Trivia / Jurassic Park (1990)

• Accidentally Correct Zoology: Grant and the kids are attacked by the adult tyrannosaur while riding a raft down the river when it swims after them. For several years after the novel's publication, it was highly debated whether Tyrannosaurus could swim or not. In recent years, there has been evidence that theropods such as tyrannosaurs could actually swim.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: Michael Crichton spent years working on the story, trying to convince himself the premise was not so unlikely. He had to do a lot of research before he could.
• Recycled In Space: Large portions of the plot are recycled or expanded from Crichton's earlier work, Westworld.
• Science Imitates Art: Michael Crichton had the dinosaur Crichtonpelta named in his honor.
• Science Marches On:
  • There's an In-Universe example near the start of the book, when Grant spots a herd of Apatosauruses and muses that they are more commonly known by the 1930s misnomer "brontosaurs". Amusingly, this itself crossed over into a real-world example: Brontosaurus was subsequently confirmed as a real species again decades later.
  • The novel features the dinosaur Microceratops, which has now been renamed Microceratus^note Notably, Jurassic World Dominion not only features this dinosaur, but it is correctly identified as Microceratus (due to Microceratops already being used for a genus of wasp), and much of the material previously known of it has now been reclassified as Graciliceratops.
  • There's a scene where the Tyrannosaurus grabs Tim with a long, prehensile tongue from a crevice behind a waterfall where it otherwise can't reach. Later studies indicate that large carnivorous dinosaurs had immobile tongues anchored to their lower jaw, like the tongues of crocodilians. This also would've made it impossible for the T. rex to bite its tongue as it does in the book.
  • It's now known that the cloning techniques established in the novel is impossible, in multiple parts. For one, DNA has a half-life of only 521 years, making genetic material of Mesozoic Era organisms completely unrecoverable, and the method used in the book (getting it from mosquitos preserved in amber) was based on a study which has long since been discredited (it's now believed to have been a false positive from modern day contamination). Also, egg-laying amniotes cannot be cloned using the same method as placental mammals, because the transfer of the embryo inside a shelled egg requires such precision as to be functionally impossible (unlike in placental mammals, where the embryo will implant itself in a uterine wall).
• Technology Marches On:
  • The park staff don't realize the dinosaurs are breeding because they set the tracking program to stop counting when it hit the expected numbers just to save processor cycles. A bit short-sighted at the time, but a completely alien concept to a modern reader whose phone has more power than the entire island is said to.
  • The park is explicitly stated to be running on three Cray X-MP supercomputers. At the time, those were the best in the world, but by modern standards they're completely obsolete: compare their clockspeed of 105MHz to the iPhone 15, which runs at about 3.5GHz. That's right: a modern phone has more processing power than a supercomputer in 1990, by a full order of magnitude.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: A bit of a preemptive Zig-Zagged example, but the novel wasn't necessarily meant to have a sequel, so Crichton had Isla Nublar firebombed, killing all of the dinosaurs on it. That didn't stop Spielberg from convincing him to write a sequel, anyways. However, he did include a Sequel Hook in the epilogue where Dr. Martin Guitierrez talks to Alan about the possibility that some Velociraptors (and/or other dinosaurs) had managed to escape the island's destruction and vanish into the Costa Rican jungle.

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