that don't attack Biosyn crops– that seems like more than enough to prompt investigations and accusations. Why put herself and Alan in danger?
  • Biosyn could just claim that their crops were extra pest resistant and the locusts were made by someone else. Proving that Biosyn engineered the locusts themselves, which they would certainly try to cover up if there was an official investigation, would be the smoking gun.
  • Also, Ellie's suspicions about Bio Syn were only first aroused based on what amounted to a pretty specific set of circumstances - she went to a farm that the locusts had hit that didn't use Bio Syn crops and found that they hadn't hit the farm next door that did. This is pretty much circumstantial evidence - there could be any number of explanations for that. She needed more concrete evidence.

Asexually breeding raptors

• So Blue is revealed to be able to reproduce asexually. And nobody is very concerned about this? Sure, she's relatively tame, and Beta is cute, but this implies that she and Beta have the potential to produce many offspring, not all of which may be as tameable as her. To make matters worse, there are other Velociraptors confirmed to have survived on the mainland...with significant Fridge Horror potential from the fact that they're the breed of raptor from JPIII: the smartest and most dangerous of the different raptor breeds.
  • Considering A) it took Blue many years to produce a single healthy offspring and B) there are already other wild raptors, it's not really that big a deal. Factor in that having Blue as a mother means they'll not only inherit her natural sense of empathy but also learn their behaviors from her and they may end up solving the wild raptor problem rather than creating one.
  • Blue and her offspring have Owen nearby, who has years of experience imprinting on and training raptors, plus Maisie seemed to pick up his skills and have a connection with Beta. As for the other raptors, we don't know for sure that they can reproduce asexually like Blue. They're likely from a different, earlier "batch" of embryos that had different genes, considering they look rather different and were produced at least a decade before the Jurassic World pack. They'll still be a threat to people, but they're not going to be asexually mass-producing and overrunning the place.
  • Plus the key plot point of the very first book and movie was that the animals were breeding naturally (the book has a subplot about finding the Raptor nest. Finding that naturally born Raptors weren't as aggressive as their caged counterparts) and in JP III the only reason the Raptors are chasing them is because they want their eggs back. Blue's reproduction is somewhat of an outlier as she's a solitary animal that is typically in a pack.

Going to Biosyn, Part II

• If Ian and Ramsay were already there and knew the danger of the locusts, why did they need to bring in Ellie and Alan? Ian's credentials alone are apparently high enough to get into the restricted lab area, and Dodgson treats Ramsay as his trusted protégé and second-in-command; Ramsay could have probably just gone down and told the lab workers to get a DNA sample for him, or downloaded the relevant data and leaked it, or any number of other, less complex and less risky methods.
  • After the leak, Ian and Ramsay may have wanted to keep their positions in case of any coverups within the company. By leaking the information to Ellie and Alan, they would be in position for any future leaks that might be needed.
  • Also, they're in the same place as Dodgson who, as we have seen, isn't above committing murder to save his own skin. Grant and Sattler coming in, surreptitiously getting a locust sample and sneaking it out when they left might have actually been the least risky option.

Curing a genetic disease

• So Charlotte had a genetic condition that caused her to die young. Maisie, as her clone, had the same condition until Charlotte engineered a pathogen to spread the cure to all of Maisie's cells, eliminating the condition. If she could do that for Maisie... why couldn't she do it for herself?
  • Maybe Charlotte's condition had reached a terminal point where the cure simply wasn't effective enough, while Maisie's cells were able to respond to the cure, possibly as a result of her newborn physiology. Given that Dr. Wu in this film is The Atoner and clearly cared for Charlotte, yet doesn't have any sort of "I failed her" moment, we can assume there wasn't anything more they could have done.
  • Wu also said Charlotte didn't know of her genetic disorder until after Maisie's birth.

Making Maisie

• So Charlotte Lockwood created a clone of herself in order to have a daughter. Even if she wanted to be a single parent, there are numerous other options, like going to a sperm bank or even just adoption. Why did she take the path that essentially involves experimenting on herself and her child, as well as inevitably creating complicated issues for said child?
  • As noted above, Charlotte had a fatal genetic condition. Adopting a child meant leaving him/her orphaned and using a sperm donor would introduce unknown variables in her unborn baby. By cloning herself, she could ensure Maisie's DNA was pure and could later be studied in order to cure her daughter. Plus, Charlotte only had a short time to live so cloning would've allowed her to skip the bureaucracy around adoption or artificial insemination to become a mother.
  • That... kinda makes it sound like Maisie was created to be a guinea pig for Charlotte's experiments. She's supposed to have been a great person, according to everyone else, but it really seems like she didn't consider any of the innumerable ethical concerns of making a clone child.
  • No one's saying what she did wasn't unethical, but she never experimented on Maisie aside from purging the genetic disease from her. Charlotte's primary concern was Maisie's health because there was a chance her daughter could be saved when it was too late for the former.
    • It's also possible that Charlotte was intending on applying the cure for herself as well - only to find it was too late for her. Whilst, yes, she did something ethically murky, simply wanting to be able to see your child grow up isn't a very horrible thing to want.
  • Charlotte was also implied to be infertile, so a sperm donor may not have been an option.
  • But she didn’t know she had this disease until after making Maisie. So there’s no reason why she wouldn’t have adopted someone or gone for artificial insemination, right? Because there was none of the fear and urgency that came with the whole genetic disease discovery.
    • Charlotte was heavily implied to be infertile, so artificial insemination was not an option. As for adoption, it's possible Charlotte suspected she was terminally ill before she actually found out - aside from the possibility finding a cure for herself, it's possible she didn't want to risk leaving a child orphaned (which adoption would have probably led to).
  • Charlotte wanted a baby, everything else be damned and so risked it off. For plotline reasons, them other options (adoption, artificial insemination, gestational surrogacy, etc) for motherhood aren't brought up, though the details in the movie could give reasons why those might not be viable options for Charlotte.

Shaving cream can

• How did Dodgson recover the shaving cream can he had given Nedry? Last seen, it was being buried in mud (and assorted Nedry bits) in a random part of the jungle on Isla Nublar. There's no conceivable way it could have been found, and even if it somehow was, it would have just been thrown into the trash as a piece of garbage on the ground.
  • We don't know how long Isla Nublar was abandoned after the end of the first movie. After he didn't hear back from Nedry, he likely sent a team to search the island, with specific orders to look for the embryos and any other InGen trade secrets they can get their hands on. They find the Jeep and Nedry's remains, and Dodgson makes his men dig through the mud until they find the can.
  • Funny enough, that's exactly what happens in Jurassic Park: The Game, albeit with a very different outcome.
  • Dodgson finds the can while on a trip to Isla Nublar during the fifth season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.
  • It should be noted though that Dodgson explicitly says in the original movie the can only has enough coolant to keep the embryos viable for 36 hours. The storm would not be cold enough to supplement the cooling, and certainly when it fell into the mud that would eventually heat up and further ruin the can's temperature. So it is really only useful as a souvenir, any claim that it could have kept the embryos viable for longer than 36 hours (e.g. in the aforementioned game) is a dubious retcon.

Where are Your Guns?

• The viral footage from the prologue and over the course of the first act shows that humans are not exactly adjusting well to the sudden influx of dinosaurs. They're at best being harassed by the smaller ones, having to avoid the larger ones like you would a moose or buffalo, or even having to bait the really large ones away from a site before they cause any damage. Like, dinosaurs that are large enough to seriously damage an ecosystem just by walking through it. That's not even getting into the fact that the larger predators know for a fact how easily humans are killed. At the very least in the States, why does nobody seem to have a gun in the event they're attacked? Cut the rambling short, why is Owen the only person consistently armed, where everyone else has to grab something in the moment?
  • For one thing, the dinosaurs probably have some legal protection as endangered species, which would make the average person hesitate a bit. And for the large ones, shooting at it carries a big risk of setting off a rampage. From what we've seen, the biggest ones probably wouldn't be significantly hurt, but would be scared or angered enough to start destroying their surroundings and putting even more people in danger.
  • The dinosaurs would be classed as an invasive species by most governments, who would generally actively encourage killing the dinosaurs, if not implement wide sweeping initiatives to terminate them themselves. To pick one example shown; I highly doubt the London investment bankers would be appreciative on nesting dinosaurs, or any of the nearby airports now that I think about it.
    • This would actually be a bit of a grey area since, whilst the dinosaurs are technically invasive species, they are also technically critically endangered. This would mean that quite a lot of people would have moral issues with extermination.
    • They're not natural, and are already extinct. We haven't got a real-life counterpart (yet) but I doubt they would be given such status and it would be up to individual countries to grant it to them. As it stands they're more like GM Crops currently than say Albatrosses.

No Dehorning?

• Cattle farming requires that the cows have their horns docked, or removed, I forgot the right word. This is so they don't injure the farmers raising them, each other in fights, as well as squeezing in just enough space in the trailers for an extra few cows. To cut the question short, whose bright idea was it to keep the ceratopsians fully horned, being easily strong enough to toe-up with a truck?
  • They're probably worth more on the black market with their horns intact, given how many people are shown using dinos in fighting pits or as Attack Animals.

The current status of Dinosaur Protection Group

• Given that dinosaurs are now living across the mainland and are subjected to various acts of cruelty (best shown during the scene in Malta), could mean that DPG will most likely be involved in this kind of situations and yet the movie doesn't even mentions them.
  • Possibly, but if it was discovered between films that members of the DPG (Claire, Zia and Franklin) were connected with the dinosaurs being let loose on the mainland, with only the audience and the main characters in the previous movie knowing what exactly occurred at Lockwood manor, it’s possible that could have led to serious legal fallback on the DPG which made it legally impossible for them to interfere any further with the dinosaurs.

Future dinosaur parks / Dinosaurs in captivity?

• By the time the movie takes place, are there any possible chances of third dinosaur park or any variation of public seeing dinosaurs in captivity (normal zoos for example)?
  • Perhaps some of the dinosaurs would get rounded up and put into regular zoos, although if they are too dangerous like Rexy they will probably be relocated to the Biosyn Sanctuary. And considering just how massively things went wrong on Nublar twice and how that will still be in the public memory, it feels safe to say it’s extremely unlikely in the near future for the building of any further dinosaur parks. Especially when people could just go on a normal safari or trip to a national park and have good change of seeing wild dinosaurs.
    • This leds into other question - does Biosyn Sanctuary is now open to public, given that at the end of the film has been designated as a global sanctuary by the United Nations?